Club ride

So, there being a distinct shortage of people to go mountain biking with, I did some research and came up with the possibility of joining a club.  Somewhat apprehensive in case they are all fit and fast and I hold the group up, I went for my first club ride with North Cheshire Clarion on Sunday.  Wildboarclough, a ride billed as 20 miles long.  Well, that shouldn't be a problem, thinks me. Say we set off by 10am, back to the pub for 1pm.  But indeed no, it was not to be, and 5 hours duration later we got back to the pub, muddy and happy.  I think.

I enjoyed it.  Weirdly the club ride turned out to be the ride leader, a club member who hadn't been out for a good while and three newbies.  It would have been a strangely low turnout, methinks, without the new peeps.  And I think it worked, largely.  Possibly not for Carl who was young, skinny and kind of fit looking and who rode away, certainly from us two girls, up the hills.  Technically none of us were bad, and nobody was so weird that everyone avoided them.  In fact, I'd go as far as saying it was a good group and I enjoyed the company of everyone on the outing.

My age and experience and independance does give me away though.  Having looked at the route map, I'd also printed it out, highlighed it in red pen, got out a full OS map and put red crosses and dotted lines on that at key points.  Well, it was a 30 year old map already held together with sellotape and I did have a second one of the same area at home so figured a little map defacing wasn't going to end the world.  And indeed did kind of show up my scary independant stand alone streak when we found ourselves somewhat confused by where we were, having taken a wrongish turning somewhere.  We were on the edge of the map print out, and the edge of the map the leader had.  When I say on the edge, we were over the edge.  The only thing to do was fess up, get out the big map and have a discussion.  So then everyone knew.  I was weird enough to bring map and compass, and the ability to use them.  As I explained, I'm used to going out on my own or having to take responsibility for myself and I wasn't about to abscond from that responsibility on a group ride.  And there was me, trying to blend in.  I did a good sales job though on selling them the merits of the Nav course at Plas y Brenin.