Nothing like 4 hours hard riding in the Dales to cure the Christmas overeating!

On 30th December 2007, Alex Willis and myself ditched the running shoes, for a day in the saddle in a mountain bike orienteering event.

Organised by Kudu Bikes Triathlon Club, the event was a competition between two disciplines, running and mountain biking. It's aim to see whether the runners, with the advantage of footpaths (offering much shorter root choices), could beat the mountain bikers with the clear advantage of speed. To even the out the event, there were two compulsory checkpoints for the bikers, which the runners could ignore. Also, one particularly speedy bridleway was made out of bounds to bikers.

Starting in the centre of Hawes, we headed out on the roads to get the 2 compulsory controls. Following this was a steep climb on forest tracks featuring several switchbacks. After this very painful climb, we were rewarded with a brilliant downhill taking us over some great limestone steps.

Back into Hawes we set out on our second loop, this was a steep climb onto a huge Roman Road running along the ridge of Whether Fell. The next step of the journey offered some fantastic technical riding over open moorland. The kind of track good enough to find it's way onto a magazine cover.

The last descent into Hawes' neighbouring town Gayle, was very technical with deep ruts and tight corners. It follows that I took flight over the handlebars, thankfully, no serious damage. A quick blast through Gayle took us back into Hawes and to the finish. We finished with 140 points in 14th place.

The winner was the speedier mountain bike, yet surprisingly the runners occupied many of the high placings.