Spring

There's nothing like blasting down a challenging descent, crashing, laughing as you watch your bike chase you down, hopping back on, and regaining that beautiful descending rhythm immediately.



Spring time in the hills is a wonderful thing.

Desert gravel grinding

It's always fun to change things up and head somewhere different for a weekend of racing and riding - new courses, new terrain, new vistas, new challenges, and in this case, an entirely new group of riders to meet and befriend. Caroline and I headed down to the state below us for the first event of the New Mexico Endurance Series, the San Ysidro Dirty Century. The name is a bit of a misnomer, since there are 80, 90, and 123-mile options. We opted for the long one, which was about 100 miles of dirt road of variable quality (including some of those eternally frustrating gas line roads that stretch as far as the eye can see and across every drainage between wherever you are at the time and the distant horizon) and 20ish miles of fun singletrack in the White Mesa trail system.

All photos below are by Caroline, since I went light and didn't carry my camera. There was the unfamiliar option of dropping food/water at a point the race passed 3 times. Somehow between the food I started with, ate, and then took from this location on my last pass (whatever was left was to be thrown away), I finished with more calories than what I had at the start of the race. That means (1) I definitely had trouble taking in calories, and (2) I need some practice with non-self-supported races. Hmm.

7 am start and a balmy (apparently compared to last year) 40 degrees

Dirt roads and big vistas

White Mesa singletrack!

Mount Cabezon was circumnavigated on the second loop

I found myself in the company of Dan Durland and Aaron Gulley at the front of the race early on, and Aaron kindly guided me through the many turns on the White Mesa trails. Soon after that, the course turned into a stiff headwind. I dropped into my aero bars and slowly rode away and spent the last 4 hours by my lonesome, only occasionally passing riders doing one of the shorter options. Caroline and I stopped to chat briefly, and she went on to become the first woman to finish the long course. My legs carried me back to town a bit over 8 hours after starting, missing my ambitious goal of a sub-8-hour time. I guess I'll blame that on having a headwind on the way out and part of the way back. Aaron came in just under 25 minutes later, and Dan followed another 20 minutes to put in an impressive singlespeed ride. And thanks to Lenny Goodell for organizing the event. I'll hopefully get a chance to return for one of the more technical NMES events this summer and spend some more time riding with this fun crowd.

Sunday was another beautiful day, so we headed north for an easy ride in the Jemez Mountains. Northern New Mexico has some astounding landscapes with a very low population density, so it's easy to find oneself in the middle of nowhere. I think that's one reason why I enjoyed this section of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route so much. It was good to be back...

Looking north across the Shining Stone Valley toward the snowy Brazos Ridge region

We climbed until we found snow, which was at 9500', and then turned around in time to make it back to the car by dark.

Ghostly volcanic rock features serve as a reminder that the Jemez Mountains are the intimidatingly massive result of some extensive eruptive activity.

Thus begins yet another cow standoff. I was victorious in this round.

Now I'm back in Boulder for a brief stay before returning to the desert, but this trip to Arizona involves more important things on the schedule than pedaling for a change. This time I'm trying to land a job since my career as a student is reaching its terminus. Queue the grown-up music in the background, whatever that might be.

Riding, writing, riding, sewing, riding

The hare-like year of 2011 continues full bore into Spring as the days grow pleasantly longer and warmer. Big adventures have sadly been kept to a minimum lately as things like structured training, dissertation writing, sewing projects, and job interviews have temporarily taken precedence. A few relatively unexciting photos are all I have to share for now.

Yet another blaze spooked Boulder County residents last week. It burned up the terrain surrounding on of my favorite trails in the area, which will sadly now be closed to public access by the USFS for an undetermined length of time for "rehabilitation." The fire wasn't hot enough to crown, so most of the pines are still green.


My Spearfish can now easily carry 70L of water and assorted other goodies in it's snazzy new framebag. The rear shock and frame design made attachment a bit challenging, but I think this approach should work. I actually took some photos at various steps in the creation process, so if anyone is interested in the do-it-yourself approach, I could post some step-by-step instructions for what I did. Keep in mind that I have never sewn anything besides fleece mittens and two frame bags, so I don't necessarily know what I'm doing.


A second chapter of my dissertation almost completed...


...and a third chapter follows right on its heels. Apparently my version MS Word doesn't approve of French.


Both these chapters are on what these exceptionally unique carbonate features on Baffin Island tell us about conditions beneath the Laurentide Ice Sheet when it was at its greatest extent 20,000 years ago. Very few other geological archives contain such information, and the validation of numerical ice sheet models require this kind of data.

Greasewood Flats and beyond

The past few weeks have been absolutely jam-packed with work, training, and more work. There hasn't been time for much else. I've got 10 spare minutes now before heading to a PT appointment for some more work on the ankle I injured in Sedona six weeks ago (it's getting better, but very slowly, but the most painful part of the injury has still not been diagnosed!).

Days on the bike have been including more intensity than the past few months...intervals, long and steady tempo efforts, and moderately hard climbing workouts. I've gotten back to 'time trialing' a few of my favorite climbs around the area, and the results are pretty impressive, with my times only lagging my times from a couple years ago by a couple minutes for 35-minute efforts, and I'm now doing these on a mountain bike instead of a road bike.


Last weekend I met up with these guys (and a bunch of others at the start of the ride, as well as Topeak-Ergon riders Jeff, from whom I stole this photo, and Yuki who is hiding from the camera) for a climbing fest. We logged 10,000+ feet in 5.5 hours of riding, and I think it's safe to say that everyone was shelled by the end of the day.


Yesterday I checked off two objectives on my list of rides I've wanted to do for the past couple years. One was to ride so far east that the mountains disappear from the horizon before turning around and riding home, and the other was to check out a desolate region of northeastern Colorado that only has a couple dirt roads cutting through several hundred square miles of land. I proposed the 180-mile ride to Caroline, and after mulling it over, she ended up joining me.


The route was pretty damn beautiful for being entirely on the plains...lazy rivers, bald eagles, pronghorn antelope, very little traffic, and gravel roads stretching as far as they eye could see.


The ride ended up being 175 miles, with close to half of that on dirt. We managed to make it home just after dark, doing the whole thing in 11.5 hours riding time. That's just over 15 mph, on knobbies...I'm still surprised at that speed.


Yesterday, despite having legs that felt pretty good considering Saturday's ride, I had another challenge to face. I spent 12 solid hours cutting fabric, sewing, pondering, sewing, being confused, sewing some more, and finally, triumphing over my very own home-crafted frame bag. Now I just need the frame on which it is going to hang...