Sherwood Pines Mountain Bike Enduro
A Quick Dash Around Sherwood Pines ...
Jeremy Sainter (Dark & White) / 11.11.2010
Sunday 31st October saw the second running of the Dark & White MTB Enduro at Sherwood Pines. The numbers were up considerably on the 2009 event with a total of 184 riders taking part in both the 4 and 2 hour events. The course was within the Sherwood Pines forest complex and at 9.8 miles (15.7km) offering varied riding on a combination of some superb narrow, winding & tricky single track interspersed with sections of forest rides and wide fire roads to allow for overtaking.
Sunday dawned cool and misty, no bad thing given the level of exertion that would shortly be required from all the competitors. The changing of the clocks didn’t seem to catch too many out and the extra hour of daylight helped the marshals who pre-rode the course that morning to check it out prior to the start.
A few hardy riders arrived early for some practice, venturing out onto the course between 8.30 and 9.30 a.m. to familiarise themselves with the route and course markings.
The bulk of the riders were assembled and ready to go by the time of the 9.45 a.m. race briefing, but as always there were a few last minute arrivals as the ‘Le Mans’ start set off across the line at 10.00 a.m. prompt. This entailed a short run of a few hundred metres around a stand of trees and served to spread the riders out from the off and prevent mass bunching once the biking started! The run only took a few minutes but the front runners set off at a fair old gallop give the duration of the event and the pace did not let up at all as they headed out on to the course proper on their bikes.
The leaders set a blistering pace as they headed off to the first checkpoint (CP1) in the northwest corner of the Pines, the marshal at CP1 really had his work cut out as the competitors came barrelling in, struggled to stop in time to punch the checkpoint. But failure to punch all the checkpoints on each lap would result in the loss of the lap most people did manage it, but not all.
After CP1 there was a short fire road climb before heading off in a southerly direction on single track through the wood. A kilometre of fire road followed to jockey for position before a long tricky central section of single track which was a good 2 km long.See All Event Posts
