Even though I am pretty hopeless on any type of pushbike, I decided to head down and pick up a new MTB with my mate Ryan last week and get back into pedalling.  Seems I'm not as fit as I thought after our first ride in Mt Cootha!

Most of the time I ride a bike I'm getting laughs, generally going into a foam pit, maybe its something to do with my knees looking real gumby - I don't know.  But since I can't run anymore because of my ankles, it makes any sort of cardio exercise pretty hard so it was time I got into MTB instead so it's easy on the joints.  Relatively.

I don't know much about mountain bikes, but heard the Bigfoot was a pretty good bike to start on, especially with the Marzocchi 32mm forks, so I figure it could take a bit of punishment for a hard-tail.  So we headed into Boggo road bike shop and picked up our new bikes.

Once we loaded them into the van, we figure it was time to break them in, so I thought we'd do a short 45 min ride so I can get used to it (that and I'm definitely not bicycle fit).  After 30 minutes of riding up-hill, we were about to go back down for the fun part and go home.  But instead, we met two guys who said there were better trails on the other side of Mt Cootha.  We figure we had nowhere to be, so why not check it out.

Ohhh, how bad of an idea that was - My legs have not done anything like that before - I found muscles I've never used before, I swear!  My legs turned to jelly before we even pushed our bikes to the top of the hill.
But once we were at the top it was so worth it.  The trails were awesome, heaps of tight stuff to ride in and trees to put the shoulder into.  (Hey Ryan!).

So our 45 minute ride turned into 3 hours, I was wrecked but what a good way to start with the new bike.  Now Rachael has Ryan's old bike, so I'll see if she can handle the heat next.