Category: Mountain Biking

Cuando los Días de Verano (When the Summer Days)

When the summer days aren’t more than grey clouds, long hours of rain and a ghostly light illuminates the passing hours. When summer resembles a half-forgotten memory, with its faint colours and blurry edges. When you come to terms with the fact that this is England and summer isn’t like anything the word is meant to imply.

It is then that, when blue reigns the sky and green shines with the colour of life, the soul wakes up early, together with the sunrise’s pinks and oranges, a clear sky and the promise of the sun’s warmth against the skin.

Two-Hour Autumn Getaways

When I looked at my reflection in the mirror I half expected to see two scratches down the left side of my face: from my eyebrow, past my nose and straight through my lower lip. But there was nothing there, not even a hint that I might have fallen off my bike and landed on the spiky arms of a wild bramble on my third mountain biking getaway with the university.

We set off on a cold and misty autumn morning, the sky grey and the light dim. However, there is a big contrast in this setup. Further into Endcliffe Park the trees grow redder, warm-coloured leaves rain from the treetops as we ride past. The ground below us is yellow and orange and our chatter mixes up with the sound of tires crushing dead leaves as we ride by.