Archive for the ‘Queen Elizabeth Country Park’ tag
Queen Elizabeth Country Park, South Downs Way and Hayling Billy Trail
This was really 4 very different rides all in one! It consisted of:
1. The advanced mountain biking course at Queen Elizabeth Country Park
2. From there following the Southdowns Way to the A29, just west of Amberly.
3. On the road to Burnham (from where I took a train to Havant)
4. The Hayling Billy Trail back to south Hayling Island.
Total: 39 miles – most of it offroad, and a great 6 hours training. Here is the route (terrain view gives you more of an idea):
View larger version at EveryTrail
I also used the trip to try out my new Tachyon XC Micro helmet camera for the first time. The following is my first dabbling in the world of helmet mounted video (much better efforts hopefully to come in future posts). The video is all of the advanced mountain biking course at Queen Elizabeth Country park – so gives a flavour of the riding there:
In a side note – I learned with interest recently that if you upload something to YouTube that incorporates copyright material (such as say… the music you put your biking video to) it is quite possible that it can be actively permitted to remain there by the copyright owner for various reasons… see this fascinating talk on how YouTube manages copyright material.
Bike Training in Queen Elizabeth Country Park
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.
