Avalanche trophy

The Avalanche Enduro was held in Kielder forest on the 25/26th May, it was a good event with decent weather and better than expected trails.

Saturday we checked out the event stages ridding them all twice, there was a mix of loamy bits but mostly trail center stuff which was sandstone based so sandy with lots of loose rocks. The stages were around 4 mins long and most required a fair amount of pedaling to keep the speed up. Stage 4/7 was used on Saturday afternoon as a prologue to seed riders for Sunday, this was probably the flattest stage so was a real suffer-fest but I got down it in a time better than it felt. This result did however mean an early start time on Sunday of 8:40 to head up the hill, the time allowances to get between stages were quite relaxed giving plenty of time at the start of the day and getting tighter as the event progressed, if you had a problem then things started to get interesting.

My first stage was the most fun in practice with sweet dry loamy bends as well as dark greasy woods sections but come Sunday morning it occurred about 2 coffees too early in my day and I minced my way down with lots of little mistakes.

Stage 2 was much the same, I concluded that I needed to stop rushing things and focus on being smooth which as I got more tired through the day seemed to happen.

Stage 3 was more of a downhill/freeride run and flowed better, I still missed a couple of lines and had issues with the chain jumping off but it was a good blast down the hill with jumps, fly-offs and some really nice corners.

Stage 4 was the prologue from Saturday and still hurt but I just sat down and peddled as much as possible and got through before a long slog back up to the top of the hill for stage 5 (a second run down stage 2) just in time for a shower of hail stones.

Stage 5 went better than first time around as did 6 (a re-run of stage 3) which was just plain fun hitting all my lines and floating the jumps. Back up the hill for the last time for stage 7 (a re-run of 4) and four more minutes of pain completed the event. We had a brew and packed our stuff, there were tired looking folk still on track and would be for another 2 hours so we headed home.

The results are now published here -> for a full analysis of ‘what ifs’ and excuses before we do it all over again at Ae forest in 2 weeks.

No crashes (on stage at least … I might have been experimenting in how grippy loam was on the Saturday with obvious results) and no mechanicals although the bike will need some love before next time out, the tubeless setup on flow rims was spot on as loads of folks had punctures. The weather was good, sunny and warm, cold over night and few midges. All in a good weekends racing.

Dan Darwood