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Upon arriving at Rugog farm and seeing the open expanse of a hill we decided to take a walk up the course before uplift started. On our way up somebody coming down stated they had taken the course over every possible outcrop of rocks on the way down, Which at first sounded good until I walked up and saw it for myself. Not been a very good jumper and been reasonably new to DH mountain biking I walked up the course complaining and quite frankly shitting myself. I really didn’t like the look of the course it consisted of lots of rocky outcrops, step downs, table tops and fades and none of which were very well marked. As we walked further up the hill we saw that Dan Atherton was still grafting away on the strimmer trying to make up new lines over the rocks, which I have to say were a nightmare to ride and no wonder as when I went down the hill behind him I found he wasn’t even using this line.

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All was forgiven after my first run when I finally found a course that downhill bikes were really made for the fades and drops were easier than I had first suspected and I loved the speed of the top section combined with the technical off camber section toward the bottom.As the course had never seen any traffic and most of the jumps were blind which made it really hard to remember which line to take into each jump until around my 3 or 4 run down. Although I did know to slow down when I saw the odd person standing around the edge of a jump this generally meant there were two options one would see you safely down the jump the other usually meant a 5-6 foot step down with a flat landing and for the unsuspecting a definite off.  So for the first 3 runs I usually slowed down were I’d seen the vultures and sure enough I managed to avert total carnage. The uplift was ok apart from the 35 minute wait we endured
on one occasion and I heard from Andy that the trailer he got on wouldn’t get up the track and half the riders had to get off whilst the tractor made  numerous attempts to get up the track.  By the time they were reunited with there bikes Andy’s had scratches which were more fitting in a scrap yard and Aarons bike had a puddle of oil on the trailer floor.  It has to be said befitting to the name of the tractor the Lamborghini tractor was most defintely the fastest up lift of the day shaving around 6 minutes off the up lift compared to the others.  As the day wore on the top section only got faster while the bottom muddy section got harder and greasier with most riders stacking at some point or another it really was a day for the CRASH TEST DUMMIES. I loved the course so much I have already signed up for the first round of the Nationals there in early April.