Oh Yeah...

4.5 hours in the saddle
40 miles
3 bottles
1 flask of homemade gel (which rocked!)
A LOT of climbing.
A LOT of descending.
And one of the best ride days of the year on the mountain/ever.
This was one to stick in the ride spank bank for around January. Good stuff.

AM EDIT: Now that I have some more time, I will blather more about my ride. With the legs pretty rested from the SM100 melt down, and WPA having the best weather of the year I knew in my mind that I wanted to get some quality knobbies on mountain dirt love this weekend.

I recently explored a nice little 5 mile addition of forest roads and rocky double track that adds 5 miles on to my standard loop. This puts The Standard at a sweet 40 miles. During some of my exploring I was doing Beltz Road (wide rocky grassy double track) down to Buck Run Road (forest road) and then looping back up to Martz. But for the sake of a more natural "loop" I came UP Beltz. It's not a fast climb, due to some rocky parts, grass, and roots, but all middle ringable. It was interesting to climb and constantly get hit with falling acorns from the trees that towered along side of me. Another sign that fall is in the air to go along with the leaves that are starting to litter the trail and the once bright green mountain ferns now starting to turn a bit yellow.

One back up top it was Red Oak Trail back down a bit to hit some single track on the Lookout Loop. All said and done the East side loop was a hair under 20 miles when I started the road climb up to North Woods. The rest of the ride was my normal loop which sort of weaves through a selection forest roads, snow mobile trails and single track and pretty much down/up/down/up/down/up for another 20 miles.

As I was finishing up Mountain Streams Trail I was starting to run out of water, and I just sucked down the last of my JasonGel® (nice name, eh?). I had one mini 3 Musketeers left and I was saving that for the base of the Camp Run climb. Mountain Streams is finally about 95% dry! It only too ALL summer. When it's dry the is a fun section of trail, when it's wet it sort of sucks. Literally, the mud will suck a shoe right off a foot.

I hammered the last super flat section to the base of the climb and got ready to start climbing. I ate my last bar, and started up CRR. As the climb got steeper I switched into my granny. And immediatle heard a rubbing noise. WTF?? NOT AGAIN!! Yep, I apparently broke ANOTHER spoke (I had just broke one 3 weeks ago) and now my tire was rubbing my chain stays when I would switch into granny, but not if I left it in my middle ring. Frig. I knew I COULD climb CRR in my middle ring, but with about 35 miles in my legs and back, I was planning on nice spin to the top. Oh well, into the middle I went and stayed there to the top, only stopping to let a 4x4 pass me with a friendly old man who stopped along side me to say "don't see many bikers riding up this road, nice to see you out here, have fun". Nice and all, but not sure why it would be nice to see me out there? Oh well, it's a welcome change from the normal shit that gets yelled at me by people in cars.

A few miles later I was at the top, pass the cemetery, pass the snowmobile club, pass the private "don't even look at me" homes, and back to the xB. When I had passed the snowmobile club, I noticed they were laying out some sort of race course. In my warped mind I thought "maybe there's some sort of CX race there?" HA! But of course it wasn't, it was a snowmobile grass drag race (WTF?), I found that out when I saw the sign further down the road at the entry to my parking lot. Reading the sign was not without incident- I saw the sign out of the corner of my eye, and wanted to go back to see what it said. I started to turn, my wheel dug in the gravel, and I was slammed down to the gravel at 1 MPH and 10 yards from my car. Yep, 40 miles of riding in the mountains and I crash 10 yards from my car going 1 MPH. I'm such an idiot. But I DID have fun.