A Normal Weekend

After a long, long, LONG Michigan winter, it has been nice to get back to “normal” weekends. By “normal” I of course mean weekends that have way more riding than staring out of windows cursing the snow and ice.

Saturday brought my first taste of singletrack in 2014 as I headed up to MMCC to ride the trail with a couple of friends. The trails are now 100% void of snow and were in perfect shape. I was also pleasantly surprised with my fitness and skills after such a long break from trail riding. It also felt great to be back on board the Superfly. The MMCC trails are 99.9% singletrack and alternate between fast sections of hardpacked sandy dirt and long, lumpy sections of embedded rocks and roots. A softail (like my old and recently sold Salsa Dos Niner) or a full suspension (like my current Superfly FS) really helps to smooth out the trail and make it much more bearable for an aging doofus like me to sit and hammer… well, as much as I ever “hammer.”

I ended the day with a smile on my face, the vaguest of tan lines on my gelatinous, pasty white skin and with about 26 miles of singletrack riding in the brown, leafless woods. Good stuff. So good in fact that I put aside my idea of doing a casual dirt road ride on Sunday and made a return trip to the trails. Great idea! Wrong.

The trails and bike were just as good as they were the day before. Me, not so much. While I had no noticeable soreness off the bike, once on the bike I realized that my ass felt like that of a newly christened prison bitch, my hands hurt and my legs felt like shit. My plan for another couple of laps was quickly aborted and I settled for one easy–although be it painful– 15-ish mile lap (avoiding the Yellow Trail for some unknown reason).

Once home it was a semi-relaxing Easter Sunday of watching Jason Grilli blow yet another save for the Pirates, utilizing my front porch to do nothing in the sund with Jake The Dog and cook up some pork and a batch of homemade Mac ‘n’ Cheese.

All in all one of the best weekends I have had in a LONG time. Next weekend should be nearly as good with the MMCC Rust Shaker race on Saturday and B-Man’s soccer team kicking off the spring season on Sunday. All I gotta do now is survive the week.

Later.