Tarrenig Rally

A couple of Sundays ago I travelled up to Llangurig in Mid Wales for the Tarrenig Rally, run by the Hafren Dirt Bike Club (http://www.hafrendbc.co.uk/). The rally took place in and around the Tarrenig forest, an area that has been opened up by the recent construction of a wind farm and was run over a 30-mile lap of challenging dirt sections linked together by gravel roads.

Rallies of this sort are less hard work than an enduro and the gravel road sections give a chance to rest and recover from the difficult bits. The Tarrenig was more challenging than either the Hafren or Cambrian rallies that I have done before and it included three scary descents and a difficult climb. I managed to complete a lap, only falling off once, after which I was exhausted so I retired (full distance was three laps). For next time I will run enduro tyres (the road-biased tyres I was using gave insufficient stopping on the descents and insufficient go on the climbs) and to reduce the tyre pressures.

The weather for the day was perfect (dry with sunshine) and the scenery was breathtaking. I took a few pictures which I have posted here:
http://www.biochem.ucl.ac.uk/~mckenzie/tarrenig-20060507/

It was a superb day and I indend to return next year to see if I can finish it.

Duncan

Well done for completing it. I tried green laning, noty exactly the same thing I know. The gravel bits and sand bits, even the rocky bits were fine but those horrible little gullies, forget it. You must have been very tired at the end of all that. Maybe one day I shall go give it a whirl.

If you want to try some more off-roading I can strongly recommend the Cambrian Rally as an ideal introduction to off-road events. It is like a first step up from trail riding and is run in October:
http://endurouk.com/component/option,com_events/task,view_detail/agid,238/year,2006/month,10/day,21/Itemid,196/

Duncan