After a great ride in the woods on Monday morning, Monday night brought some long overdue rain to mid-Michigan. The cool temperatures, dark clouds and knowledge that I had nowhere to be Tuesday morning made it real easy to sleep in and be no use to anyone. I like easy, so that’s what I did, and it felt damn good.
After four days on the bike, it was time for two days off the bike this week. Meaning I was working at the bike shop for 17 hours (not in a row obviously).
As I’ve mentioned in the past, the bike shop I work at part-time has quite a bit of old mountain bike race memorabilia. One of the owners used to be the mechanic for the now extinct Volvo-Cannondale Mountain Bike Team, so the shop features a ton of stuff from the V/C team as well as some photos, jerseys and what not from other racers of the era.
I have to say, I’m pretty lucky to work in a shop a few days a week that has various bits of UCI and NORBA (remember them?) downhill and cross-country mountain bike racing history hanging about. It’s fun to walk around the shop and see the bikes, frames, kits and number plates from the various legends of our sport. It’s also fun to hear the stories and anecdotes from a wrench that worked for one of the top teams during mountain bike racing’s heyday.
After working all day at the shop on Thursday, my plan for Friday was to get in some miles on the Boone. Sadly, that didn’t happen. Instead it pissed down Old Testament-esque rains all morning and the rest of the day was filled with FINALLY getting a permanent crown put on one of my teeth and dealing with a backed up main drain which resulted in plumbers in the house to snake it. The only highlight was celebrating Wifey’s 44th birthday.
Tuesday brought a hazy and warm summer evening. I had an un-blogworthy 16 mile singletrack mountain bike ride in my legs and a belly full of baked chicken thighs and spicy tomato pasta, but the evening was too nice to waste sitting around the house. So once Wifey was home from work I made the decision to head out and do some fishing for a couple of hours.
As I headed to bed last night I knew what today was going to have in store for me: a trip to the dentist office to FINALLY get the left side of my mouth right (what?) and then working at the bike shop ’till six. On paper that is pretty swell, especially since I would have a few hours in the morning to putz around before work. Here’s what happened…
Jolanda Neff, I try not to write about her, I [sort of] swear! But she keeps on winning and keeps on doing so with large amounts of #Neffness. Which I believe translates into both “rad” and “Braaap” in Swiss [forgive me for my use of the word “rad”].
The weekend ended up being pretty crap for riding; it pissed down a hard rain all day Saturday, and Sunday was sunny, but windier than hell. Wifey got home around 1 PM from Pennsylvania and I had plenty of time to ride, but has absolutely NO desire to ride in the chilly June wind (yes, I said chilly and June in the same sentence, welcome to Michigan).
No, I’m not going to be sucked into another season of the uber-successful (by my low standards) blog post series: #Neffness, but I must admit that I’m finding it hard not to comment on Jolanda Neff’s victory at UCI XCO #1 in Nové Město, Czech Republic last weekend.