SkipRatt mountain bike blog

Well here I am back again writing.....The Hubby is actually away at the minute in Cannock Chase with the Nephew..(which I'm sure he'll tell you all about in great detail when he gets back!) so I thought this was the perfect opportunity to write a post without him being able to edit/delete it before anyone sees it!!!

You probably wonder from the title what I'm going to write...well it's about how many bikes can one person possibly need!!



You see I'm curious to know whether 1 single person needs multiple bikes?? I am one person and i have one bike...it's not great but it works and gets me from A to B no problems. I don't need any more bikes...i can't ride more than one at a time...i was only born with two legs!!

Then there's my hubby....he is normal..(well as normal as he can be for him) was only born with two legs...yet he has three bikes...that's SIX pedals!!!!


Ok..i guess I kind of understand why he would have a full susser and a hardtail..( ok so I don't REALLY understand but i get that there's a difference) but why on earth does he need two hardtails??? He would probably comment on this and say he only bought a new one so the Nephew could have his old one but that is only part truth...I know no matter what he says he would have bought that second hardtail...and I know for a FACT that he would go and buy another bike tomorrow if i said."Here you go Babe..take a couple grand to spend on a bike."...Now you're probably thinking...well who wouldn't...but he would then just add this to the collection in the shed and not dispose of one of the older bikes. At the rate we are going on..we'll be the ones living in the shed as the bikes won't fit!!

So avid followers of this blog who are into mountain bikes...please give me some feedback and help me understand the necessity of having to own multiple bikes or if it is in fact just my Hubby who is becoming a grave collector of anything that has two wheels, two pedals and is expensive???



Maybe also help me understand a little about why you would need a hardatail and a full susser, I mean, at the end of the day we still rode bikes in the victorian times and then they were ridicuously strange and impractable..and yet it worked for us....are we just becoming soft in this technology driven world??

Any feedback would be appreciated.....I'm sure my hubby would be happy if you made me stop moaning at him too!!!

Maybe it's just a man thing!!

Let me know.

Over the last few weeks I have been struggling with knee pain in my left leg associated with mountain biking. When I first started riding mountain bikes like any other newbie mountain bike rider, flat pedals was the way to go. As I got deeper into riding and pushed myself much harder I made the transition to clipped/cleats.
When I first started using cleats getting them set up for me was a pain in the butt. But however, when the set up job was complete my riding seamed to improve 100%.
I never suffered with knee pain for a least 2 years of using cleats. So when the pain struck, I was completely taken aback by it and I could not fathom out how and what would sort it!

After lots of cusses and tantrums I decided to go back to flat pedals, this was a bold move as I did not know how this would effect my riding. To my amazement my speed did not decline, but efficiency did. I found that my left foot would move outwards whilst road riding, and both feet would not stay on the pedals over rough ground. Again lots of cusses and tantrums followed,,,OMG, "I sound like a 5 year old!"

My pain in my left knee has gone since using flat pedals and now I find myself at a crossroads with which route to take,,, I could get a pair of "Five ten high shoes" As these would keep my feet glued to the pedals, so they say! The reason I say Five ten high is because they would give me some ankle support and stop me from rolling my feet.

The other route would be to go back to cleats, but with my DX shoe and pedal combi! So far I have tested the DX route due to the fact that I already have them in my possession and the Five tens cost £75. Not a route I'm prepared to take whilst I'm on a 3 day a week at work!
Yesterday I went out on my full susser with the DX combi fitted. I had the cleats all the way back on the shoe and my seat quite high. I spent about half an hour riding leisurely before feeling pain in my left knee again, so I stopped and went home!

When I got back home I decided to move the left cleat nose out which should result in my heel inward toward the chain stay. I found this relieved the pain whilst shifting my left foot inside the shoe, and when I was using flat pedals I found that my left foot would point toes outward naturally anyway. This felt weird as it feels like I am stomping on the left pedal and my right leg is just doing no work!

As things stand, my plan is to go out again today and see if any more pain occurs. If more pain occurs then I will ditch the cleats forever and buy a pair of Five ten high shoes instead! But then again it's my birthday in June so all the ear ache I have caused and dropping "Five ten high shoes" in there too, may get me a pair! We never really grow up do we?? ;-)

Hi..I'm Tanya and this is my first post here...so what do I know about mountain biking?? Honestly, not much...however as a wife of a mountain biker far more than I ever wanted to know...lol.

I'm not, nor am I ever going to be a biker but My hubby absolutely loves it and to be honest this is fine with me as it gets him out of the house and gives me a break too...:-)

I know all the basics of course and a few more things besides like the pro's and cons of disc versus v brakes and full susser against hardtail, (and that's without reading the content!).

However I'm not a person who rides for pleasure. Sure I have a bike, just a bog standard one that came off a shelf, it gets me from A to B and that's fine. Being a wife of a biker means that I understand my gears are out of allignment (which is apparently why I get the horrible clicky noise) and that my tyres never have enough air in (which is why I always find biking such hard work). I know these things but not how to fix them which is when I become so grateful that my hubby is.. (and these are my words) quite fanatical about biking!!
There is so much more to mountain biking than meets the eyes and I suppose I could write it all in this one first post but then I would never have anything to write again so for today I'm going to leave it here, but please know I will be back with my own views of living with a biker, the pro's and con's of that and what i think can personally benefit you from biking as I have seen it first hand...oh and I will prob tell you something about me and my hobbies too..(even if I was specifically asked not to mention my allotment!!!)

If you didn't get it by now...I am SkipRatts wife!!

My wife has a life long pen friend in Sweden named Eva. And from time to time, either Eva will come over to the UK to visit, or my wife will go to Sweden. Eva invited my family to stay with her and now husband Mattias in Gottenbourg. Knowing that I like to ride mountain bikes and wanted to check out the trails. Mattias got in touch with his friend Nisse, also a mountain biker to ask if he would like to show me the Skatås trail. Mattias also hired out 2 mountain bikes for us.

We met Nisse in the Skatås trail car park and began to unload the bikes after all the introductions! The bikes were really heavy with v-brakes and a seat like a razor blade, but ride-able."Well my bike was ride-able" But then I picked the best of the two! Nisse's bike's chain kept coming off due to the gears being out of alignment. This made riding for Nisse more of a pain in the ass than my bike did for me!

The Skatås trail was quite wet and very technical which I found challenging and fun, it allowed me to ride aggressively and at some points leave Nisse way behind. But this was probably only due to that fact that Nisse had not ridden for some time and because of the condition of his bike!

The trail had huge slab like rocks in our path going up and down, but this did not deter me or slow me down. Even though my heart was racing so fast I thought it was going to plough through my chest! When Nisse caught up he asked me if I ride in competition, I was astounded by this question and answered with "No do I look like I do!" He looked at me with puzzled eyes and I returned the puzzled look.
Later I thought my response to Nisse maybe was confusing to him due to the tone I may have used (or maybe he just didn't get that I was fishing for a compliment...lol). Sorry mate, it wasn't meant to come out like that. Maybe I had nothing better to say with being taken aback a bit with your question!

Nisse forewarned me about some kind of bugs coming off of the shrubs on to my skin, and to make sure I check myself when showering up! I'm not sure if he was playing me but I was more concerned about the huge ants in the area! (however we did find that Mattias had picked up a tick in the forest when we all got back to the apartment...eugh..)
At one point I stopped on the trail where it was layered with bark, cut from the trees. As I looked at the bark, I noticed that the ground was moving. Upon closer inspection I realised that these huge ants that I had been worried about so much were riding the bloody trail with me. Needless to say, I did not hang around!! I'm NOT a bug person....hhhmmmm...why do I go out and ride a bike again?????!!!!

The Skatås trail was a tough loop that needed a lot of work on the maintenance side, but definitely got one's heart racing with it's slab/rock obstacles, crazy lines and "bloody HUGE ants!"

The first time I went to Thetford Forest after reading reviews on it I found myself to be very disappointed, as the reviews described it as a place to go fast on flowing single track for hardtail bikes. When the trails were new the reviews would have rang true, but due to the weather we have had the trails have been ripped up to shit, creating very bumpy flat sections that used to be fast and flowing single track. One thing that I read to be true is that, "it is for fit bodies"!

My nephew Joel has just started to take an interest in mountain biking and asked me if I would take him to one my favorite haunts. I was astonished to hear what I was hearing due the gadget crisis with children these days! But quickly I got over my astonishment and said yes I would take him away with me! I wanted to take him to Cannock Chase but thought better of it due to the fact that Cannock is not for beginners in my opinion and a high level of fitness is required! So I said to him that I would take him to Thetford Forest instead to see how he would take to the journey and to the forest.

As I do not drive, I travel via train and the journey can be quite a slog and cumbersome, so Thetford was a perfect place to start Joel off. Brandon train station is 3.5 miles from Thetford Forest, a perfect warm up for things to come!

Joel really surprised me with the way he handled things, he rode a lot better on the trails than what he does back home, (maybe like me not being a lover of road riding!) He really thrives on the trails and in his surroundings, and his endurance really shine's through. He only planked it once and even after that still completed the trail. I thought that might be us done for the day then, but he was still raring to go so of we went again on another circuit much to my delight!!! What I enjoyed the most out of the day was seeing him smile all the time he was there.
In fact, the biggest of smiles was when we finished riding at the cafe. He saw a shiny new white 'Whyte full susser' parked up and he was completely engrossed in looking at it. I'm not sure what the owner of the bike was thinking, as he was glaring up at him, but it was funny to see and really made my day!

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