WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY SANNY
Be honest. It’s hard not to feel your heart sink, if only just a little, at the thought of the impending winter. Shorter days, colder temperatures, muddy trails – they don’t exactly entice you in the way that the sun on your skin and the seemingly endless days of summer can. Instead, a routine of endlessly charging lights, drying shoes and heading out in winter slop on dreary grey days and inky black nights awaits. While magazines and the internet do a roaring trade in images of riders blasting down dusty singletrack trails under a canopy of verdant green with the warming sun and azure blue skies above, you would be forgiven in believing that this is the only truly enjoyable type of mountain biking. Tempting as it may be to hang up the wheels and go to (whisper it) the gym, or the pub, let me be the one to open your eyes to the art of the possible. Ladies and gentlemen, for your consideration, I give you the dawn raid.