Hey everyone, usually I'm making the Cycling Sunday in the middle of the week and now we're getting back to regular work weeks now the holiday season is over it would be Thursday for me which is quite late so why not already start making a part of this post in advance, now I have some spare time!

At the time of writing this part, it's a Saturday early morning for me and outside it's 0 degrees and snowing so it's not the best time to go outside. I wasn't planning to go outside anyway as I kinda overdid it a little on my short holiday in Drenthe around New Year from last Monday until Friday.

The area there is much different than where I live and it's always cool to ride somewhere else than our usual routes we can almost ride with our eyes closed.
Before going on holiday I plotted two rides for that week with Garmin Connect but I didn't ride any of them... 🤣

When we arrived, my wife went to the reception desk to get the access card and to know which rental house we needed to go to, I was waiting inside the car since my bike was on the bike carrier and I didn't want to leave it alone to be stolen when I saw a sign right in front of me with 'Cross Baan' giving me the idea there would be some kind of cross or MTB track close by, so while I needed to wait anyway I googled what it was and while I couldn't find that actual small track on our holiday park on the internet I did find a mountain bike track at only 6 kilometers distance, by then the idea in my head started to do a ride every day but I needed to do some more research in the MTB tracks here, because where there's one in the woods close by, maybe there are more because there are a lot of forests in this area!

About my first MTB Ride, the one I accidentally found I already made last weeks Sunday Cycling Chit Chat post about.

The toughest ride (ever)

Later that day I got on my laptop and indeed I found more MTB Tracks in my area, the other one was 15 km from our location and a bit longer with 23 kilometers it would bring the total distance for that ride to 53 km.
Because I didn't want to do two MTB rides on consecutive days because it takes its toll on my muscles and they need some rest, my plan was to do an easier ride through the woods of Dwingelderveld on Wednesday and then see if I had the energy to do the MTB ride on Thursday, our last full day in Drenthe.

During a walk I had together with my daughter on Wednesday morning in the same area I planned my ride in, I decided the ride was not worth it and I now already seen a part of the forest now and it was better to save my energy.

Thursday morning when I got up it was raining a lot and it didn't stop any time soon too, damn it... I really want to do this ride! 😕
The weather forecast was a little but better after lunch, however the rain was not fully gone and the 35km/h wind was still going strong I decided I wanted to go anyway and see how bad it is and just cope with it, I wouldn't get the chance of riding here any time soon again!

There is a nice Dutch Website called MTBRoutes.nl with info on most Dutch MTB Tracks, including a YouTube video so you can see what the track is like, plus the .GPX file to load on to my Garmin.

I only realized later I crossed part of the route I planned for Wednesday on my way to Diever, and on my walk with my daughter we could see a large dish of some sort in the distance, but on Thursday I cycled right past it so I needed to stop to make a picture.

This is a radio telescope built in 1956 and at that time it was the largest in the world.

Radio telescopes detect radio waves from space rather than visible light. This one was used to map our Milky Way Galaxy, study its structure, and survey neutral hydrogen gas—the most abundant element in the universe. It played a key role in early radio astronomy research in the Netherlands and helped discover nearby galaxies now named Dwingeloo 1 and Dwingeloo 2.

But... I'm digressing here, on with the ride! 😄

Well I first have some pretty pictures to show you, this is the area around the telescope, most is now all decayed heath-lands but in the summer this blooms in purple!

The part of my trip to the forest wasn't even that bad, some light rain for about 15 minutes and some head winds, nothing too crazy. I did crash on a slippery part of a cycling path because of my own fault, a last minute decision to take a side road so I had to brake hard which made me to slip and there I was on the ground 😅 nothing happened so I got up again and continued my ride.

The start of the MTB Track, leading in to the woods was at an entrance of a camp site where I stopped to eat and drink something to refeul before I started, my bike was still clean here... 😌

MTB Track Diever is very different from Ruinen. Ruinen is fast with a lot of consecutive high-banked bermed corners were in Diever I didn't see many of those but it was mainly small elevations going up and down a couple of meters, working hard to get on top and then racing down - more challenging but both were a lot of fun.

Half way on the ride there were a lot of muddy sections I had to go through, my chain wasn't happy and started to make noise, especially in the lower gears.

I stopped on a hill to make some more pictures and to drink, and here I found out my tail light has broken off underneath my seat, it couldn't handle the rough terrain, in hindsight I could've better taken it off myself and store it in my backpack, lesson learned and luckily it was only a €7 light from China.

The ride home was the worst, even tougher than riding in the woods where I had cover from the wind and there was only some light rain every now and then but as soon as I cleared the woods and changed my gloves and jacket for a dry one (I always carry a spare set in my backpack) the heavy rain started with even some hail stones, these hurt!

The last part, passing the radio telescope has sandy trails which two hours earlier were not the best but now with the new rain had turned in to a slushy sand / mud hell, combined with headwinds made my speed drop to 17 km/h with a heart rate close to 150.

fun fact, after I made nanixxx a road biking divider to use in her posts I liked it better than my own, so I made two new ones for myself as well 😄

Ride Stats

Well this post is getting quite long and I didn't even got to the Cycling Sunday question thing which I will add later to my post 🤣

Total distance of 53km (some day, @nanixxx will beat that 😉) with not even that bad of an average speed, considering 54% of that distance was off-road.

Sooo... 1291 words already and I still have to include the Chit Chat!

To be continued....

And... a day and a half later and the post I was waiting for just launched!

So, if you want to know how to participate, check out the original post here.

Wait what? is this week TWO already??

So once again there are three questions to answer, let's get in to them 🙂

What thought or feeling visits you when you cycle in silence, without music or distractions?

I love it to cycle without music, I think it's also dangerous to have music on my ears with other traffic around me, even when most of my routes are empty roads between meadows or forests - I think it's nice to be alone with your thoughts.
I'm mostly riding with an empty mind, just enjoying my surrounding and sometimes a little cursing when I get strong head winds... 😂
But even when we have worries, I think any sport where you're alone in nature without distraction has a healing affect on our minds, just being there - one with my bike, no worries just the rhythm of the pedals.

What fear related to cycling have you managed to face little by little?

Hmmm... this sounds too bad-ass and I don't mean it like that but I'm kinda fearless on my bike and it's also the reason I end up very close to the road sometimes 😅 it happened last Thursday for the last time.
In the forest, falling is mostly without consequences because where I land is either grass, sand or mud. 🙂

What did you discover about yourself through cycling that you would never have imagined before?

Well, that I would be happy to cycle more than 15 kilometers just for the fun of it! When I was younger, my parents loved cycling (just recreational low speed, on normal bicycles) and I always told them 'you know they invented cars when you want to go somewhere that's more than 5km away?'

I got in to cycling because my joints didn't like running anymore but it wasn't my first choice at all, yet in about eight months, it became my biggest real life hobby in twenty years!

That's it for this week, thanks for stopping by and I hope more community members will become more active here again. 😀