Trail Work

I got to spend a few hours yesterday with Paula, Mark, Scott, and Kevin working on the trails at Waldo. We had a good couple of hours re-routing some sections and armoring or draining a few muddy spots. Some of it was rethinking hasty decisions made hot on the heels of the 100 mph straight-line winds that tore the place up on May 15, 2018. In other cases, ten years of use had worn the trail to the point it needed a rest.

Like most trail days, the work was fun, and hanging in the woods with some friends was fun, and in the end the park will ride better, so everyone can have more fun.

That said, I’m not sure why it’s the same dozen people who show up for work days when hundreds ride in the park.

The Man Who Knew Too Little

Praise Bike!

After he gets through some hard terrain, my friend Chris sometimes talks to his bike like it’s animate. “Good Bike! Well done, Bike.”

It makes sense to me because it isn’t the conscious mind that gets you through the gnar.

One of the challenges to mtbing is ignoring the ground under your front wheel, particularly when it’s gnarly ground. That’s where instinct says to look, but if you do, the next rock in line will throw you over the bars like a ju jitsu black belt. You have to be looking two seconds up the trail, planning and deciding your line, your gearing, your body position.

And then you have to trust your body and your bike to execute the plan because your eyes and mind are already two seconds up the trail from where your wheels are.

That two seconds after my conscious mind delegates all the functions that matter to my muscles or to some other part of my mind or to my bike fascinates me.

It’s the key to mtbing.

One Gear Harder

Only three weeks ago, I wrote about returning to more gravel riding to improve my mtbing. Now, that’s a little ironic because 6 years ago, I started mtbing to improve my gravel riding. It seems that both the latter and the former work; as if the two kinds of riding are complimentary. Because of what I’ve learned on the trails, my gravel bike has navigated some pretty sketchy terrain. And yesterday’s Waldo ride gave evidence that just a few weeks of pushing myself up some hard hills had improved my strength noticeably.

While I’m not back to where I was three years ago, I rode well yesterday. There’s the climb on Red before the power lines that begins with a rocky turn to a stone wall crossing, continues up over more rocky ground between two closely spaced trees, and finishes up with a rooty chicane between two more neighborly trees and a couple of boulders. I’ve only cleaned it a couple of times in the past two years. Yesterday, I resisted the urge to drop down a gear, pushing one that felt slightly uncomfortable at the get-go. The second my rear wheel cleared the stone wall though, I knew the gear was right. The rest of the climb took looking up and gritting down just a bit.

Then there was the first rock garden on Purple. It’s not the gnarliest rock garden in Waldo, but the gnarliest one is only uber-gnarly going up. Going down it’s no big deal. But the first rock garden, well, it’s tough in both directions. We hit it from the fire road side, the same way as usual.

On the approach, Roadie Me and MTBMe had their usual argument about gear choice. MTBMe won and RoadieMe slunk off to sulk.

I hit the rocks one gear harder than seemed comfortable and rolled right over the first 15 feet. The next 15 feet is a crux spot. The best line is the higher line, but it’s a little off camber, and, if you go too high you risk striking your left pedal. But staying high maintains speed and lines you up better for the rocks to come. Trusting my bike, I hit the high line in a high gear and came out perfectly.

Next comes a bump and a small drop – Nothing smooth here, just flattish, jaggy rocks with a narrow passage at the crest that’s defined by a tree on the right and a rocky bank on the left. You have to begin gearing down here though, because immediately after the drop comes a left-turning, rocky, rooty, steep climb. If I’m not in my bottom gear right away, I’m either jamming my derailleur trying to get down, or I don’t make the climb. There’s not much more than 10 feet between the crest of the bump and the bottom of the climb to gear down.

But because I took the high road one gear higher at the beginning, the bike had some speed going into the bump and I was able to gear down in plenty of time.

Cleaning the top, I whooped, “Yeah!”, and coasted to a stop to wait for the group.

So, yeah, I’m pretty happy about the gravel rides.

Jumping in the Leaves

No one else wanted to play so I went out by myself Thursday night. Rather than doing 30ish miles, I hit four hard hills in 15 miles. Around here, it’s not so much the distance as the up. One of the hills I wanted to climb was Bear Burrow, and there’s a neat little unmaintained section on Cross Brook that’s a short cut to get there.

One homeowner had blown a pile of leaves across the entry, but I’d ridden up through them from the opposite direction a week or two before with no problem. This week I hit them going down hill, buried my front wheel against an unseen branch, and executed a perfect endo – and I mean with a full 180 degree rotation to a flawless back landing – into the leaf pile.

It was actually kind of fun.

But I think I’m going to take my leaf blower over there tomorrow once things dry out a bit.

Flats

Going from being a roadie to riding mtbs, it was natural for me to stick with clipless pedals. One platform, one pair of shoes – It all appealed to my frugal nature.

Falling over like Arte Johnson seemed natural, too.

Sure, sometimes that hurt. The time I landed on a rock with my left hip and couldn’t sleep on that side for a month. The time I heard the little carpal bone or the other time I heard one of my ribs go, “Crack!”.

It was only last winter, gun-shy from knee surgery and tired of kicking the snow out of cleat on the shoe I put down all too often that I decided to try flats.

I’m not too bright sometimes. Six years on an mtb and only now I’m riding flats. Yeah, there’s a learning curve. But the number of falls I take has declined by something like 156%. And it’s way easier to start back up on climbs and in sketchy sections when you aren’t focused on clipping in.

Frustrated by how my feet didn’t stick to the pedals in bouncy rock gardens, I did go back to clipless for a few weeks in the spring. But then I Arte-Johnsoned a couple of times, and thought, “Fuck this.”

Ben suggested new shoes. I’d been riding soft-soled 5-10s with cleats, which I figured would work fine on flats, too. But Ben said he could hear the metal of the cleats hitting my pedals. I couldn’t, but hey, old carpenters can’t hear much more than tinnitus, and nasty and blood thirsty as the pegs on my flats are, they don’t engage well with metal. So I bought a pair of 5-10 Freeriders – Oh, man, I love these shoes.

There’s a rock garden at Waldo that’s my litmus test. I’ve been killing it lately, which is way easier when I’m not scared of falling and when my feet aren’t bouncing off the pedals. When my feet do bounce around, repositioning them is a piece of cake. And I’m focusing more on my foot position, which is making me a better rider all around.

Another Little Bit Gone

I went to a retirement party for my friend John yesterday. He owned the bike shop. While he owned it, many, many people referred to it as “my bike shop”. Finding the bike shop that fits is like finding your barber shop. It’s a personal thing. Both my barber shop and my now former bike shop are homegrown reflections of their owners. There is nothing corporate or flashy about them. You know people there. A visit is social at least as much as business. We each know where the other lives. Our numbers are in each other’s phones. We’ve broken bread, or at least uncapped bottles, together.

I suppose that describes businesses for much of human existence. It’s only recently that most people didn’t remain in the community of their birth. Two generations ago, we knew our neighbors, knew our towns, enjoyed their institutions. That’s changed at a Koyaanisqatsi pace, one that I haven’t even tried to keep up with, this blog notwithstanding.

At the party were friends of the shop, only about a third of whom I knew. That alone spoke to John’s influence given the number of times I had stopped by in the past decade. There were photos from when John and his brother first opened the shop 40 years ago; photos that could have been stills from Breaking Away. Blonde hair had become gray hair and the bikes had changed radically, but the smiles were the same.

I described the shop and the upcoming party to my friend Mark, who lives in what sounds like a suburban dead zone outside of Philly. Mark responded by saying, “The fabric of your community has actual fabric.”

It does. And although the cycling community remains, there’s a big hole where the center once was.

Changing Fast

Last Thursday, I re-rode a route I’d ridden a week before. On it, there’s a climb up some old double-track carriage road that leads to the site of a long-gone 19th century hotel. The wheel tracks are full of baby heads and loose, round, bank-run gravel from back in the day. It’s only been since I took up mountain biking that I’ve been able to pedal my gravel bike up this.

The week before, it was still full daylight when Joe and I climbed the double track. Plenty of light filtered through the leaves on the trees to easily see the rocks and sticks and to pick out a line. At about the same time last Thursday, it was going on dusk when we climbed. Mark’s taillight killed whatever low-light vision I had and the downed leaves obscured the line. I didn’t clean it, and made a mental note to stay a lot further back from my ride partner’s LED taillight.

When Mark and I reached the apex of last Thursday’s ride a few miles further on, the sunset lingered over the hills to the west. Descending the valley to the east took us into full dark. Climbing back up, my headlight threw the gravel washboards of Holmes Road into high relief. Riding the abandoned section between Roxbury and Woodbury was an act of faith, our tires crunching leaves and twigs and bouncing over unseen rocks.

There were smells, too. The sharpness of downed leaves, the sweetness of Concord grapes, the muskiness of the donkeys in the pasture on Bacon Road.

Autumn riding just rocks.

Back on the Gravel Again

Sunset from East St. and Wykham, Washington, CT

Between my torn ACL two years ago and changes to my work, both my mileage and my fitness have declined. In the last month or so though, I’ve been getting out two to three times a week and have added gravel back into the mix. I can feel a difference.

Last night, I rode Holmes Road, a half-mile dirt climb I haven’t ridden for almost exactly 3 years. I was kind of dreading the climb last night because of how hard it had been the previous time. Last night wasn’t my fastest time by 24 seconds, but I was 34 seconds faster than the last time I rode it. And that time felt a lot harder.

That’s been typical of my results lately. My fitness is creeping back up since my ACL replacement, but I’m beginning to wonder if the effects of age are creeping in. At some point, they’ll have to. Still, I’m telling myself that my recent lack of PRs has more to do with my recent lack of training than it does with my recent lack of youth.

Roadie Mistakes

I was a roadie for long time before getting on an MTB. Consequently, I learned to spin my cranks pretty fast, a skill that still serves me well on trail climbs. But it’s not really what you want to be doing to get through a rock garden or over a log. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite.

Still, my instinct is to shift to an easier gear whenever an obstacle appears. Then I can’t time my pedal strokes as needed and smash a pedal on a rock. Or I don’t generate the torque needed to power through. Or I spin out the back wheel. In any event, I’m done.

This has been frustrating me for years, but old habits…

Last night on my Waldo ride I adopted the mantra, “One gear harder.”

It served me well. I got through and over some stuff that had been troublesome.

This morning, my legs are toast.

Next time, it’ll be better.