Gwilym's Adventure Blog

After an early start and a long 3 hour ride up to Sweet Lamb Adventure Bike Centre in Wales, I parked up the Explorer and jumped onto the KTM 790r for a day of 1 : 1 coaching with "Moly" the owner and lead instructor. I haven't ridden much this year (on or off road) for obvious reasons. I normally do around 10000 miles a year and since lockdown, it is more like 700 miles. I was a bit concerned about my skill fade but after a quick refresher training on riding position and corning (and getting to learn a bike I had never ridden before) it was off to ride around the Sweet Lamb complex and I was not as rusty as I expected. Today's particular skills we looked at were riding through water, riding ruts and ditches (up and down), skid turns, riding grass (some of it very lumpy and bumpy), pushing the the bike out of a marsh.  

After a little bit of fiddling with the bike this morning, it was off for another day of riding around the trails of Sweet Lamb to start with and then off site round the byways of Wales. Just Rob and I out today and we had a great time. It was somewhat drier than yesterday and my riding was better so no lying down for the bike today. Just the one pic today until Iget round to editing the video from the weekend

I finally got to take my rebuilt XT660Z Tenere off road today with a Trail Ride from Sweet Lamb . Nearly 100miles of gravel tracks and single track mud in the forest. The bike lay down for a rest a couple of times :-) but was soon back on its feet. Having only ridden 20miles since having it back on the road, today was a test of both my riding skills and the last few months worth of spannering skills. The bike held up mechanically so that was good and the only damage so far is a broken indicator (£15 on ebay) so hopefully nothing extra tomorrow.

I have just got back from a very productive 1:1 coaching day with Mark "Molly" Molineux at Sweet Lamb Adventure Rally Bike. On my last trip up there (curtailed by snow) I realised the limits of the tyres so went back with some more aggressive ones, some Pirelli Scorpion Rally STR . Theses are a good compromise as far better off road but only a small negative result on the road handling. I thought I had made a mistake by telling Molly my nemesis was riding on grass as soon off we went onto the grass. However, by the end of the day, I was all over it and actually looking forward to getting off the gravel onto the green stuff. Next time though, I will tell him my nemesis is eating cake. Oh, and also during the day we road about 60% of the off road complex, road over tyres, gravel humps, dodged 1000's of game birds, visited the source of The River Wye , did my first jump on a Big Bike and generally had loads of fun whilst Molly kept pushing the ...

I have been looking forward to this weekend for a while. On Friday I rode up to mid wales for a weekend of Big Bike Off Road fun at Sweet Lamb Adventure Bike Academy . A wet ride up got me there around 8pm on Friday night where I met the other 7 people on the course. On Saturday we headed out into the cold for lots of skills training, the instructors Mark, Ben and Pat put us through our paces for the day and had us riding in much more relaxed and controlled style than when we started. We covered around 80km that day but with lots of laps of the same ground so we could improve our style each time. Although I was on TKC70's   and everyone else was on proper knobbly tyres, I was still in full control until some wet grass and deep mud/gravel where I let the bike lie down for a short rest on 2 occasions. The format of the day was great (with lots of coffee breaks to warm up) and loads of confidence inspiring skills were taught to us. Sadly this morning, w...