As I mentioned during yesterday’s short post, I was able to log another 200 mile week last week. All 200 miles were on local pavement, dirt and gravel roads and all were completed atop my new Trek Boone 5 Disc with a smile on my face (except for the times that I was dealing with a craptastic headwind.
When my alarm went off at 6:05 AM this morning I drug myself out of bed in a manner that suggested I’d been out until 4 AM, pounding Jägerbombs with a gaggle of strippers fresh off their shift and looking for free drinks from a desperate, creepy old dude, rather than home, sober and in bed reading at 9 PM with lights out and sound asleep by 9:30. Maybe I’m growing older faster than I think, or maybe my renewed efforts on the bike are making me crave sleep more than usual… Either way, I had made up my mind to ditch riding today before I even had my first cup of coffee. A decision that was confirmed when I walked upstairs to wake B-Man twenty minutes later and my legs felt like I was carrying a fat dwarf on my back.
Today called for a more “normal for me” type of ride: a 35 mile ride north of town that was roughly a 50/50 split of paved and dirt roads. Because it’s late, I’m lazy and in an attempt to avoid this site being a blog that recounts every nuance of even the most mundane of the rides I do (like today’s ride), I will just post a few pics and move on. The three pics pretty much represent a few of the many things that are business as usual when riding in rural Michigan.
After Saturday’s debacle of a ride where I limped home a bonked, wind hammered, shell of a would-be cyclist, I took Sunday and Monday off the bike. Sunday I went to B’s soccer match, watched footy on TV, drank a few beers and cooked burgers on the grill. Monday I made sure to hydrate, got back to eating good, quality foods and hoped that the bonk I experienced on Saturday was just the result of poor post-ride recovery and Friday night hijinks. I hoped, prayed and fretted that I had not become so fat, slovenly and crap that I could do, 40, 45, 48 and 49.5 mile rides fine, but the mere idea of cresting 50 miles would turn me to a heap of human suck clad in lycra.
I realized today that I haven’t ridden a mountain bike on singletrack (dirt) in roughly six months. I rode some snow packed fat bike trails on the Farley this winter, but I haven’t been on dry, woodsy singletrack in six freaking months! That’s sort of unacceptable… except when it is.
As previously discussed, this week will not got down amongst the finer ones of the year. But that is all, pretty much, sort of, kinda behind me. The important things is that after four days of nothingness and crap trainer rides, I finally got my cottage cheese-like ass cheeks in the saddle for a ride atop the Boone today .
Today’s post is yet another post that falls into the lengthy Soiled Chamois sub-category of The Weather is Crap & I Didn’t Ride, But I Wanted to Post Something. Usually these posts end up being about food, crap photos, beer, or people that race bikes way better than me (in that they still race them). However today I figured I would post something that someone out there could actually use. Something that I was going to post over the weekend but got all caught up in the joy of my beer the moment and forgot. It’s to do with the Boone 5’s tire clearance when using a WTB Nano 40 tire (my tire of choice).
I was pretty spent after yesterday’s ride. The steady, east winds during the last half of the ride and running out of fluids with 11 miles to go had me happy to spend the rest of my day and night on the porch with Jake (the dog), listening to music, and enjoying some well-earned beers before putting some burgers on the grill later in the evening.
I was resigned to not riding today (Sunday); I’d had enough of the oppressive wind and was looking forward to sleeping in, watching more footy (I never seem to get enough) and being a waste of a human being whilst my family is away in Pennsylvania.
But with my week’s mileage hovering at 172.9, as much as I wanted to lay around, I just couldn’t. Surely I could muster up the balls to get a mere 27+ miles in and put myself over 200 miles for the week. Something that I haven’t done in quite some time. Probably not since my days of thinking I could/should/wanted to race my mountain bike for long distances.
Despite my family unit being out-of-town for the weekend and the world that IS Mount Pleasant, Michigan at my social fingertips, I had a chill Friday evening alone making Bolognese sauce and pasta, drinking a few beers, sitting on the porch, and watching pirated downloads of Paris-Roubaix on TV. Truthfully I was pretty spent from the day’s ride and was more than happy to go to bed and enjoy several hours of slumber which was colorfully punctuated with dreams of intrigue featuring high-priced special effects, over paid guest stars (Jason Alexander, seriously??) and random memories of young women in black leggings and running shorts shopping in the Meijer produce aisle for ripe avocados. OK, that may have been a fantasy, not a dream, but still.
The other day I alluded to going down to Terry’s (my shop of choice) in beautiful downtown Alma to check out a bike. With me racing mountain bikes less and less and less and less and less and less these days, my rides of choice have been dirt road rides mixed with crap Michigan pavement. Last season when my back was jacked up and made worse by my positioning on the Jake (The Snake), I thought the best route would be to get a rigid fork and essentially make my El Mariachi a flat barred CX bike for dirt and gravel riding. Even though I usually turn to my Superfly full suspension for singletrack riding, I still couldn’t do it. The EM is too good of a mountain bike to relegate to dirt roads. So….