Perhaps if I had looked at the route profile of the blue route at Llandegla, I wouldn't have picked it as the first trail to try at a proper trail centre. Bear in mind that only a year ago, Gisburn was not a proper trail centre by any stretch of the imagination, merely a forgotten backwater, a pale imitation of the golden trails that now reside there. Llandegla was the first place I encountered many things: bike washes, hire sheds, visitor centre replete with toilets, bacon butties replete with provenance of ingredients attached (the composition of a decent bacon butty rant is one for another day), bike racks full of more shiny, complicated and expensive kit than I had ever seen in my whole life.
In my limited experience, there are two kinds of trail. One goes up for what feels like forever, and then comes down at a rate akin to a stock market crash, the other undulates merrily with no rhyme or reason, throwing in surprise gear crunching ups, and following them with blissful but monentary downs. Llandegla falls firmly into the former camp. Somewhere between 5km and 6km is the ascent which greets you with all the harshness of a winters day. The gradient isn't the killer. The duration is. On and on and on and on. Deceptive crests greet you around every corner, enticing you to put that last little bit of effort in, inducing a vain hope that the pain will soon be over, and over every crest is yet another muscle draining climb.
And yet. We go back. We all go back. I know we do because the privately owned operation keeps on going, because the car park is always rammed, because that damn ascent is littered with the many multi coloured hues of the modern mountain bikers livery. It's like a sirens call. I can only speak for myself in what follows, but I suspect that perhaps I am not alone.
Going down requires focus. Absolute concentration. High speed data processing and a little bit of magic added in for good measure. But going up does not. Or, at the very least, going up fire roads does not, and that's what the majority of the up is at Llandegla. Predictable surfaces and gentle corners. And this is where the magic happens for me, because I'll own up right now, I'm probably the biggest geek going. I consume data in streams, multiple streams, from following over 700 people on Twitter and keeping up to 3 email accounts, 4 regular forums, untold blogs and journals and even an old antiquated Bulletin Board System. But on my bike, there is none of this. Instead there is radio silence. No input, no data, no phones, no email, no one nagging for my attention, no one asking for advice, help or a paddle to get out of the creek they've found themselves in. No noise, just silence.
It's my space. Mine. No one can take it, no one can intrude on it. The odd cheery hello is returned, but I quickly and smoothly switch back into the serenity that I find. With nothing else to focus on but the smooth turning of my pedals and the occasioinal twitter of a bird, there is nothing. It's where I write. It's where I remember how to breath. It's the reset button on every bit of stress accrued during the week and it's the place where I find myself. It's a place where I am totally in control, but where I don't actually need to be. I can merrily daydream away, and my legs will keep on pushing. And pushing. And pushing.
Sometimes, when I get to the top, I find other people there. Sometimes I see on their faces, the ones who are not in a group, the same serenity I know is inside me. I don't smile, or nod, or intrude. I don't need to, I don't think. It is, perhaps, imagined, but I really don't think it is. For some of us, the adrenaline is the thing, but in obtaining it, we find our serenity.
I'm on cell 3 in the comic by the way. I came around the same stupid corner and misjudged the change in gradient, lost my gears and nearly fell sideways. Thus resulted a walk. This is an improvement on the previous visits where at different places on the trail I did actually fall sideways. I give thanks on a regular basis that blue routes are so quiet that hitherto no one has witnessed these catastrophic schoolgirl errors, and live in hope that next time will be the time no error occurs at all. It's one of the things which keeps me riding, truth be told, though there are hundreds of those reasons. But should you be riding at Llandegla in the future, and witness a fat girl doing the happy dance of joy after the Somme berm at the top of the shared blue/red ascent, it will be me, and I will be in cell 4, having just ridden 100% of that damn hill.
I suspect for most, a mountain biking nemesis will be a technical feature on the down. I make no apologies for mine being staying on my bike the whole way up a hill. Small victories, my friends, small victories.
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