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| A very Specialized Woods |
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Page 1 of 3 At last we’ve had some proper old-fashioned cold snaps.  Pictures by Kelly Hancock. Having grown up in a house built in the 17th century, I am quite aware of the meaning of the word ‘cold’. If you couldn’t see your breath when you woke up in winter you could do worse than checking you were actually still breathing. While I am definitely neither thermo nor photophobic, I prefer to leave the entomophagy to others such as Indiana Jones, and this recent drop in temperature should cut down some of the insect numbers that have been ending up in my mouth in recent years when outdoors. I used to cycle everywhere. I had to. It was over a mile to the nearest lamp post and a further three to my best friend Phil…a much better cyclist. In our early teens we apparently shocked many a friends’ mother by turning up to see other friends in little more than (what might now be considered indecent) cycling shorts, helmets and gloves. Cycling wasn’t just our lifeline to civilisation, mountain-biking was our way of life. We were going to continue upgrading our bikes and finding steeper hills and more competitions forever and we were definitely going to be more considerate drivers! 15 years on, Phil is still a much better cyclist and has kept his side of the resolve, cycling to and from work, upgrading brakes, gears and more and no doubt finding steeper hills! Cornwall is a Mecca for mountain biking. With copious disused railways, mines, mineral tramways and the longest coastline of any region in Britain, the already strong cycling community is very well catered for before we even start looking at the many woods and parklands open to bikes. Unfortunately for my biking prowess, the notoriously fickle Miss P Hilton is probably less so than me. So it was not without some fear that I stood looking up the muddy track at Cardinham Woods. The lovely people at the Specialized Concept Store in Plymouth had worked wonders to make this day of exertion (exhaustion?) as little effort as possible, but there was no denying to myself the cold hard fact that I had not ‘mountain-biked’ for well over a decade. |
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