Wednesday's Ache of that Bottle .

chris turned up at mine before 6 and we pedalled whatever singletrack respites in the urban fray we could find, river, Banks Ave, Kingsley, the edge of Horseshoe to suburbia followed roundabouts and more suburbia til we hit the Sandpit...
legs, severely lacking oomph after lastnight's ride, aching and burning and majorly lacking power on the ups.
bottle lake... a spin round our nth favourite municipal pine plantation (there are how many(?) better ones elsewhere...). felt like forever since i'd treadled my carcass round there, saving it in recent years for those winter singlespeed outings...
geared, and worn out, i'm really not so sure.
in so many respects, is it not boring, painful, and annoying? but then i guess perhaps there's a certain fondness for the poor deluded, denuded land. its bumps, its hollows, its gravel, its trees, its sections of sand. and the memories! how many years have i ridden those ribbons of trail? the where's, why's and wherefore's the trail has squirrelled over the years. we're lucky, aren't we, us punters of the ccc, to have that place. uh huh? hah, damned sight better than sitting in front of the tv i spose.
the thing thats lacking, though, at bottle lake, is the reward. you do all that pedalling but there's no real reward, no nice long flowing trail, winding its way down around the contours, allowing you to rest your climbing muscles and finally use your holding-on-steering, -leaning and -braking muscles. you put all that effort in and all you've managed is a few metres of altitude occasionally followed by a brief squirt of down. no true gain to extinguish with braking.
if christchurch.inc could get its shit together to have the equivalent of bottle lake's trail infrastructure (and SO MUCH more) applied to (say...) the McVicar Block, fuck it'd rock! a network of well built weather-proof hilled pine and fir plantation singletrack trail added to the great (but complaining) network that's already on the hills. take the pressure off the existing trails by having so many options. whakarewarewa of the south... if only, eh?