Joyride150 report

This morning I headed off to Markham to meet up with a few friends at Joyride150, my first visit to the park. Upon arrival, I met with Brad and Jared and we set to work installing my old brakes on his new Gioda Espresso. Unfortunately his fork had IS tabs and I didn't have an adaptor for the front brake so we were only able to install the rear - but one brake is ok for a bike park, right? If you like skidding around corners it is. The bike looks beautiful and I'm sure Jared will be happy racing on it this summer.

I had my waivers signed at home so the membership card was a quick and painless experience. I paid my fees for the day and headed off to change. I put on arm warmers, but those came off after 1 quick warm-up lap. Throughout the day we would find the temperature quite comfortable when riding (even sweating a little when you get going on the pump tracks) but rather cold when you stop and are a little moist.

Overall the park was very fun and surprisingly XC friendly - the XC loop of course was good, with enough features to keep it interesting and a couple challenging features if you want to take the hardest line. Some relatively tame rock gardens (more like rock carpets?) but I still managed to crash trying to enter one parallel to the wood border, sliding along instead of rolling over it.

The pump tracks are a bit tight for the wheelbase of an XC bike, but are still fun and I found #2 to offer good enough flow to spend a fair bit of time on it. A few laps on the pump track are quite tiring and heavy on the upper body work. It's nice to mix them in with laps of the XC track.

The skinny lines are probably my biggest challenge, but I found I got significantly better over the course of the day. There's a nice progressive ground level line that goes right down to a 1.5" board in the front area. I was nailing that, so back to the sport skinnies I went - I can ride about half of them, half of the time. A few are completely beyond my reach right now, and the rest pose enough challenge to make it enjoyable and productive. I was happy to clean a few of them after a couple attempts, for sure.

Overall the park surprised me with what it had to offer for an XC rider, and also with how much space there was for a busy weekend day. While occasionally you'd get crowded or held up it was usually just a case of choosing another area for the moment and you'd have lots of space to yourself. I must say it was easy to log 4 hours of "training" and have it not feel laboured - I am tired, but since the load was distributed to my whole body my legs are not fried. That in itself is a great value to a racer who is doing base or the start of a build period. I will definitely return at least once this winter, and would be a regular visitor if I lived nearby.