Ordinarily with a cycling event I’ll turn up the night before, camp, do the ride, camp again, and get the train home the next morning. This was the draft plan for 2025’s Brother Big ‘Un ride in Kent, but events conspired and I just didn’t finish and get home from work until around 7.30 pm the night before. The good news was that I’d been lent an electric van to go with, so my thinking was I’d just drive in the morning and do the ride. This is a post about what I learned and observed in so doing.
Tag Archives: mtb
What I learned and observed riding the 2025 ‘Surly 100’ in the Cotswolds
The Cotswolds is not a part of the land I’d much cycled in. Pasting in from Wikipedia, the name means literally “sheep enclosure in rolling hillsides.” It’s a great off-road cycling location that an experienced route-setter like Graham Foot knew how to get the best out of with this year’s Surly 100, a two-day ride that takes one out of town straight in to the hills, but on wisely-chosen trails that, while tough, are definitely rideable. I’ve written up what I’ve learned and observed over these two days and hope they’re helpful. A big thank you to Graham, and the wider team who made this event well worth the train trip.
Four learnings and observations from riding the 137 km Stone Circle Gravel ‘Rebel’ route with no bibs and arguably the wrong bike
Having put up my tent in the grounds of Old Sarum fort at gone 2130 hours, I was dipping in to my bag to prepare my clothes for the ride the next morning, and laughed bitterly. My neighbour asked me if something was wrong, so I gave the news; I’d left my bibs on my bed and would have to ride with the pants and shorts I was wearing. ‘The adventure starts here,’ they reassured me, clearly finding this very funny.
This is a short blog post about what I learned and saw at this amazing event which went down on Saturday 28 June 2025. Hopefully you learn something from it yourself and avoid a mistake – or at least get some amusement from it like my very gracious neighbour did!
My top 3 ways to ruin your bike and get an expensive repair bill
As a teacher at London Bike Kitchen, and doing my own bike maintenance work, one of the first things I talk to people about is how much money maintenance can save you. It’s tempting to tell people that cycling is ‘free once you buy the bike,’ but this quickly becomes untrue if you let maintenance problems build up, and let your more expensive components become unduly damaged and worn ahead of time. This is a short blog about the best ways to ruin your bike through lack of maintenance, which hopefully you’d use more in a what not to do sense. But it’s more fun to talk about it this way!
A permament fix for stuck/broken Suntour Q-Loc suspension fork thru-axles
If you’ve ever owned a Suntour suspension fork, like that on my Voodoo Bizango (which has a Suntour Raidon), you might have already been a bit thrown by the proprietary Suntour thru-axle system, Q-Loc. Unfortunately, Q-Loc is prone to breaking, and then you have a wheel stuck in the fork. This once bit me in the bum quite badly because I’d let my front tubelessly-set-up wheel run out of sealant, and it deflated on a ride and wouldn’t stay up after I reinflated it with my mini pump. I couldn’t get the wheel off to put an inner tube in, so had to resort to public transport.
Getting home I did a lot of online research, many people found they were having the same issue, but the solution as per the bike shops’ advice was to just buy a new Q-Loc axle. Being unhappy to just spend more money on a clearly poor quality component, I found a permanent fix to this problem using a third-party provider, Hexlox. This is a short article on how to find the right replacement for your Suntour fork.
What I learned riding ‘the Purbeck bimble’ aka ‘Purbeckspedition,’ a MTB/gravel and bikepacking route on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset
I’ve just come back from the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, where I re-rode a route I did a few years ago. It’s a really great weekend away so this is a short blog about how to make the most of it and what I learned on the ride (and the camp).
What I learned: Riding on the ‘old chalk way’ from Tring to Pangbourne
To try and focus my blogs and keep them from being an unstructured mess, I fix them around ‘wins and losses’ from a given ride. This time it’s around a great day out from last Sunday, where I got the train out to Tring from London Euston, and followed a route called ‘the old chalkContinue reading “What I learned: Riding on the ‘old chalk way’ from Tring to Pangbourne”
2 flops and 2 wins at the Pan Celtic Gravel Rally 2024
Last weekend I rented a van with my pal and drove from London to Eryri National Park (Snowdonia) with our tickets for the Pan Celtic Gravel Rally in our pockets. This meant a 19km ‘night stage’ on the evening of the Friday, starting at 2030, and the 136km ‘long’ route the next day starting atContinue reading “2 flops and 2 wins at the Pan Celtic Gravel Rally 2024”
Gravel bikes for the UK: Just get a hardtail
If you’re interested in off road cycling you may well have ‘gravel bikes’ being marketed at you. They can supposedly ‘do it all,’ because all it takes to tame the UK’s off road terrain is some wide knobbly tyres, flared bars and some hydraulic disc brakes. I was persuaded by this and persevered with trying to make a Surly Midnight Special a ‘do it all’ bike for more than a year, and learned the hard way that life is too short to try hammering square pegs through round holes. This is a short article about how I ended up trading it in for a cheap 2nd hand hardtail and why I think you’d likely be best served by opting for the same.
Calum On Wheels 