SkipRatt mountain bike blog

Wouldn't it be nice for the Lincolnshire area to be on the map for a mountain bike destination! It would if we had some good local trails and not just some old bridal way that gets ripped up to shit by motor crossers and 4x4s.
No that's not completely true because we do have some good trails, it's just that they are not looked after and mostly needs to be joined up by busy roads.

2 main trails that come to mind is Viking way and Jubilee way. What about some thought into redevelopment of these trails and making the whole area mountain bike friendly. Wouldn't it encourage more people to ride push bikes? Hell, have a mountain bike center close to the 'Rutland Arms' to generate some kind of local funding for the trails and maintenance.

The Rutland Arms do quite well financially with walkers in and around the area, they charge £1 for a can of coke! Over the last 2 years I have noticed some sort of improvement in the surface of the trails, but find it boring for mountain bikers and believe that more could be done to the area to make it more interesting.

Lately the viking way has been widened and the surface layered with the hedgerow. Would it be viable to create a purpose built surface for mountain bikers at one side of the trail and do something to minimize the straight up straight down of the route?.

Jubilee Ways forest never dries out from the rain and the whole area looks like a swamp. It's a very interesting place to liven things up, but again it's a straight through route. Why not involve the other parts of the forest too and layer the surface so it's more ridable, interesting, fun, dries out for all year riding, and make it walkable too because parents take their children on walks through the forest.

Too much of the surrounding area is off limits due to it being farm land or, what starts out as a public right of way, ends up blocked off further down the trail. Most of the farm land ends up unused, it has some nice forestry and it's off bloody limits!! If farmers opened up some of these area's, it would limit the amount of road used by cyclists because one trail would lead to another. I can understand that if they did open up land would it encourage motor vehicles too! Whilst in wales I noticed every so often they use gateways to squeeze mountain bikes through. Maybe this approach could be used in the area, it's better than sloppy un-ridable let alone un-walkable trails!

I don't know maybe I could attempt to do more instead of ranting about it, but where the hell would I start?. I know that the viking challenge is held here every year, maybe organizers of that could do something. Would they want to and who would fund it?

Mountain biking and fitness is not as clear cut as people think for the average Joe Blog. The term used by what mountain bike UK "Just get out and ride" is true, but questions need to be addressed.

How much is too much?
Riding through illness? Is it a good thing?

I for one have been riding for 4 years and my fitness varies from season to season and year to year. This time last year I was out riding, not to my best but I was riding.

So far I have not been out for 4 weeks due to illness/cold viruses. Come spring, when the air clears, (and my nostrils!), will my fitness drop? Well I think for some people the answer would be yes. But for me it's not really a problem because although I don't get out riding, I do commute to and from work on my bike, and it's only a mile or so there and the same back.

They say activity is the road to recovery, but training can make things worse, or last longer. So taking this into account I should be OK then? lets hope!

When I started feeling a little better I slowly started using the commute to and from work as a training program, nothing to heavy though! I began working on my leg muscles. Getting to work I would select middle range gears to work on my lactic threshold in my legs. On the way home I would work on increasing my leg strength. Simply by selecting high gear ratio's to pedal all the way home. If I felt a little run down, I would have a steady ride in a gear that suited me. It's not just about gear ratio's though, I also think about the weather/wind resistance.

When I feel up to it and the roads dry up, I'll get out either at the weekend or midweek for a road ride and keep it in the 1 hour time frame, nice and steady. I will not start pushing myself until spring comes and the weather improves. By this time I will know what effect it had on me, if any!

Basically riding at high levels for too long...or on the other end of the scale not riding at all, is counter-productive to fitness levels!

A while ago I went on holiday with my family in the Scarborough area, taking my bike with me. Knowing that Dalby Forest was down the road, actually a long way down the road! I thought I could kill 2 birds with 1 stone. Once arriving at my home for the next week I started to plan my day at Dalby Forest. I soon discovered that getting to the Dalby Forest trail center would be a long hard slog due to the fact their was no public transport for mountain bikers.

The day of my ride to Dalby Forest was a long hard 56 mile trip up Spikers Hill into Wykeham Forest and somehow onto the north to sea route towards Dalby Forest. When I finally got to the trail center I had nothing left for some fun riding so I freshened up and made a beeline back home which turned out to be an expedition of the area, never again!

The result of this ride led me to ranting about public transport and how not being able to get from Scarborough to Dalby or York to Dalby using public transport with a mountain bike. I know with all the car drivers these days the need for public transport has declined, and you can travel by bus! But what about with a bike? Not just a bloody fold up one!

I've heard reports about some area's having shuttle buses for bikes. Why not in all area's? Maybe people will be more inclined to leave their cars at home if public transport served bikers needs better. I also think that trains need to better serve bikes than what they do now.
Welsh trains are pretty good for bikes because they still use the old carriages with lots of space. All we get is a box or share with wheelchairs which, in some cases, take priority over the bikes.
Great, I pay my fair, get on the train, and at the next stop 2 or 3 wheelchairs get on. What am I suppose to do? Get off the damn train! It's crazy, not everyone has a car or wants to drive a car even if they do! So more needs to be done to better serve these peoples needs!

It’s been two years since Bikely launched and in that time it has become a massive hit with cyclists around the globe. It features the highest volume of user-generated routes on the web (a whopping 80,000 and growing) helping us all to find and share routes all over the planet.

Bikely is owned by the people behind BikeRadar.com, the world's best cycling website, and top cycling magazines Cycling Plus, Mountain Biking UK, Pro Cycling and What Mountain Bike. In merging the two sites together, they are creating one awesome site to serve all of your cycling needs in one easy place.

I love these 2 websites because it serves the most up-to-date news and race results from around the world, more product reviews than anywhere else on the web.
Top advice on fitness, training, nutrition and techniques from the team of experts, lively forums covering everything on and off-topic and more…

The transition will be taking place at the end of November and members accounts will automatically be transferred, so you won’t need to do a thing! They will send you a reminder once the switch has taken place but don’t worry if you forget, you’ll automatically be re-directed from Bikely to BikeRadar.com.

I, for one cannot wait for this to happen as it makes things so much easier.

I've been riding bikes my whole life but only got a good mountain bike 4 years ago. Before that, spending more than 3-400 pounds on a bike was completely out of the question. What with commitments and dare I say it, "women". Yeah you know what I'm talking about, we're all in the same boat! Darling can I have, "no" well have we got, "no". Mountain biking is a very expensive hobby to get into and maintain, and once your in you would think nothing about spending a shit load of cash on the latest products/upgrades or a brand new bike. So having an understanding bank manager/wife is of the utmost importance to mountain biking.

I'm very much a fair weather rider because I like nothing more than to rip up the trails and sit in the shade with a nice ice cold Fosters afterwards. I ride alone most of the time so you could call me a solitary rider or socially impaired, Whatever! Riding alone can be boring at times as you have no one to chat to or be competitive with.

I live near a fairly large town called Grantham, located in the East Midlands, UK. The local trails around here are pretty flat and with it being part of the Sustrans network, it's beaten up too. To find any good trails I'd have to travel 2 hours in any direction on the train as I don't drive.

With the viking challenge and other events being held here every year, mountain biking/cycling has become quite popular over the years. Although the trails can be quite bad in places and more needs to be done to make them more suitable for both bikers and walkers alike.

It's very easy to put together varying different loops both on-road and off-road for a 1 hour ride or 3-4 hour ride depending on your level of fitness. I've managed to put together a peach of a loop that totals a good 50 mile and incorporates all the best the area has to offer, that I know of!

First off search engines are businesses and just like any business they have a product, and with all businesses with a good product comes competition from other businesses. So as a business, search engines want to be the best at what they do.
To be the best at what they do they need to deliver the information/results web surfers searched for. For a search engine to do that it needs quality content in its index/data centres.

That's where we the mere mortals come in.

Forget about the next big SEO thing and unethical SEO methods and get down to the real issue; content. Quality content is where it's at, all our focus, all our hard work should be placed upon writing and delivering quality content.
Do it for your readership, do it for the search engines', they'll love you for it, do it for naturally building links. Do it for yourself!

Quality content is king, always has been and always will be.

Although 'webmasters' have very different views on what is and what isn’t when it comes to SEO, in my humble opinion only the search engines themselves know what is. We have a full picture of what it takes to get to the top, but our information into what's most important is mixed up from webmaster to webmaster. The truth of it is that if every webmaster knew what it took to get there, we’d all be #1….. So its always going to be trial and error, good individual guess work and seeing what works best for other related sites.

Search engines are the bread and butter of all websites, so optimizing your site is a must if you want on-line success, higher rankings brings more clicks. With that said being listed in search engines alone is not enough to ensure your business gets the attention it deserves. Its very important for you to get your own domain name with the keywords you plan on using, as free domains are useless if you are serious about your on-line business, unless of course your website is a blog.

Keywords is an important factor of SEO as search engines use these to judge a sites relevance through textual content. If your website is image led, the best thing to do is add some text into your images, using ALT in your meta tag; for search engines to read.

The most important meta tag to get right is the title and description because search engines use these to judge a sites relevance to a search query from a possible visitor. So your choice of keywords in your title and description is what should make you stand out from the crowd of hundreds of thousands of related websites. Although the description is as important as the title; the title is key to on-line success.

Increase your inbound links and get your site listed with search engines all it takes is a link on some ones' listed and popular site and you get listed too, because active sites get crawled all the time, searching for new content. This is just the start of a long road to number 1 though; of which you may never achieve.

Do follow links vs no follow links is a topic I have read about over and over again and still I come to the same conclusion.. The argument is that no follow links are a waste of time and you should focus all your efforts on do follow links instead.
Quite frankly I think this is a crock of shit because both have very different benefits to your website promotion needs!

Do follow links can help in your websites serps, and give you juice/PR from the blog/site linking to you. And no follow links can help increase your traffic, if the blog/site is popular.

Do a search on google for blogs related to your niche and post useful, on topic comments regardless of, "is it do follow or a no follow back link" forget it just post a comment because you want to. Make a point of doing it daily on lets say,, 15 different blogs and watch your traffic, serps/PR increase.

At the end of the day we are all looking to increase our popularity, traffic and serps/PR. So to me a mix of do follow links and no follow links will serve your promotional needs. Personally I think it's all good!

Get paid reading and writing articles? Too good to be true? No it's true and I have been testing it for the couple of days. Over at Qassia you can be paid up to $100 for 1 article, but it has to be completely new if you wish to get $100.

They also pay you $5 - $9 for reading articles depending on the length of it. Basically if you read 5 articles per day your earnings would be on average $28 per day. Not bad for 5 - 10 mins reading, that is if you only skim the surface of the article. The credit/cash is added to your account when 12 people have read/screened that article, this includes your submissions too. You only get paid when 12 people screen your work/intel.

Qassia also pay you for referrals too. As long as the new user hits your user page first. You'll be credited with a commission of dollars. Plus for every article you submit successfully you get a free link back to your blog/website.

So all in all it's good and well worth the effort into joining. I will spend most of my time just screening other peoples work to earn cash as I spend so much time here, that is when I have something to say! What will you do with yours?

O.K
so it's not true. You only get Qassia dollors which only determines how high your website ranks in qassia. ;-P