Taking Care Of Myself

It's been a hard week of spending bike money, and this blog doesn't even tell the whole story. If anyone deserves a beer, it would be me. I couldn't afford to wait for someone else to recognize this fact, let alone have the ambition to act on their sense of compassion. That could have been a very long wait, as in hundreds of years, and I'm generally not that patient. And that, therefore, is why I took matters into my own hands.

Better

Please don't turn this into a race thing, especially just in front of the election. It's a pure bike thing, in a vacuum, and that's how you should look at it. (I know that's asking a lot, considering how well I know you and your adversarial and highly-political nature.)

But honestly, I'm pretty radically opposed to fostering the excessive use of black as a dominant bike theme. I was, at one point, but now I'm not. Everyone has to go through the stealth phase I suppose. I know I did. And I have those two bikes that I will have to live with for a long time, to remind me.

These days though, my psychological backlash calls for COLOR. There's plenty of inherent and unavoidable black in every bike (and I mean that in the most respectful way) and black is a fantastic complementary partner to any scheme, but let's not get carried away. (Or maybe you should be preaching that line to me, since I seem to be going off the bling deep end these past few months.)

Jeez. I've gotten way off track.

The stock forks have offended my highly-tuned aesthetic sensibilities since day one. And now they do not. That is all.

A Great Day

Bikewise, at least.

Bulking Up For Winter

I never thought I'd live to see the day that I'd be telling you that Eric's gotten fat. It has always just seemed so impossible.

But ever since our tour across Washington on the John Wayne Pioneer Trail last June, he has had a slightly different purpose in his gaze. He stopped by my house tonight packing a few extra pounds . . . in the form of his new Salsa Mukluk 3. I wasn't home from work yet, so there are no pictures, but Patty saw it with her own eyes and has provided her unimpeachable testimony. It looks just like this:

Eric bought his new bike from Steve, who, as an unfortunate victim of mother nature, brought in both a Muk 2 and a Muk 3 last fall, just prior to our snowless winter. Damn. But on the other side of the coin, positive fortune for Eric, who was able to help Steve clear out old stock at a discount.

Apparently, then, the whole world has gone stark-raving mad with this fatbike nonsense.

(I don't know for sure, but Steve may possibly still have the Muk 2 around, for any local lunatics out there that may care to attend the monster's ball.)

Sunday Last, First Person, Realtime

The big-ass van shows up just before eight. The driver remains seated, calmly idling, while every other door explodes outward. My riding-pals-turned-soigneurs burst out of the van and grab my bike and all my krap and huck it through the gaping rear-facing entry and into the cavernous cargo hold.  I frantically pull on one riding shoe, take the last hit of lukewarm java and then one-legged-hop out to the sidewalk with the second shoe in one hand and the last bite of banana in the other.  It's every bit as surreal as it sounds.

The growler's just for show. No beer is consumed in the making of this adventure.

We make one more stop, during which I join the growing legion of soigneurs, and within seconds, we're back on the road. Within minutes, we're entering Riverside State Park.  It's every bit as rad as it sounds.

The man with the van has a plan. I don't know it right now, but this is where we'll be riding.

I stop to admire the sight of my buddies admiring the fogged-in hills from which we have just emerged. These guys don't stop much, so I gotta snap fast when the opportunity presents itself.

Ponderance.

I survey Joe's 29er Elephant hardtail and once again conclude that it rules.

I witness Joe and said Elephant on the trail.

"For an area that's supposed to be so damned flat, there's sure a buttload of climbing", I think to myself, repeatedly, during the buttload of climbing.

The payoff is the view from atop Pine Bluff. Joe, John, Glen and Justin, L-R.

I hear someone call me a pornographer. It doesn't bother me at all.

Well, maybe just a little. I take one bikeless shot, just to validate that I am not.

I arrive back at the van sopping wet from my own sweat, with snot dripping from my nose, mud splattered all over my face, and a set of seared lungs. I anxiously wonder how soon I will be able to get back out here and do this again.

Righting An Egregious Wrong

Or 'how I spent my Sunday night'. Whatever, call it what you want. Bottom line is, it's an aesthetic mess I've been needing to deal with for a long time, and that has now been pretty much dealt with.

Full details to follow, in due time. Unless I decide that, given yours and my historically contentious relationship, you don't ever need to know.

I don't think that will happen, though. In fact, I'm sorry. I don't even know where that bit of attitude came from. Maybe the fact the Glen drug me up several brutal climbs this morning during which the lack of oxygen to my brain for an extended period of time fried all my goodwill-toward-my-fellow-man sentiment.

Anyway, the fork belongs to this wheel. When the wheel gets back together with the fork, everything will look prettier and my world will be a better place and I hope to be able to share my joy with you, genuinely,  as my blood-oxygen level will be back to a more reasonable level.

Acquainting Myself

Now that I have a proper mountain bike, I'm super motivated to get to know some of the local stomping grounds a little better. At the top of my list right now is Riverside State Park, an area that I really haven't spent much time at, and therefore don't know well at all. It's a big enough area that it can be kind of intimidating, and so I've come up with a plan for us to get acquainted with each other.

The first thing, of course, is to get out there as much as possible. But you also want to make the trips productive.  There are trips out with other riders that know the area, and these are great because you don't have to spend time sitting around scratching your head, wondering where you're at and you get to see a lot of terrain and people point out different things and use names for different sections, etc.

But I think some solo time is also important, because sometimes you need to slow down and figure out where you're at and yes, even get lost.  It forces you to connect the dots and gives you a greater depth of understanding of the terrain.

In addition to wanting to learn the lay of the land in general, I am totally fired up to the do the 24 Hour Race next Memorial Day Weekend, and so I also intend to learn that course like the back of my hand.  So I've decided that I'll take the course in sections and get familiar with each part of it, and the trails surrounding it.  That'll form the "backbone" and give me some context from which I can branch out.

Today I had a couple of free hours and worked the solo part of the plan. I was able to pull a gpx track of the 24 Hour Course off the internet and load it on my gps, which was a great help.

I basically rode the section of the course from the start/finish line up to Inland Road. I also wanted to check out the new trail that runs between 7-mile road and the top of 5-minute hill, along with the new connector trail between Inland Road and Pine Bluff Road, so I headed out Inland Road, past the ORV park, and hit those trails on the way back.  I'd been on most of this on last week's ride with Dan, Eric and Chris, but I didn't really know where I was or what I was looking at.  Now I get it.

This is the new trail, heading south, just as it is about to drop off the ridge and descend down to tie into 5-minute hill.

This is the actual descent down. This part of the trail is very well built and all swoopy and super sweet.

That's the new trail on the left, just as it spits you out onto 5-minute hill.

This is the connector, peeling off Inland Road and heading down to Pine Bluff Road.  Dave Nelson was out just yesterday working on the trail to open it up and make it more visible from the road, thus the fresh-looking cut. The stop sign in the distance is 7-Mile Road.

All in all, the solo ride today, combined with last weekend's ride with Eric, Dan and Chris, combined with the ride 2 weekends ago with John and Glen are all starting to add up to a very basic understanding of a very small section of the park. I can hardly wait to do some more building on this meager foundation.