Category Archives: News

Basque MTB: Mountain Biking into the 2012 Spanish Holiday Season

At BasqueMTB we are gearing up (bad pun, sorry!) for the 2012 mountain bike holiday season. After a very successful 2011 we are already taking holiday bookings for this season and are encouraging anyone who wants to come to this part of Spain for a mountain bike holiday with BasqueMTB to book soon to avoid disappointment.

Mountain Bike Holiday Spain Mountain Bike Holiday Spain
Mountain biking near San Sebastian Mountain biking on the Basque coast
Mountain Bike Holiday Spain Mountain Bike Holiday Spain
Mountain Biking near Bilbao Mountain biking in the Spanish Pyrenees

Many people ask me what we do when during the winter when we don’t offer mountain bike holidays. Well, the answer is that we prepare for the next season. A large part of that is exploring to find new mountain bike trails. We offer day trips in Navarra and longer mountain bike tours in the Spanish Pyrenees as well and all these trails need to be researched. In addition, for 2012, we will offer a Basque Coast mountain bike tour, riding from San Sebastian to Bilbao. This trip doesn’t follow the Camino del Norte, (an alternative to the Camino de Santiago), instead following less used trails, so again it takes a lot of work to map out all these trails and find the most fun route.

Mountain Bike Holiday Spain Mountain Bike Holiday Spain
Mountain biking in the Spanish Pyrenees
Mountain biking in the Spanish Pyrenees
Mountain Bike Holiday Spain Mountain Bike Holiday Spain
Mountain Biking near San Sebastian
Mountain biking in Basque Mountains

The other big job is to maintain, or improve, fitness. In the holiday season we will be guiding 5, 6 or sometimes 7 days a week. If the body is unprepared then that is almost impossible. Winter is the perfect time to get some big mountain bike miles in so that when the holiday season rolls around the toll on the body is manageable.

It’s a hard job but someone’s got to do it!

BasqueMTB – Mountain Biking Video

Just a quick post this time to put up another of our mountain biking videos. Some of you may recognise this mountain, it’s quite distinctive. The descent is pretty tough by bike, as is the climb, but if you know the right route then it’s a really rewarding day out. Definitely not one for the faint hearted though, because the descent is very rocky and technical and the consequences if you get some bits wrong are as high as they get.

You can see some photos of BasqueMTB’s hard mountain biking, in the Pyrenees and the local Basque mountains over on our website.

BasqueMTB Skills Adventure with Great Rock

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Well, our big mountain biking skills adventure with Ed Oxley from Great Rock has just finished. I’m totally exhausted and covered in cuts and bruises but I’ve got that warm happy feeling from a week that worked out well!  Ed Oxley is a renowned mountain bike skills coach from England and I met him back in December 2010. It was very quickly apparent to me that Ed was the real deal. He a fantastic understanding of the techniques involved in riding a mountain bike and, more importantly, a great way of explaining them. You can read my impressions of my mountain bike skills weekend with Ed Oxley over on the main BasqueMTB News and Views section.

 BasqueMTB-GreatRock-Spanish-Basque-Skills-Holiday

Our idea for week was to take a group of riders for mountain biking holiday, as normal, however Ed would help develop their skills through the week to make sure they got the best from the technical and varied trails of the Basque Country. From the very start we knew that the key would be to balance the skills and riding so that everyone felt they had learned lots but still had a fun mountain biking holiday. We weren’t entirely sure how we would organise everything, we weren’t sure how it would work out but we were sure that we wanted it to be a fun experience for everyone involved. And all the feedback says that it was!

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The beauty of the whole week was that it really felt like we were doing plenty of mountain biking; the skills stuff didn’t really intrude into the day, yet by the end of the week everyone was riding noticeably better. On the last day we took everyone to a very technical trail that would have been too difficult for many people at the start of the week… it was amazing to see everyone riding parts that they would have pushed their bikes down before. The guys that were already riding at that standard were noticably faster and smoother.

Of course, it wasn’t all mountain biking and skills training. We were on holiday you know! The beauty of the Basque Country, especially around Hondarribia and San Sebastian, is that the food and drink are up there with the best in the world. So of course we sampled some of that too. We had planned our week to coincide with the Fiestas of Irun so, of course, our week wouldn’t have been complete without a visit there one night to let off a bit off steam!

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 You can see more pictures from the Great Rock skills week over on BasqueMTB.