My cycling journal
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Thirty-six hours before I was to board my flight to Colorado to race the Leadville 100 I was riding peacefully in my backyard canyon, trying to keep my legs loose. That’s when I felt a terrible “ker-chunck!” from somewhere and felt my bike sag depressingly towards the ground. Shiny metal fragments flew off my [...]
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Standing in front of the Leadville Courthouse at 5:54pm on August 15th, it occurred to me that for the first time in a long while, I had nothing to do. I did need a shower pretty badly, but besides that, my schedule was completely empty. Wow, what a strange feeling…
I started preparing for [...]
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If you ride a mountain bike with any regularity, you already know what this is about. If not, you may be surprised to learn that you are going to crash if you ride a mountain bike, so just expect it.
Sometimes crashing happens in predictable ways. Like, you know you shouldn’t have bombed that [...]
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After spending the 35 minutes it takes to climb Middle Peak in Cuyamaca, you are presented with a choice. You can either continue down the back of Middle Peak via the well cleared fire road, or you can take an improbable left and take what we call, The Shortcut.
Yesterday, I was following Mark and [...]
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Mark has a creak in his suspension and it’s really bugging me. Creak, creak, creak. I make a face without looking back and all of a sudden a quarter cup of sweat comes out from under my helmet – where’d that come from?
Creak, creak, creak.
I’m turning the pedals over one-by-one, just focusing on [...]
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The Straight Poop…
I’m flying down a rocky fire road, going like a bat out of hell trying to catch Mark. I’m maybe 20 feet off his wheel, looking for a place to pass and his dust is choking me. I think about the amount of horse poop I’ve seen that day and I [...]
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Splashing through a creek, I looked over my shoulder to see how far back Virtual-Arlyn was. My Garmin said he was just 52 feet behind me and coming fast. I was racing a virtual version of myself, using a feature of my Garmin GPS that lets me race a previously recorded workout.
Around the next bend, [...]
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The first time Mark’s chain broke, we laughed and joked around while we fixed it. We were enjoying pristine weather on a beautiful desert loop which will be part of the Julian Death March next month.
It was a beautiful morning to be riding my orange bike.
Stopping to adjust Mark’s front derailleur took awhile, but was [...]
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It felt like we were descending into the darkest depths of middle earth. I fully expected to pass sea-level at any moment. We started the morning in 34 degree sunshine, freezing but happy to be riding. Descending more than 2,000 feet, we passed through the cloud layer we once looked down on, into a gloomy [...]
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