Day Four - 7 Stanes (Dalbeattie)

Day four – 7 Stanes (Dalbeattie)

The day isn’t a misprint. Discretion being the better part of valour, we opted to have an off-bike day on day three, and a very pleasant day wandering around a book town was had too.

Anyway. Dalbeattie. The day didn’t start off on the best of footings, with a complete misery permeating everything. The weather was the usual – cloudy with occasional breaks of sunshine – but sleeping was proving elusive and sleep is a little bit vital at the moment. As a result, we didn’t turn up in the car park with me in my usual state of raring to go. I dribbled out of the car, spent too long over shoe choice and was generally hesitant about the whole thing.

Dalbeattie doesn’t have a Trailhead in the traditional sense of the word. The bike wash is a standpipe with a hose attached and a log to rest your bike against. There are no toilets, no café, no showers, no one at all. There is a distinct absence of everything that there is to be found at all the other Stanes Trailheads that we’ve visited so far. There’s a car park, a shelter with some maps on it, an empty box where the mobile form of the map should be, and that’s your lot.

Hidden depths.

We set off, following the signs past the skills area to the ‘Main Trails’. The usual uphill slog began. So far, so normal. And then suddenly, the rules of the game changed and we weren’t in Kansas any more. Our experience to this point of Northshore has involved Gisburn’s attempt on the Blue route – a short and brief spurt which gives you a taste of the unnerving feel of rolling across narrow pieces of wood slatted together with a bog lurking below – Dalbeattie’s Northshore is not short. It’s long, forgivingly wide, winds you through some incredibly soggy looking ground and whilst treating you very gently, gives you a lovely introduction to the slightly weird sound the wood makes beneath your tyres. I pootled along it, I admit.

Eventually the usual fire road appeared, and things seemed to return to situation same as. Then the trail darted off the fire road and we were presented with some singletrack gorgeousness. Somewhat tellingly, the feel of it was a little similar to Kirroughtree, but with a day between me and the nightmare, things seemed to have clicked and we both flew along it. Emerging the other side, a little breathless and with very big grins, glad we’d bothered to get out of bed seemed somewhat of an understatement.

More fire road. And more. And yet more. The Blue at Dalbeattie is 14km long, a bit of an epic for a Blue route even by Scottish standards, and my trail centre guidebook tells me that not a lot of it is singletrack. Well, frankly, it’s not. But that’s not the point of Dalbeattie. The point of Dalbeattie is to learn how to deal with hills. Little ones and big ones alike, there are many of them there. Let me tell you about hills. If you’ve got no energy left in your muscles, hills are pootled up in bottom gear on the granny ring because that’s all the energy you can muster, and 70 year olds whizzing past you be damned. Once your muscles are in that bad place, even when the track evens out, you’ve not got the power to build up the speed to attack the next hill properly, and so every single damn hill turns into an epic, as you start from the bottom in the lowest gear with no momentum to take the sting out of the t(r)ail.

We got to 8km, the point where we’re usually looking for the end of the route, and I was struggling. Humidity levels were making the forest feel like a Brazilian one, the sun was by turns beating down mercilessly or hiding behind a cloud, my balance had decided to take a temporary holiday and a muscle in my left thigh was twanging quietly to itself. We were, absolutely literally, miles from anywhere. Felling machinery could be heard in the distance, but the last person we’d seen was a runner 6km back and there was no escape route, and no easy way home.

That’s where you learn. That’s when you stop messing about, grit your teeth, get your head down and decide that holding energy reserves back constantly is getting you nowhere anyway, so sitting down for 15 minutes, gathering yourself, getting some liquid and food down and thinking about something else and then manning (womanning?) up and going for it is the only thing left to do.

So I did. I attacked the trail instead of pootling over it. I forgot about the curious incident of the LouLou going over the handlebars in the daytime and just pushed and pushed and pushed. Suddenly, the hills which I’d been pootling up? Momentum was getting me halfway up and determination was doing the rest. My muscles felt nicely warm instead of filled with acid, my breathing went oddly quiet, my heart rate wasn’t spiking all over the place, the earth moved…..

Okay, so the earth didn’t move. But I did, and fast. Singletrack appeared and got the same treatment, and suddenly, without a second thought, everything just clicked. More Northshore appeared and was ridden properly, I ended up on top of blind horizons with just enough momentum that there was a pause to scope the trail in front before dropping down again, berms were ridden properly, the little ups were attacked and disappeared into nothing and I landed at the car park with the biggest grin on my face ever.

Yesterday (today is day five) I rode like I meant it. I rode as best I could, as fast as I could, with as much commitment, focus and determination as I could. I didn’t hold back. I didn’t meander mindlessly around the trails. I switched up, looked sharp and pushed. For about 45 minutes, all the fat on my body disappeared, my muscles and lungs were those of someone far fitter than me, and my mind? My mind, I think, was in ‘the zone’. The happy place. The place where it doesn’t actually matter what the trail throws at you, you’ll deal with it. If there had been drop offs I’d have done them, if there’d been jumps I would have had a go. From a morning of utter apathy and sadness came one of the best rides I’ve ever had, where I found something buried inside myself that I didn’t know I had.

I bought a Marin because I loved it. Now, finally, I am starting to believe I can be the rider that this daft as all hell bike deserves. I also understand that unless I am prepared to ride like I want to be there, push hard and learn from my own mistakes, that I have no right calling myself a mountain biker. Everyone is allowed off days. Absolutely everyone. But yesterday wasn’t one of them, and yesterday I became a mountain biker. Something changed. I don’t think it will ever change back.