Round 4 of the Red Kite Enduro meant wild weather!
Olly reports from a wet and windy weekend.
Photos by Dan Wyre // words by Ollie Hooper
It was a typical August weekend of racing. torrential rain, high winds and ankle deep mud. The fourth round of the Red Kite Enduro honestly couldn’t have had worse conditions! It rained all Saturday morning and the majority of Sunday turning the Coed Trallwm trails into sloppy bog which made conditions challenging to say the least!
I traveled up on Friday morning with two other friends aiming to have a chilled weekend’s riding and having fun racing. The Red Kite Gravity Enduro races are a great set of events if you are trying to get into the Gravity Enduro scene. The chilled out vibe and great trails make it perfect for the weekend riders trying to push themselves into the racing scene. This was perfect for one of my mates Sam Green who decided to do this for his first mountain bike race. Although the conditions were challenging he still thoroughly enjoyed it.
“All in all it was a good race, the weather was against us but that didn’t get in everyone’s way. As it was my first race I didn’t really know what to expect but with a little help by Ollie Hooper and Ed Bartley I got down the runs and got a time. The marshals and everyone who helped out were very helpful making my first race a good one. It’s a brilliant little venue, miles from anywhere but that didn’t seem to of effected the turn out. Most stages were short, steep and muddy but stages 1,4 and 5 where more ‘trail’ like being faster and having more flow to them, so put together it made a nice combination for a race.”
The schedule for Saturday started by some practice of the 3 stages in the morning then in the afternoon you got to race those 3 stages. The plan was to try and ride all three stages twice so we got as much ride time in as possible before racing in the afternoon (as well as staying warm!).
The short stages and short transition back to the top made this a super easy job leaving us plenty of time before grabbing something to eat. Racing came around and we found that the three of us were the only people in the junior category. This was ideal as it meant that we could all enjoy our selves and train it down each stages together letting a different person go each time.
The morning of race day looked pretty bleak. Heavy rain meant that the organisers had to cut some of the stages out for safety as they were so muddy that they were un rideable. They changed some of the steep and muddy ones for trail centre stages making it much easier to stay on your bike but much harder to try and keep pedalling the whole way down. Although the weather was horrible we still all enjoyed the day training it down the majority of the stages and having fun sliding down!
Although the rain did spoil the event a little the organisers made the most of what Coed Trallwm had to offer still putting on 5 great stages and racing a full ten stage race over the weekend! I take my hat off to all the marshals who stood out in the rain the whole day so that the event could go ahead and we could race our bikes.
I am now looking forward to the next one so we can have a great laugh at the nice chilled out race which you don’t get all the time these days! Thanks to the Red Kite Team and all the marshals!
Full Results- http://www.sportident.co.uk/results/2015/RedKiteEnduro-Round4/
Photos- http://www.danwyrephotography.co.uk/Mountain-Biking-2015/Red-Kite-Events-Enduro-4/
