Tim Corrigan blogs on cycling, trips and programming…

Rob and I set out for a bit of early year training on my favourite training ride in Queen Elizabeth Country Park, near Petersfield. The park itself has 2 waymarked mountain biking routes, novice and advanced. It is also right on the South Downs Way so I find an excellent 2 hour training route can be made out of riding out and back along the Way for an hour and finishing up with riding the advanced course in the park.

The novice course begins with a gravel track quickly followed by all the climbing for the route in one go. The descent is then on wide tracks with some brief spots of singletrack. The advanced course however has much more variety with climbing sections, singletrack sections and a technical downhill switchback section. My favourite part of it though is the last section which is of the flowing downhill singletrack variety. 

In terms of effort I find the novice course almost as tough as the advanced one with the advanced one being a lot more fun so I invariably plump for advanced. Anyway, despite it being only a few degrees above 0, it was a beautiful day and got me inspired to get out there more often in the coming months.