Thursday night 5:30 pm. Bike ride, banter and beer. What’s not to like. One year later we’re still going strong.

I started the Thursday night gravel ride in September 2018 when daylight savings rolled around, as a way of getting a bit of extra training in for a bikepacking trip over Summer.

Being fairly new to town, I made up one off-road gravel route, started the regular ride and figured I’d make the rest up as I went along.

A regular group of riders soon established itself with more people joining in Summer. It has the old skool vibe of going out to play with your mates. We get a workout, enjoy catching up, and the feeling of winding down at the end of the week. Rituals have formed, like the pace lifting perceptibly when we’re on the home run to the pub!

Tauranga has a surprising amount of gravel trails when you start looking, and I spent a lot of Sunday afternoons over Spring and early Summer last year going exploring and building up routes in ridewithgps until I’d built up enough of a mental map to make up more rides in my head.

There is a Tauranga cycling map but it’s maps of small sections of trail in different places, so it did require a bit of fieldwork to figure out how to connect different tracks to link things up into a longer loop.

Over a few months I built up a good number of routes that are generally around 25-30 km and take around 1.5-2.0 hours. Each route can also be done in reverse, so a new route is actually two routes in one.

People often comment that they never knew some of the trails existed and I’m still enjoying coming across the odd new link track here and there. New variations and features to ride are often suggested, and over time routes have morphed.

My favourite is when someone, sometime suggested deviating through Waipuna park to add in a steep but fun grassy bank to ride down en route to another trail in Johnson’s Reserve. So this has become another enjoyable ritual. We even tried to ride up it once, when doing the route in reverse, but it proved impossible, so we had to take the b-line instead. It was fun trying though.

Sometimes we experiment on the ride if a promising trail opening is spotted….this doesn’t always work out and has involved some hilarious hike-a-bike moments and getting slapped in the face by hanging vegetation, but is usually fun anyway!

I was going to stop for the winter when autumn daylight savings rolled around, but people wanted to carry on, so we carried on.

Over the winter we’ve only needed to cancel a couple of rides due to the weather, which is pretty good, and it was great getting out on a crisp evening, even in the dark and it made the beer at the end even more welcome. Well-known routes are different to ride in the dark, almost like a new ride, as your field of vision is so different.

Before Christmas, after a friend told me about Strava art, I made up a mystery Strava art ride, having decided a bridge looked like the beak of a Kiwi. People loved trying to guess what it was as we rode around, shouting out ‘is it an antler?’ after the first section. All was finally revealed. It was actually quite a cool route in it’s own right.

Celebrating a year of Thursday night gravel rides