The long rides begin...

No time for a real update with maps or photos or other exciting visuals - I need sleep. Yesterday I rode for a couple hours in an inch of fresh snow on the roads. Everything quickly became covered in a thick build-up of ice. Then I met Jim and Luke and headed north. Luke turned back in Hygiene, and Jim and I looped up through Carter Lake and battled a frustrating headwind back to Boulder. Then I headed east to Erie and spent some time on the roads out there in the dark. Grand total for Saturday: 8.75 hours riding, 150 miles.

Today Dan and I took the mountain bikes out and rode up to Heil, then Hall, and then back. It was a fantastic ride. I thought Dan was going to die because he kept talking about how his lungs were hurting (he's "getting over" being sick). I could hear his lungs complaining. But he didn't die, so that was nice. I spent a couple more hours out on the gravel trails east of town and then headed home. My legs were feeling pretty worked over by the end of today. Grand total for Sunday: 7.5 hours riding, ~90 miles.

Now for some sleep and a couple days of recovery. The legs are broken down, so now they'd better rebuild. And be stronger. Then there's more big weekends in store - Boulder-Steamboat-Boulder, White Rim/Moab weekend, a certain long race in Moab, and the list goes on...

Blasted by [reverse] bombogenesis

I went out for an easy ride this evening. I left at 5 when it was 46 deg at my house. I was looking forward to a warmer ride than I'd had the past few mornings when I was forced to head out early. Well, Mother Nature apparently wanted me to continue riding in the cold. Check out these weather data:

The temperature dropped 20 deg in less than 20 minutes! (And for any geeks out there who care, the pressure rose by 11 mb in 30 minutes.) It literally felt like I rode into a freezer when I turned off some pavement and onto a singletrack in Gunbarrel the change happened so abruptly. I've never experienced something like that. I convinced myself that it must have been a cold spot I was riding through, but climbing over Gunbarrel Hill, probably the most exposed spot east of town, I was being blasted by 30-40 mph wind gusts that made the left side of my face go numb. And a few minutes later I discovered my water had frozen.

This all would not have been a problem had I dressed for 20 deg weather, but light gloves, no booties, no warm jacket, and only shorts and legwarmers meant the last 90 minutes of my ride were pretty, uh, painful. I found a Smartwool glove on the trail at one point, stopped, and put it on my left hand. At least I'd have one slightly comfortable hand for the rest of the ride. Never before have I put on items of clothing I found when on a ride.

Well, I'm warm now, but my fingers and toes are still sore. Hopefully it'll be nicer the next couple days, because there are a couple of 7-8 hour rides in store...

Dreaming of the Cochetopa Hills

After 4 days of travel this past weekend, I'm struggling to keep up with everything that needs to get done at school right now, so that's my excuse for no new posts. I spent Thursday and Friday morning out in Aspen. I had been invited out there to give a talk on rock glaciers at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, and the audience that came out was great. The center there is a neat place, nestled in the middle of town on some wetlands that somehow survived the mining and development throughout the valley. I can't say I liked the town itself terribly much. I was happy to be on the road out of town on Friday morning.

From there I drove northwest, then east, and then way south to Saguache for a relaxing small-town weekend. Maggie and I did a little hiking and spent some time planning out what she's going to do with her greenhouse. It's impressively large, and it just needs a few roof repairs, some rabbit fencing, and some ventilation for the hot summer temperatures and it'll be set to go. Maggie is very excited and is going to have an enormous veggie haul if everything works out as planned (which is always the case when gardening, right?).

While in Saguache I took the new bike out for a couple 5+ hour rides, exploring some new jeep trails in the Cochetopa Hills. I didn't bring the camera on Saturday, but I rode up a slightly snowy gulch to a low pass just over 9000', descended into Cabin Gulch on the other side, and found my route under 2' of powder. With the sun was about to set, I hiked back up to the pass and just rode out the way I had climbed up. That was the first long descent I took on the new bike, and while it's not as cushy as I'm used to, it sure rolled down with a commanding feel.

On Sunday afternoon I explored a couple trails just a few miles outside of town that went back into some beautiful country.


The big wheels just rolled over all the rocks on this steep climb. This bike climbs like a tank, but in a good way. Even without tubeless tires, the traction is amazing, and I'm just runing Nanoraptors right now.


Saguache is the little tree-filled hollow behind the small hills in the middle ground.


The Poison Day Loop was much snowier than the first gulch. There was a lot of push-ride-push-ride-push-ride going on. Eventually it turned into just pushing for the last couple miles of the climb. And the first half mile of the descent down the other side.

Somewhere under there is the jeep trail.

So it was another great weekend. Monday was a rest day, though it involved a few hours of hiking with the field geology course. Yesterday the winds were gusting to >50 mph for the entire day, so I didn't bother venturing out on the bike. That meant today I had to ride before 9am, so I somehow convinced Alex to get up and head up to the OHV park for a little TT on my new course there. The trail was a little snowy, but otherwise in good shape. My legs felt great, and the Salsa just rocked the climb. I was able to ride everything without even struggling except for the one hike-a-bike section. Usually I screw up, lose traction, and have to put a foot down or dismount a few times, but not with the new bike. I clocked 35 min with an average heart rate of 183. That's 2 minutes faster than last time, so it was a good morning. Alex came in a few minutes later and then proceeded to flat on the descent. I pushed the new bike pretty hard on the descent, and except for wanting a little more aggressively-lugged tires, the bike handled everything amazingly well.

That's all for now...time for some sleep. It's been a long day.

Oh boy!

I'm not sure how I'm going to sleep tonight. I came home with 2 boxes of goodies from SRAM today...


So I quickly got to work building up my newest friend. I took it out for a quick spin around 10:30 tonight, and it feels fantastic. The cockpit still needs some adjustment (hence all the headset spacers stacked above the stem), and the brake cables could be shortened up a bit. But other than that, everything is as it was intended to be! Although hopefully I'll find some money to pick up a set of Stans rims to build up for a tubeless setup...




Thanks to White Brothers, Ergon, SRAM, and University Bikes of Boulder for helping me out with all the parts!

Tomorrow I'm off to Aspen to give a talk at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, and then on Friday I'm taking the long way around the Elk Mtns/Sawatch Range to spend the weekend in chilly Saguache. I might even give this bike a taste of what's in its future by taking it on part of the Great Divide Route.

Beautiful weekend rides

This weekend brought a couple of fantastic rides. Yesterday Mr. Dan Dunbar and I headed down to JeffCo to ride the trails in the hills above Golden. Amazingly, I had never explored this trail system before, and that's a sad thing, because I had a great time. We rode White Ranch, then up Chimney Gulch to the top of Lookout Mtn, down Apex, through Red Rocks, up Mt. Falcon, down to Bear Creek park, around there, and then back to the car near I70. Almost 7 hours of riding, ~50 miles, and a bit shy of 10,000' of climbing. Dan was crushing the climbs on his singlespeed, and I was fighting with my bike most of the day (shocks slowly losing air and one busted pedal).

The profile, courtesy of Dan's Garmin:


Today I hopped on the old road bike and headed off with a group of friends for some easy miles on the pavement. My old road bike has been beneath me for something in the realm of 30,000 miles, so we're great friends. Now why is it that a 10-year-old steel road bike gets comments like, "Ooh, a blast from the past. Nice!", whereas my equally old mountain bike draws crooked looks and a condescending attitude from others? It's a strange contrast.

Anyway, we rode 36 to Lyons, where the group split off in a few different directions. Willa, Jim, Jeff, and I went up to Ralph Price Res. My body felt like it never really awoke from last night's slumber, so I wasn't feeling too ambitious about the day. But some mocha from the coffe shop in Lyons helped, and after a couple hours, I headed off on my own. My old road bike is always on the lookout for dirt. "Hey, dirt...dirt...I know there's some dirt up that way" it says. I obliged and took it to some phenomenal 1-lane dirt roads in the hills north of Lyons. My legs started to come around, and by 4 hours, I was feeling great. We took the dirt roads back to Niwot, and dirt trails back to Boulder. After 6 hours of riding, we rolled back into my neighborhood with the legs still feeling relatively fresh - an encouraging end to a long weekend.

Today's route:

A nice little TT course

A word of caution: Just because you have a fancy carbon road bike, Campy Record, and Ritchey carbon wheels, you might not want to challenge the guy on the 10-year-old tank of a mountain bike when climbing up Olde Stage Road. He might just be warming up for a time trial effort, and your ego will probably get bruised.


This is my latest TT course...a good one for testing the fitness. 3.1 miles, 1950' vertical, average grade of 12%, max grade of 36%, and short section of mandatory running. No, this isn't on the road. It's a steep, loose, rocky, sometimes icy/snowy jeep trail, and it's fantastic.

I gave it a go yesterday as the light was waning and made it to the top in 37 minutes. There's definite room for improvement, but you have to be careful not to blow yourself up on the early switchbacks, because there's still almost 30 minutes of climbing beyond them.

After descending back down, I rode some singletrack on the plains in the dark and enjoyed the bright moon that was already high in the sky.

In like a lion, out like a lamb that can't quite walk yet

My ride today was the toughest of the year so far, and also the toughest I've done in quite a long time. I set off alone to experiment with my first intensity of the year, in the form of a long, steady tempo effort in zone 3 (~150-160 bpm heart rate for me). I headed north up 36 to Lyons, east a bit, north to Loveland and Masonville, and then started looping back. After a 30-minute warm-up, I settled into the effort and felt pretty good. An hour later I was still feeling good. I was planning on doing between 1.5 and 2 hours depending on how I felt, but 2 hours passed and I was still chugging along at the same speed. I had a cross-head wind almost the entire way north, but the wind shifted and picked up shortly before I turned back south. So heading back south, I still was pushing into the wind. Nearing the 2.5-hour mark, I could feel my power output was starting to drop noticeably, so I called it quits and planned to pedal home at an easy pace (i.e., very slowly into the wind).

Well, after no more than 5 minutes of easy, my legs decided it was time to shut down. I had taken in more than 600 calories during the last hour of my tempo effort, so it wasn't that I failed to get energy back into the system. Apparently that's as long as my legs can handle that level of effort right now. I've done very little tempo work through the years, which means I don't really know exaclty how my body will respond. So I learned something today, which is always nice. If I had a coach, they'd probably have told me this would happen, but that's just not in the financial cards.

Unfortunately, I was still north of Carter Lake, so that meant another 40 miles of riding. And I needed water from the spiggot at the boat launch, so I suffered up the steep climb, filled up the bottles, and slowly made my way home, cursing the wind most of the way until it died when I got close to Boulder. Usually on rides more than ~4 hours, autopilot kicks in and my body just does its thing and my mind is free to wander, but that didn't happen today - it was a labored chore almost the entire ride. I rolled in just after the sun dropped behind the hills for a total ride time of 5.5 hours (and only 10 minutes of down time, which is good for me!) and close to 100 miles.

That's my story. Sorry, no pictures today. My pockets were full of food and warmer clothes. All food was eaten and all the warm stuff was put on. I wished I had had more of both. No riding tomorrow, but I'll be hiking around on Mt. Sanitas all day with the field geology class I'm helping teach.