Night-riding is fun. And at the end of a day at work, it can be particularly satisfying, because it feels as if you’re winning extra riding time.
Yes it can be a bit of a mission, especially if like me you work in central London and it’s a half-hour ride home then an hour’s drive to the trails. But it’s brilliant to try and do it every couple of weeks or so.
However, summer night-riding and winter night-riding are quite different propositions. In the summer, with daylight stretching past 9pm, you can spend most of the time riding with the setting sun, only switching lights on as the as the gloaming hits home in the woods towards the end of the ride. In the winter, on the other hand, you ride home from work in the dark, pack the car in the dark, and get out of the car in darkness and cold. That moment of getting body and bike out of the warm car at about 7:30pm, when most people are tucked up at home with their supper, can lead you to question your sanity just a little bit.
However, give it 10 minutes of blitzing down the first stretch of singletrack, chasing that patch of light in front, weird shadows flickering against the trees ahead from your mates’ lights behind, soon changes the story. Suddenly that feeling of winning time is amplified. Not many people get in three hours of their favourite sport on a cold Wednesday night at the end of January. Getting back to the car, and driving home munching on trashy food from a service station, is smugness personified.
This last week was a truly vintage ride – average -2.5C, minimum -6C. Totally frozen mud and puddles. Given that my bike was dirty when I started, it was probably a bit cleaner by the end than at the beginning of the ride, as reminders of my lack of cleaning after the last ride were shaken off. We covered all of the best bits of Surrey Hills singletrack, including the night-ride highlight – a trail called Christmas Pudding, which winds its way through a patch of pine trees, needles carpeting the ground. It’s good in daylight, but somehow even better in the dark, as the trees flick into and out of that patch of light and you try and Jedi navigate your way through them at warp speed at night
It was a great group as well – four of us, all keen on going pretty quickly, all well kitted out with decent lights. Although a burst sidewall at 9:45 was a reminder that you don’t want to hang around too long stationary at those kinds of temperatures.
If it seems like too much hassle to get the bike out midweek and hit the trails, don’t think – just do it! You’ll be pleased you made the effort.