The last few days have been wonderful as the weather is perfect for every outdoor activity known to man including the Halloween ride/party at Thomson Trails. CGC also held the first of many winter bike league training rides Sunday afternoon, and I was relieved to find out/confirm with Dr. Wiley on Friday that I have tendinitis instead of something worse. Yep, it has been a good couple of days.
Diana and I met Dave and Carrie at Cracker Barrel Saturday morning for breakfast, and then headed out the Thomson to decorate the trail. I'm not sure who put the rotting corpse at the bottom of Dan's Bastard, but they need to go clean it up. Nice effect, but damn...................... just kidding. For some reason, I was pretty enthusiastic about Halloween this year, and Dave and I managed to rig some interesting noise makers in two spots on the trail. Nothing like cow bells ringing right next to you when you're not expecting it. Yep, I had a Halloween fever...........and the only prescription was more cow bell.......
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVbAuMr5eac
A few less people showed for the Halloween ride than years previous, but that's ok. We still had a great time, and it meant more beer and food for the rest of us.
Sunday was the first CGC Winter Bike League training ride and we had a pretty good size group show up to kick things off. I'd planned this first route to be a bit shorter than the upcoming rides so no-one was discouraged from coming back, and as a result several people commented that it could have been a few more miles in length. But, that's ok. We also did a tempo less than what I wanted to do, but we had a few people along for this first ride that were hurting early on so we eased up a bit. This particular route, Gently Rolling Farmland (insert Don Bill's evil grin here) had decent climbing at roughly 2,800 ft., with some into the wind, and that is were the "tempo" part of the ride comes into play. For the most part, we held things together very well and it was a good day on the bike.
The schedule gets more difficult from here on out as the routes increase in tempo and vertical ascent. We should be hitting 65-70 miles in under 3.5 hours before December gets here, but the vertical ascent will also be getting close to 3500 feet at the end. Anyone who has attempted to put a 100k route together for this area and tried to get over 3k ft. of vertical will know its pretty tough to do. The cool thing is that there is a lot of applications out there that allow you to experiment with routes. Putting the routes together takes a lot of time, but it also allows others to not have to worry about where they want to ride to get in some miles. The fun part for me is checking the weather channel and arranging the route to put the wind in our face for the last half or so of the ride. If I'm limited on hills to climb I might as well simulate a faster speed. And, its gonna get colder pretty soon. I'm sure we'll have a lot of these on CGC WBL rides:
The infamous "Snot Gun"
3 comments:
Judging by the lead-in photo, you've managed to sneak in more trail mods than I thought....
Next year we'll rig mousetraps on gun blanks. That should get a reaction!
Geez, I've only been gone a year! You went an paved Thomson and put up hand rails too?
...and a toll booth to pay for it all!
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