Meeting spot
Last Thursday ride was on the foothill of muscat mountains, just below new(ish) Bowshar pass. Again – we had another “MTB-Shoes Gate” (well, Hassan after arrival to meeting spot was promptly stopped by shoe police (Ingmar) and questioned about number of mtb shoes he brought and allowed to park only when reply was “I have 2 mtb shoes” – he had only 1 the previous week!) – now it was Andreas with his german visitor – he forgot his shoes at home so 5 secs after they parked they raced home to Ghala. In between arriving people were reporting the “Mr. Cycle-around-Oman” Tom was climbing the Bowshar hill and still has way to go. The combination of factors – we gave Tom few minutes and in between also Andreas arrived – so we had 10 riders (Ingmar, Gill, Frans, Andreas, Heiner, Ricardo, Biagio, Robin, Hassan and Tom). The temperature was pleasant – we were quite relieved ‘cause the week ago during Lake’s race we were really baking.
We started loop with short single track and the rest of the ride was on graded roads on undulating terrain. First we had to conquer 3 short but relatively steep hills and regrouped on the each crest.
Then we had short downhill on rocky bumpy track to the new houses but found our way in between jebels. The area is really scenic and if not all new houses mushrooming around it will be like in the middle of nowhere.
On one of the jebels we trained “steep climbing” (low gear ratio, body weight in the front of the seat) which successfully ended up with Ingmar heroically bleeding from his elbow after unwanted contact with Mother Earth. We took several action photos of guys descending steep hill and off we went.
The area is being developed so it was inevitable to cycle for few hundred meters on black top but when we saw the graded track going in our general direction we took it – it was freshly regraded but with sick layer of fine flour-like dust on surface so it was kind of “eat your own dust”. Soon we were already approx. 600 meters from cars but Frans wanted to see “where the usual track goes” (now it is buried below new highway) so Gill and Ricardo decided to go to cars. We cycled to highway and back by other track and we met Gill and Ricardo riding against us – they took turn left too early ;)) But it was not far from cars anyway. We fulfilled 20 kilometers of relatively relaxing riding, arrived to cars not much later after 5 – making Stampede and Thin Red line ball goers’s wives happy.
Next week is Annual MTB race in usual venue on BT Race Track. So get that bikes ready – AND BRING MTB SHOES too!