Two Wheel Blogs

Today was just one of those days when nearly everything was clicking for me. Wow, what a great feeling.

Late afternoon I loaded up my bike and headed over to Greensfelder park for what I figured would be a fairly challenging session on the trails. Last week was a wet one and Greensfelder's trails are very popular with the horse crowd. The horse people don't seem to mind destroying trails much. If you doubt that at all then I wish you'd been out there with me today.

The good news is, for the most part the trails were dry. So riding in the shredded center of the trails was not only a good trail practice, it was also great exercise.

In fact that's probably why I was so toasted in short order out there today. I know part of my (lack of) performance had to be due to yesterday's strength workout. I really hit it hard and I could really feel it out there today. The other reason was probably the extremely difficult trail surface.

Oh, and there are still plenty of wet spots out there. The ground is either dry and crusty from the recent warm and dry weather, or it's an eight-inch deep bog. How do I know its 8" deep? Easy. Because I had a couple of unscheduled dismounts in them. One was a hard turn at the bottom of a draw where my front wheel went sideways faster than it was going forward. The other was at a low spot in the trail just on the other side of a rise. My front wheel just sort of stopped. I didn't, not until the dismount was complete anyway.

And while I was off the bike I figured I might as well measure the depth of the muck. After all I was already standing in it.

I definitely had the flow going today though. Climbing, descending, whatever. I had one of those days where I just went ahead and picked the hard line because the hard line is, well, harder to ride. And I'd float it, a 10.0, even from the East German judge. For that, it was worth the pain of riding with sore muscles, the chewed up trail surface and getting coated in mud and horse poop.