Brown County Breakdown

The Brown County Breakdown is just over two months away, and I'm already incredibly excited to be riding in it. The event is more of a ride than a race. There are 20,40,60,75, and 100 mile options available. I've ridden the trails in Brown County State Park a number of times since my brother lives only about a half hour from the trails. We've camped out at other places in the county, namely Valley Branch Retreat. Between BCSP, Valley Branch, Gnaw Bone Camp, and the national forest, Brown County has probably over 100 miles of trail, if not 150 or more. One of the coolest parts about this ride is that it contains tons of singletrack. Typically, in an event like this, there would be extensive amounts of time spent on gravel roads, but even for the 100 miler more than 90 percent of it is on singletrack. How sweet is that?!?!?!?

October, southern Indiana, mountain bikes, singletrack...excellence!

Painful Road Ride...

Laurent having entirely too much fun!


I woke up this morning about 4 AM to the new puppy whining, so I get up to let her out. I go to get some water and come back to the back deck to see her running frantically around the yard, chasing absolutely nothing and realize, well...this is probably the end of my sleep for the night if she is that hyper. In vain, I tried to take her back to bed, but to no avail, so I went ahead and stayed up.

I took the chance to get things set up for today's ride, get a good breakfast (oatmeal, raisins, brown sugar, berries and some good coffee), and play with the pup. I got suited up and headed on down to the shop.

Curtis showed up, and unfortunately had forgotten his clothes. I'm sure that he would have absolutely loved this ride too, it was right up his alley! The route was picked and we took off. We would be making our way to East Bend, which generally means a relatively hilly ride. Once we got to East Bend the group split into two. Slowly the faster group got split up further until we were pretty well strung out.

We came up Baltimore Road, across to Dinkins Bottom and then up Shallowford and Turbo Hill. Once we got to Turbo Hill the group split up even further. E-Rich, Scott, Cliff and myself all took off off the front. We were able to hold off the main pack all the way back to the shop. I'm sure that there were a few parts though that they could see us off in the distance just enough to be the carrot on the stick.

This ride had me hurting at the end, I was right at the threshold of cramping for a good portion, especially on the last few little climbs up Country Club. E-Rich, Scott and Cliff were all putting in strong efforts, we were able to manage over 20mph with stops included.

Highlight of the ride: Seeing a dog walk across the road with an entire cornstalk in his mouth, then proceed to pull the corn off the stalk and eat it off of the cob....priceless!

Erich and I pulling before the ride really started to ramp up...notice we have enough breath to actually make faces. Later in the ride our faces probably looked similar to that, only involuntarily...

Tomorrow, a welcome back from the honeymoon ride with Mitch and the crew! Woohoo!

Mount Rogers

Lisa and I and the dogs loaded up the Xterra to head to Mount Rogers for a camping trip. We've each got about a week left until we have to be back to school, and we hadn't really taken any vacations this summer...so, it was time! Once we got all unpacked and set up, in near record time, we headed up to Elk Garden for a short hike on the AT. Arwen has been recovering from a shoulder injury due to an extremely heated game of frisbee, so she'd not been on a walk in nearly a month. The trail was very pretty, tons of ferns and mosses in the undergrowth.
Arwen and Lorien on the AT


Day two, we decided to take the X up to an area called the Scales. The "road" to the scales is hardly a road. I had new tires installed earlier in the week and had been wanting to try them out off road. The X got muddied up on the way to the top.


The top of The Scales is used as a backcountry horse camp, and is surrounded by meadows filled with berry bushes.

We got the dogs set up and started out towards Massie Gap on the AT. After only about a mile, I happened to look up on the hill above us and see a bear come running kind of in our general direction. He slammed on the brakes, stood up to get a better look at us and became very indecisive. First he took off in one direction, then another, before finally settling on scurrying on in another. I was able to snap a very quick picture, the bear is in the left, kind of in front of one of the trees. It was the best I could do in the ten seconds or so that he was running around in front of us.


We met a guy coming the other way a few hundred yards later, he asked us if we saw the bear. He explained that he had scared it up and over the hill, so now we had the explanation why the bear was running frantically towards us at first. The rest of the trail was mostly open with lots of views like below...beautiful!


One the way back down from the Scales, we stopped at this little waterfall.

Once back in camp we made a feast of hot dogs, pretzels, the berries I picked, Gatorade and many other likely camp foods. The dogs were spent.

Lorien wrapped up in her sleeping bag, this dog is always cold!


A very fun trip, wish we could have spent more time up there!

Hot Road Ride!!

I knew that the forecast high for the day was going to be in the mid 90's so, I had to get out early if I didn't want to die...makes sense. I left the house about 7:45 or so, and headed out to do my regular mill ride out into yadkin county. About halfway out, I ran across another rider haning out on the side of the road. I slowed up to see if he needed any help, but he was just messing with some food in his pockets, all was well. he jumped on my wheel, and we ended up riding for about 20 miles together. I took him out past the old Butner Mill, we stopped ate a quick snack and headed on up the gravel road. Otis was a lot of fun to ride with, he had never been on gravel on his road bike, never past the mill, and was up for just hanging in with me and exploring a little bit. After the mill we headed back up to 67 towards East Bend. We split off once across the river back into Forsyth County. It was good to meet you Otis, if you end up checking the site!

After we split, I was feeling really good still so I decided to make the long climb up Donnaha and Spainhour Mill roads. The grade is pretty chill, not too often getting above 5 or 6 percent, but it's long and out in the sun for most of the way. It was starting to get extremely hot, the sun radiating from the pavement. After I made my way back through Tobaccoville, I decided to continue on and go towards Bethania. I cut off on a road that I hadn't been on before, but knew that it had some potential. I made the right onto Bowens Road and was greeted with lots of farm country, no cars, and lots of fun rollers. There is one nasty climb on Bowens that gets up to 12% for a decent little while...I already had about 45 miles in by this time, so it definitely hurt! After I got to Old Richmond, I decided it was time to head on back. I got in all in all about 50-55 miles in just under 3 hours. Pretty fast ride, hot, and fun!

As a flashback, I have to thank Van at Paceline for embarrassing me on Saturday. We were getting ready to head out for the AM ride, maybe about 30 riders. Van always has a pre-ride pep talk usually dealing with safety/route/having fun and the such. Saturday, though, he called attention to what he deemed, "the best dressed rider," and said that all riders should dress this way;

My face was probably exceptionally red...thanks Van!

Post 150!

Well, this is my 150th post, pretty incredible that I've had that much to write about when I look over the past year and a half.

I took Chris out last night for another short road ride. We decided since we only had about 45 minutes of daylight that we'd go really hard. We went out to a road called Killmurry Hill and did some sprintwork. It's fun to have some variety because typically I do not do those kind of rides, short and hard.

Motionbased is no longer accepting uploads from Garmin units, so I've been relegated to GarminConnect. Everything seems different when I upload the same ride to GC that I had on MB, it's kind of strange.

Lisa and I had planned on going camping over the next three days, but 97 degrees does not sound like much fun to be camping, so we've opted to do some work around the house, get my classroom ready over at the school, and just generally hang out on my last week off from school.

Oh, and by the way, the revolving door for bikes is getting more action at my house, the Superfly is up for sale on ebay...time for my next project...back to steel!

Ohio

Well, I know I had promised trying to blog while in Ohio, but alas, the only computer I had access to had an ailing hamster off his wheel. Microsoft DOS is strange, so was playing Dig Dug. Anyways, the trip was pretty eventful. If I had never been to Ohio before and was basing what I knew about Ohio on this one week, I might actually be impressed. The weather was unbelieveable (75 or so, low humidity and sunny), the trails were dry (an oddity), and there was plenty to do!

The first outdoor activity was taking the new pup, Lorien, on a short hike in one of the metroparks. The area is called Oxbow, for one of the bends in the river. This lovely river might look mildly pretty, but it was the one that was made famous by catching fire in the late 60's. Needless to say, there was no swimming or fishing done in this river!


The next fun activity was taking my brother-in-law for a ride. I picked him up at his parents house, and we went to the Towpath. The towpath was alongside the canal that connected the Ohio River and Lake Erie. Essentially the towpath was there to allow animals (namely horses and mules) to pull the canal boats up and down the canal. I wrote an enormous paper regarding this canal when I was in undergrad at Akron. This was a huge project in the 1820's and 1830's. The railroad arrived shortly thereafter; it wasn't long before the canal was obsolete. The towpath today, and some of the canal and locks have been restored. I believe the trail now, from end to end is over 100 miles. Pretty cool, but flat as a board of course. We rode almost 16 miles, and climbed only 37 feet...gnarly! Nick did extremely well, he's such a cool kid!

We stopped at a snack shop alongside the trail called Trail Mix. We got some homemade ice cream and hung out for a bit. Around back was this cool bike art.


I was able to make it out for one legitimate mountain bike ride. I met up with some of the guys I used to work at Eddys Bike Shop with. We hit the trails at West Branch State Park. There are two sides to this trail. A wide open, super fast, non-technical lake side. Then there is a rocky, super technical South side. I arrived about an hour early to attempt some of the rock gardens. I knew that they had been riding these trails at least twice a week since I'd been gone, and they knew all the lines through the rock gardens. I had to get out there and try to remember/pick some lines. After about an hour of tooling around, I headed back to the trailhead to meet up. We rode for about 3 hours, making two laps of everything out there. That 3 hours constituted about 20 miles, a testament to the technical nature of the south side.
Heath tearing it up!

Nick riding rigid and single on the same section!

Another section of techy goodness.

Big Numbers!

Well, I officially had over 1000 visitors come to my blog this past month. I never expected so many people to actually read this! Last year when I started the blog, I kind of did it just as an experiment, to log all of my rides and keep some photos. Now I feel obligated to update it more often! Also, my mileage numbers got royally screwed up for the month, but I think it ended up somewhere in the 500-600 mark, and elevation somwhere about 60k to 75k feet of climbing.

This morning, I'm off for the Paceline ride, then packing up the Xterra and headed to Ohio for about a week. Lisa and I are going to visit with the family a little bit, see some friends, and just generally hang out. I am planning some rides while I am home. The best of which should be on Tuesday. I got ahold of some of the guys I used to work at Eddys Bike Shop with when I lived in Ohio. We will likely be headed to Mohican State Park for a nice long ride, should be fun! I'll try to get some entries in while I am up there!