Winner Winner Chicken For Dinner!

October 22, 2025 Mat Clark

They could hear me moaning from a mile off. "only 4 stages?" and "30 second tracks?" and "is that an uphill??"

Skip forward 4 hours and Im grinning from ear to ear from a win with jelly legs, a belly full of lactic acid and feeling overall pretty damn tired!

At first glance the PedalHounds race setup looks easy. 4 very short timed stages with little to no terrain challenge, a few stop start corners and a sprint finish. Easy peasy!

Until you start trying to go fast.

Imagine going as hard as you can for 40 seconds whilst harnessing all your bike skill to get your bike around the most awkward, slippery, slow corners you have ever seen at a race followed by an all out sprint finish that makes you taste blood in your mouth.

The dusty conditions made getting the perfect run pretty tricky!

The race format is a "mashup" format meaning you can ride the stages as many times as you like with your best 2 runs counting towards your overall time. What this means is that you agonise over the perfect run. A little tyre slip here, a caught pedal there and you're going back up for another lap to perfect the run. I dont think I had a single run I was 100% happy with.

This compounds the physical effort with a mental pressure I havent had a race before. Normally mistakes are swallowed up by the 3-15 min stage time. But not here! You need to be perfect!

Throw in some tactics and changing weather and this mini enduro becomes a very interesting challenge.

Short stages doesn't mean theres no drama! Ste to the rescue!

The stages were dry and dusty making them hard to navigate for grip with pebbles, dust, leaves and acorns strewn across almost every inch of track. Throughout the the day the tracks got more cut in and we were able to start trusting the corners more and building speed but by now the legs are suffering from all the sprints so timing your efforts was key.

Stage 4 had a savage fire road pedal!

And then the rain came. The tracks in the woods where unchanged by this but stage 4 which was mostly in the open with a grass corner at the bottom started to give a bit more grip. We heading up for a last minute run in the better conditions but the grip we found at the top was all lost on the grass at the bottom. Still we made up some time!

After "bipping" our timing chips at the end it was clear we had all had a good day with Myself and Ste winning our categories, Micky gets a 3rd place to round out the season as overall winner and Stu gets on the podium in the over 40s.