Thanksgiving!

What a fantastic Thanksgiving! Despite my often grumblings about life, I should be thankful for a lot of things, and I am. This week, was a perfect way to clear up my mind and give thanks. What better way than by riding hard and long.

So the recap of the week:
Monday and Tuesday were a little damp, and a little cold, shortish night rides after work. But in great company.
Had half day Wednesday, the weather was absolutely gorgeous, in 70s!!! So I took the whole day off and rode Wissahickon up and down for 5 hours, probably clocking around 30 miles!
Did a small fun ride on Thursday morning at Clayton, one loop, about 6 miles. Perfect little appetite builder for T-giving dinner!
Took Friday off from riding to do a little TM with few good friends. And it was back in the saddle for and improve, unsanctioned, unofficial "off season training race" with some folks from MTBNJ.com. The trails were super rocky, and the climbs were long and super steep, it was cold in teh morning, but warmed up by the late AM early afternoon.
And to top it all off was the crowning Sunday bi-park ride we pulled off with a fellow rider from PMBA, Wissahickon and Belmont in one day. He had a GPS and made a google earth track!!!

The leaves were down, and one part it was like riding over an oriental rug. The leaves must've been snapped by a cold frost and high winds, because they fell to the ground and were all still pale salad green, bright yellow, and reddish, without any decomp brown colors at all!!! The whole place looked magical!

Drying out

So I did get to the park and rode last night. But if my buddy, Max, would've said that we were nuts to do it and it was a bad idea and we should just turn around and go home, I would have not put up a fight. If you know what I mean.

Surprisingly the trails drained very well and were in good condition. Just handfull of soft spots, and maybe one slightly muddy section. The rest just very wet slippery mulching leaves covering everything.

It was rather chilly and uncomfortable, due to the wetness and low temps. We were out for about 1-1.5 hours, riding at a pretty slow pace, cos it was that slippery. Plus the myst and fog were so thick at times we could hardly see the trail with all the reflection from the water dropplets from our head lights. Let me tell you. It was spooky at times. And I have no idea how people race cyclocross in the winter in the freezing temps! In that hour and a half, I never warmed up and never loosened up enough to feel that feeling of your body working like a well lubed machine at operating temps. Just felt constricted and tight and cold.

Likily it looks like the rain is going away today. So it might be drier and tomorrow it should be even warm! Back in the 60s!

Rain, rain, go away!

For various reasons I didn't get on the bike a single time since last Sunday... A week is a long time, yet in a way not too bad, becuase I road almost every day the week before and recovery time was quite welcome.

However, the withdrawal started acting up and I was looking forward to riding today... But despite early favorable forecasts, this is what I woke up to...


Argh!!! They are saying tho, that it will stop by early afternoon, and it's only drizzling, so I might get a ride in tonight. Here's to the hope!!!

Stay tuned.

Trails under the wheels, trails under the shovels...

What a week was the last week!

Started off with two consecutive days of riding, on Monday and Tuesday. Had to take Wednesday off. But rode with a fun group on Thursday. I really like those Thursday rides. The pace isn't killer, so it is very nice to enjoy the park and trails without trying to keep my lunch down at the tops of the climbs!
Met a new member of PMBA club. He is new to the area and has been exploring the park on his own. We rode most of the trails, until his light ran out of the battery and we had to find the closes bail point riding by my light alone! Then my battery ran out of juice too about 1/4 mile from the parking lot. Good thing by then I was on the main well lit path. And my legs were just as done as my light!!! I could barely turn the cranks on the flat smooth path! That's good week of riding in my book!

And on Saturday we had a great group of dedicated volunteers come out to work on a badly eroded section of the trail. It rained and drizzled on and off thru the night and in the morning. However, a little drizzle and 37 degrees temps in the morning did not deter the spirits and more than 35 people came out to work!!! I'm impressed by the generosity and dedication of our volunteers. Their spirit for giving does not seize to impressed me!
The planning for this project started a month ago, but last scheduled date, two weeks ago, got rained out. So it was rescheduled for this weekend.
There was a bad mud hole which we wanted to fix. Then we looked at the trail leading to the mud hole, and it was getting eroded badly, all loose and just plain ugly. Before we knew it, we had a plan for a section of the trail to be re-routed, and another part of it stabilized and made more erosion resistant.
By the end of the day, we had re-routed and/or revamped 320 feet of trail, in addition of building an enormous (aprox. 10'X12' and 4-5' deep) "french drain" with a beautiful stone "bridge" over it.
Check out the pictures!!!
I believe everyone was as happy and proud of the results as they were sore from all the work we did. I know I was!
It is incredible how much a relatively small group of hard working people can do in one day!

But the week was not over yet. On Sunday we went for a ride at White Clay, and fun park down in DE. The trails are maintained there by the group called Delaware Trail Spinners, and let me tell you, they know what they are doing!!! It was a beautiful late fall day, the air was cool and crisp, the colors were astonishing, the group was friendly, and the ride great! Perfect fun, recovery ride after a fantastic week!

Over and out.

Fun ride, funny crash

Had a shortish but fun ride with couple of fiends.

We were cruising pretty fast, I was leading as I approached a spot with a little jump, which I've been exploring lately, slowly gaining confidence getting a little air off of it. A friend of mine, who is much faster downhill and enjoys jumping much more than me. I didn't want to hold him up, and didn't slow down as I normally would.
As a result I went off the little jump rather uncomfortably, awkwardly, and too fast.

Landing wasn't much better. Front wheel touched down firts and at an angle with a loud crack/snap noise. One thought went thru my mind "I broke my CF fork's leg at the dropout".

I picked myself up and dusted off. Fearfully examined the bike, only to discover that nothing was broken, except for the low tire pressure. Lukily, as it turns out all I did was burp some air from my Stan's conversion! Phew, what a relief.

Never had that problem before in a long time. I haven't topped off the tires before te ride, so it is possible that they were just a hair too low. From now on, I will always check the tire pressure before heading out, and never ride on anything lower than 30 psi! Lesson learned.

SlackerVille

Being a lazy slacker SUCKS!

Last night all my riding buddies bailed on me, and I didn't have enough motivation to go riding in the cold AND dark by myself. Instead went out for a bite to eat and a beer. As I was going home afterward, I realized that it wasn't all that cold, and I felt really guilty for wasting a perfectly nice riding night.

To make things worse, today is raining... Figures... That's what I get for being a lazy bum.

In a crappy mood. Just hoping that the forecasters are correct and this rain WILL stop in an hour or so and the sun comes out and dries things up.

Hopeful to get out and ride after work

Slower pace bliss

For the last couple of months I've been mostly riding with fast guys or by myself. In either case, the rides turn out pretty hard. When I'm by myself, the pace might not be break neck fast, but I don't stop. When chasing them boys, it's almost race pace for me.
And I love the resulting fatigue and pain.

However, tonight I went with a different group, and pace was much more relaxed. What a joy! Noticing so much more beautiful nature around. To say nothing of being able to fly up the hills half way thru and at the end of the ride, because I still have a lot left in the tank, instead of being spent from riding to the limit from the moment of getting on the bike.

New resolution, from now on, at least once a month -- easy ride!!! :-)

Over and out!

Columbus Day rocks!

Well, I workin private sector, but for some reason my company decided to honor the day, and close the office. Score! The weather was perfect, unbelievable for October, in fact.

I tried to rally some friends to ride with, but in the end only one buddy, who works from home was able to get away to join me for a part of the ride.
I started off in Wissahickon, rode one side of the park all the way, popped on the surface streets for maybe couple of miles to connect to Belmont, where I meet up with Lou, and we did a nice loop in there, before he went home and I rode back to Wiss, to finish up the other side.

All in all, it was probably close to 30-35 miles of gorgeous ride. Too bad my legs didn't feel as fresh and strong as some other days, and I ran out of water. When I came to the water fountain where I was planning to re-fill, I ran into a family with bunch of kids using it in some ways, which convinced me not to use it for drinking water... So I just finished the ride getting progressively dehydrated.

But no worries, any ride on Monday, when everyone else is working ROCKS!

What a weather we've been having, it's completely unbelievable! We finally are getting some moderate rain. This is long over due and very needed. The water will moisten the trails and dumpen all the dust. The end of the week, with stickier trails and cooler temps should see some killer riding conditions!

Trail Maintenance!

This will be a quick one, but I wanted to mention the TM day we has this past weekend! Over the last 3 months our local MTB club has been gathering momentum on various TM projects, and with help of other local more established groups, we are going places now!

We scoped the location and set the goal, made plans, and prepared. But I still had some doubts about how it would all turn out. It was a rather ambitious project.

But all my doubts were disolved and I was blown away that Saturday. When we had 20+ people ready to work early in the morning, standing in the pouring rain (the forecast was for sunny skies and warm temperatures) and not leaving, I knew it was going to be good! Luckily the rain stopped pretyt quickly and we had blue skies for the rest of the day!

We had 45+ volunteers working throughout the day, loggin total of over 250 man hours!!!
We changed large [parts of existing trail to shed water better and re-routed an approximately 200 feet long section!

Here are some pictures!

High hopes, not too much disappointment

So I was thinking about attempting to try to push for doing two laps of my local loop for the first time this weekend. As I mentioned in the previous posts, For some reason, after just one loop (~16-ish miles) I'm usually so beat I find it hard to keep going.

But I fell short of that goal. Tho I'm not too disappointed.

We went out for a really hard paced lap in the morning on Saturday, thinking that we would barely have enough time to finish the loop by 1 PM, when we were meeting couple of more friends to scope out and plan the location for the TMD this coming weekend. However, we went so hard that we were done by noon! So we started with the TMD planning an hour early. No biggie.

Then in the evening we had our first PMBA annual party. I killed an hour just hanging out in the park, taking in this gorgeous, crisp, refreshing weather we are having right now. This is how each fall should be. Absolutely perfect!

Lotsa good beer later, and many many hardy laughs, I got home, and promptly fell asleep.

On Sunday, I had to meet with my son's boy scout troops, to go over the preparation for the 33 mile bike trek they will be doing at the end of the month. And I thought that afterwards I'd have time to go an do my "two-lapper".
Well, the meeting went longer than expected -- we ended up going for an easy ride in another park. It was nice seeing how some kids took the bike so naturally and were lofting their, sometimes too big for them, bikes with platform pedals over logs and log piles! Some of those boys are natural!

And that was my weekend, and now for another hard ride after work. Seems like tonight might be the first time I'll break out the lights!

Confused...

Got out of the work more than an hour late yesterday. So instead of being at the trail head by 5:15-ish, it was 6:30 by the time I was ready to roll. Luckily, I saw a familiar bike on a roof of a car that pulled into a parking lot - a friend I knew from a season of XC racing I did a couple of years ago.
Turns out her SO couldn't ride and she was heading out by herself, I asked if she would mind company.
Man, if I knew how much she would kick my butt, I would've gone by myself at much slower pace! Ha-ha

It was late, and getting dark soon, so we only had time for half of the normal loop. Still about 5 miles of gravel path and then 6 or so miles of single track. She was moving at a pretty good clip, and I had to work hard to keep up!

It was a shortish ride, but a hard one, and it was nice flying thru our trails at 8-9/10th! Trails felt quite a bit different from a more relaxed normal pace.

What really perplexed me was why it felt so hard and I was so tired after only 10-12 miles?! Just a couple of weeks ago I completed SM100. I mean, it almost felt harder doing these 12 miles than 100 miles two weeks ago! Granted at shenandoah, I was pacing myself, and yesterday I was going almost all out, but still...

This is also right along the lines of what I was thinking few days ago. Having ridden 100 miles, why does it still feel almost impossible commit to and ride two complete loops of my regular ride? That would be "only" 32-ish miles...
I'm sure it's possible, but I haven't been able to convince myself to go for the second lap, after finishing first.
I wonder if I looked at the SM100 as n almost "super feat" and thus just threw everything at it, expecting to suffer to no end. I contrast, the regular ride, is just that, "regular" ride, and thus when at the end of the first loop I feel some fatigue, I expect myself to do the "regular" thing, and stop...

Must work on not stopping! After all, 12-16 mile long "training rides" would not help me much at those darn hundies next year... :-)

SM100

So this was my do or die 100-miler debut.

I was meeting some friends at the race, who went down on Friday. I pulled into the camp site about 5:30 PM, set up my tent, registered, got some food, dropped my drop bag, and settled in for the evening of pre-race jitters. :-)

My goal for the race was to finish. The longer single day ride I've done before the SM was about 75 miles long, and did not have a fraction of climbing we were facing in the race. So needless to say, I was nervous.

The morning of the race, we happily started at the back of the main group, knowing that we would pace ourselves and weren't gunning for the top honors.
However, as we turned off the paved roads into the first jeep road climbs, my buddy and I started picking the spots up. It's always entertaining to me to watch people on the geared bikes spinning granny gear up the hills. I know I'm not that strong and not stronger than the other riders, so I attribute the fact that I'm climbing faster up the hill in a harder gear on my SS than they do on geared bikes, to the black magic of SS.

At the top as we turned into the first section of singletrack, that's where our strategy of starting at the back came to bite us, as we were bogged down by riders who didn't seem to be used to and comfortable with out East Coast rocky terrain.

Luckily, the field was spreading out nicely and before we knew it we were cruising.

I must give big credit to the organizers as the course was just about perfect for a long race. There was plenty of climbing, but the climbs weren't such that they would stop us dead in our tracks and beat us up such that we wouldn't be able to ride past 20-30 mile mark. Flats were good for recovery. Singletrack sections were plentiful and absolutely a blast. Some of the best, funnest (yeah, if that's a word) prettiest singletrack I've seen. The down hills were fast and technical. I'm not the fastest down hiller by any means, and riding fully rigid bike, even tho it's a 29er doesn't help. Tho, I have to admit, it's not the bike that is really limiting the speed, but the rider. My buddy on his rigid 29er was opening a gap on my on every down hill.

I was expecting to barely claw my way to the finish, dragging my lifeless carcass by the sheer will power. In reality, I actually didn't feel half bad thru the race. I must've been better mentally prepared and definitely paid more attention and stayed on top of proper hydration and replenishment of the calories burnt.

Few interesting realizations that came to us during the race. We were looking forward to 50 mile mark as some magic mile stone after which it will be all easier and we would be home free. Despite that mile 50 for us was 6 hours into the ride and we had another 50 to go, and 50 is a darn long way!!! Then we were closing on aid station 5 at mile 75, like it was god sent, and after it, we had "ONLY" 25 miles left... Ha, my normal rides are about 16-17 miles long, and here I was looking at "only" 25 miles, AFTER riding for 75 already, and in these "just" 25 I would have to climb more than I usually do on any of my normal rides...
But still, mind is a funny thing, and it definitely helped a lot to look and think about it that way, "only" 25 left. At aid station 6, mile 88, we had "just mere" 12 left, that's child's play!!! We are home free!!! :-)
At station 6 we were told that if we really push we might be able to finish in the day light without using the lights! So that became our motivation and goal, and it worked out perfectly!

So I completed my first SS hundie. The longest one day SS or otherwise ride I have ever done! I loved every second of it. I'm hooked and will come back for more, much more next year.

PS One observation I made after the race was that to my surprise, during the race I did not think once about pulling out or not finishing. I was very happy about that.

History

A week ago, yes it did take this long to get around to write about it, I completed my first 100-miler. In the spring of this year I had some visions of grander of doing two of them, Wilderness 101 and Shenandoah Mountain 100. But when the time came to sign up for Wild101, I chickened out.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is supposed to be a bit of the history of how I got here. Back in '99 I rediscovered biking, more specifically, mountain biking. I haven't been on the bike since I was a kid, but just one ride had me completely re-hooked, is that a word? I went and bought my first "real" mountain bike and proceeded to ride it fairly regularly for the next 6 years.

However, just like all of us, I had a severe case of upgradatitis! And by '04, after having replaced every component on my bike except for the frame, I was itching for a new bike. I had my mind firmly set on Santa Cruz SuperLight. However, such and upgrade wasn't in my budget at the time. In retrospect, I'm glad it wasn't.

In '05 a friend of mine got a Surly Karate Monkey. And started talking about all the single speeding stuff. I was curious and one day in the fall I went out for a ride, put my gears into 32X15 and didn't touch the shifters for the entire hour or so that I rode that night. I've seen the light!!! Within a week that 1X9 was converted to SS (I got really lucky, because the magic gear on that bike was 32X16, no tensioner needed!) And started researching proper SS bikes.

Within a month or so of reading all the reviews and information I could get my hands on about SS, I came to the conclusion that since I'm going SS, I might as well, and should, go all the way and get myself a fully rigid 29er SS! A little detour from FS 26er geared, don't you say? A little more research and I had placed the order for On One Inbred frame and fork. While waiting for it, I started putting together the components. Finally, in early July of '06 I had my bike together in all it's glory.

However, before I got that bike I got talked into doing 12 hours of Allamuchy. For which I was still riding my old converted Trek. We were going to do it a two man team, but my buddy came down with a bad case of flu or something less than 48 hours before the race, and it was too late to pull out without loosing the entry fee. The only viable option I had was either to find a new partner in crime (didn't happen) or change our entry to a solo ride! Which I did. That was probably the hardest ride of my life! Despite the fact that I did 8 laps, "only" 56 miles, half of SM100! The entire ride was in the rain, mud galore!

And I was not prepared at all, neither mentally, nor physically, nor with nutrition. I was completely spent!!! But I also LOVED it!!! And since then was thinking about what other endurance races I could do.

Thus I was coming into '07 with plans of doing many endurance races. As it turned out I would do only one... SM100. I did attempt to do Stoopid 50 in State College PA, but had to pull out half way thru with a major mechanical.