Tangential Adventures

I’m sitting here posting this in the warm and cozy indoors while it’s gray and freezing rain conditions outside.  I took my last night ride of the year last night at Russell Mill, which was unusually free of snow for this time of year, and fast due to the hard packed frozen ground.  2011 was a difficult year on a personal level for a lot of reasons.  However, despite that, it was hands-down the best year of mountain biking I’ve had.  Perhaps not coincidentally, it also was my tenth year of riding.

For much of the spring, summer and early fall, I rode three days a week with the Merrimack Valley chapter of the New England Mountain Biking Association.   Tuesday nights at Lowell-Dracut, Friday nights at Russell Mill & Great Brook Farm, and Sundays at a variety of places in New England.  I took my first trip to Highland Mountain Bike Park in NH, and also was part of a group trip up to the Kingdom Trails in VT.

I started using EveryTrail fairly early in the season, tracking many (but not all) of my rides with the GPS receiver in my smart phone.  According to their statistics, I recorded 59 trips and covered 722.7 miles as of 12/31.  I estimate that the GPS mileage is probably low by a small percentage since it cuts off corners, especially in tightly packed trails.     I also know I didn’t track several rides, or had problems with losing tracks on some of them.

Applying some conservative fudge factor adjustments, I’m estimating I rode over 800 miles in 2011.

I am fairly sure I didn’t manage to break 1000 miles like I had been vaguely aiming for, but 800 miles of dirt is still a lot in my book.  It’s way more than I’ve ever ridden in one season before.

So, I leave you with two bookends for the season.

A simple video of a studded tire ride at Lowell-Dracut that I shot on my cell phone back in January:

…and a more polished video that I shot on a GoPro camera, from our epic Kingdom Trails trip that we took in the fall:

Can’t wait to turn the cranks in 2012.

On Sunday I finally got to check out Highland Mountain Bike Park in Northfield, NH.  Highland is an old ski mountain that has been converted to an awesome, lift-assisted, mountain bike playground.  The hill has a good selection of trails, each with a variety of drops, step-ups, tabletops, berms, gnarly sections, etc.

I opted to rent full armor (knee/shin guards, elbow/forearm guards, chest/shoulder/spine protection, and a full-face helmet).  I had been considering renting a plush bike more suited to the terrain, but I decided to give it a whirl on my Mojo.  My bike did everything I asked of it (and seemed to be begging for more), so I was definitely the limiting factor there!

My first couple of runs were quite tentative, but once I got a little more comfortable I really started having fun trying to rail down some of the faster, bermed out flowy trails.  I played a bit on some of the drops and tried to get the hang of the tabletops and step ups, but I’m still lacking skill and confidence on those.  My fun-o-meter was pegged into redline most of the day.

I brought along my new GoPro Hero HD camera, trying to get some footage to put together since I enjoy making videos.  Unfortunately, I’m still learning the proper angles to set up for the chest mount, and most of the footage I got is a little low-looking.  Still, it gives a sense of the place and what the trails are like.  Highly recommended – I can’t wait to go back!

Because this discussion on sports nutrition is probably about as exciting as that guy at work telling you how many reps he did at the gym yesterday, I’ll be kind and bury it behind a cut tag.

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I am still alive despite a bit of life upheaval, and while I haven’t been doing any serious adventure travelling, I have been doing a ton of mountain biking. Since early May I’ve been typically riding three times per week, with the Merrimack Valley NEMBA chapter, on their group rides. I’m riding further, faster, more competently, and over more challenging terrain than I ever have before. Part of this is the new bike that I got back in the fall, both because it’s much better suited to the all-mountain type of riding this group likes to do, and also because it’s just so damn much fun to ride that it makes me want to ride it more and more. The bike seemingly begs to be ridden harder and more aggressively, and rewards you for doing so.

In the last couple of months I’ve been digging into a great book, Mastering Mountain Bike Skills (2nd ed.). This is my tenth year of seriously mountain biking, and while I knew I wasn’t awesome, I thought I was at least OK. I have to say reading this book made me feel like a rank amateur. I’ve barely absorbed half a percent of what it has to offer, but everything I thought I knew from bike setup to riding technique is challenged by what I’ve read. For every little thing I manage to learn and carry out in my riding, I’ve felt a big increase in the quality of my riding and the fun level. Last night I was even complemented a couple of times by one of the better riders in our group for “ripping” through some of the corners on one of the twistier, hilly bits of trail on our ride. I can only liken the feeling to the moment when linking turns on a snowboard finally clicked for me and I gained some confidence at it. It’s fun, and it just makes me want to do it more and more.

To keep pace with the amount and level of riding, I’ve been tinkering with my nutrition/hydration regimen. That discussion got long enough that I’ll separate it out to its own post.

I’ve been tracking my rides since the end of May using EveryTrail. There is an app which runs on my Android phone and captures GPS tracks, and then conveniently lets me post the trip all from my phone. It’s not necessarily the best or most accurate or most private way to do things, but it’s certainly convenient. In particular, GPS receivers are pretty bad at accurately tracking tightly packed singletrack trails, and tend to cut off corners and reduce the reported mileage. However, it’s still a useful tool to track rides week to week.

This biking season has been a lot of fun so far. I’ve ridden at several places that I’d never managed to get to before, like Yudicky, Harold Parker, Lynn Woods and Fort Rock. In addition, I’m really starting to feel like Lowell-Dracut-Tyngsboro and Russell Mill are getting to be homes away from home.

And it always brings back lots of memories to spin through Great Brook Farm as part of the Friday Russell Mill ride, since I rode there so much in the 2003-2009 time frame. I can still vividly remember the spots where I used to be exhausted, or couldn’t clear an obstacle, or crashed hard. It puts things in perspective to ride that same terrain, years later, with new skills and see that I have actually made some progress. And that’s what it’s all about, right?

I’m on

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Here’s a video I put together using all of the miscellaneous video footage we shot with the point and shoots on the trip.  It’s set to a couple of pieces of music that I recorded collaboratively with two different friends, the second of which making its world premier.

We woke up in Eugene and packed up quickly to get on the road for our final day.  After checking out, we set our sights on the Full City Coffee Roasters and bakery downtown for a little morning sustenance.  With muffins, coffee and chai in hand, we hit the road following Route 126 out to the coast.  The weather was misty and overcast, and it was nice to see the landscape change to more green colors than we had seen in the trip so far.

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On Thursday morning, we woke up in daylight with greatly reduced winds.  Jocelyn took a trip out of the tent around 7AM with some wishful thinking that there might be a view, but no such luck.  After a bit, we fell back asleep for a while and I woke up around 8:30.  Because we happened to have cellular data service at our particular spot and I was comfortable in my sleeping bag, I decided to check the Crater Lake web cams to see if there was a view.  Indeed, it looked like you could just barely make out the lake below, so I woke Jocelyn up and we went to check out the view.  Sadly, it was still quite limited, but it was good enough to make out the edges of Wizard Island.

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Wednesday morning was our final day in Bend, leaving the next few days for us to find our own adventure.  After our final breakfast of steel cut oats prepared by Sarah, we gathered all of our things and packed the car.

Our plan was to make our way down to Crater Lake to do a night or two of backcountry snowshoe backpacking and camping in the snow.  We left Bend around 9:15 and made decent time as we headed south on 97.  Since the north entrance of Crater Lake National Park is closed in winter, we had no choice but to continue to the southern entrance.

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Everyone was up early on Tuesday, with visions of fresh powder in our heads.  The snow at Mt. Bachelor had continued overnight, and we wanted to get to the mountain early to catch the freshies. I had been woken up with the news from back home that the server that hosts this site plus many others had crashed, and I groggily tried to help out with the logistics for someone to get into my house to fix it while getting ready to head to the mountain.

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With high winds and cold temperatures predicted for Monday, we were not in a huge rush to get to the mountain.  I found a local shop in town to rent me a better snowboard (a Ride 165 Wide), at half the rate at the mountain.  We also grabbed wraps and drinks at Devore’s market, so we wouldn’t have to subject our stomachs to mountain food again.

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