Tag Archives | mountain biking

Fat Again

By soiledchamois on August 1, 2014 in Mountain Biking

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No, the title of this post is not referring to how 20+ years ago I was a hulking, 300 pound sack of man flesh, lost 125 pounds and am now seemingly going out of my way to gain as much of that weight back as I can with a steady diet of burgers, pizza, pasta and beer. No, I am simply adhering to Cycling Writer Law 26/3.7 which states that if you ride, review, touch, hear about or suggestively rub up against a fat bike and proceed to write about it, you MUST mention the word “fat” in the title of your piece, e.g. Getting Fat, Rolling a Fatty, Fat & Fun, Fatties Do It Better, Fat Between My Thighs, etc., etc., Since I ~~suggestively rubbed up against~~ rode my Surly Pugsley for the second time this week on Thursday, I have gone with the title Fat Again. OK, with all that fat talk out-of-the-way, I will move on…

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Singletrack’s Magic Mixture

By soiledchamois on July 30, 2014 in Mountain Biking

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A good ride was had by all today, and by “all” I of course mean me. I thought about driving a couple hours north to hit up a new trail system, but instead decided to save that for later in the week and just hit up MMCC for a 15-ish mile lap today.

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Fat on Fat, Man on Bike Love

By soiledchamois on July 29, 2014 in Mountain Biking

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With B-Man in Pittsburgh with his Poppy for the week and Wifey in Baltimore on .gov business, I am considering this week a vacation week. There will be many miles ridden and copious amounts of beer drank. There will be drunk Tweeting and Facebooking, strippers and casual sex with throngs of horned up CMU girls aching to get a piece of me. OK, that’s all pretty much a lie. I plan to get some miles in, hit up some new riding areas, drink a few beers and maybe hang out with some friends. The rest is just perverted daydreaming by a 43-year-old man with a wife of seventeen years and a 10-year-old son out-of-town for the week.

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The Fat Between

By soiledchamois on July 21, 2014 in Mountain Biking

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The past week was once again low on hours in the saddle and high on Dad duties and other activities. I’m not going to complain about that, I’m very lucky to have been given the opportunity (thanks to the size of Wifey’s brain) to hang out with my son during the summer rather than send him to camp or seek “baby” sitting so I can utilize my utter lack of education and useless past work experience working at Taco Bell…Not that there’s anything wrong with that (if you’re 17), Taco Bell makes some fine quasi, sort of, not at all authentic Tex-Mexican-ish foods that are beloved by the obese and stoned college kids world-wide (except Mexico).

However–as I mentioned in quick post yesterday–I was able to get out for a double dip of dirt on Saturday and slow-paced loop on Sunday. Joy!

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Fast, Then Fat

By soiledchamois on July 14, 2014 in Mountain Biking

Firstly, I extend my apologies to my two faithful readers for not updating in a while. My cycling life has been pretty… um… ah… “uneventful” to say the least and pretty much void of riding (welcome to my summers). The last week was filled with me running on the treadmill (not blog worthy, unless you’re some perverse freak that enjoys hearing about a fat man flopping around on a treadmill as he walks and runs at speeds betweenst 3.5 and 8 miles per hour), my 17th wedding anniversary (freaking AWESOME, but still not blog worthy, no matter HOW much I love Wifey) and hanging out on my front porch drinking beer in the evenings (fun, but again, not all that blog worthy).

With all that said, Saturday I finally got out on some dirt. I took the Superfly and headed up to MMCC with hopes of a good ride. I have done this many times in 2014 and more often than not I have come back in pain (stupid ~~almost~~ 43 year old back!), pissed off and ready to hang up my bikes for good. Thankfully, this weekend was kind to me and I had some great rides…

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The Best In A While

By soiledchamois on July 7, 2014 in Mountain Biking

As I’ve mentioned in my last couple of blog posts, when I have been able to ride of late, the rides have been less than stellar (both physically and mentally). I assumed that Sunday’s ride up at the MMCC trails would be filled with more back pain and more subparness. Thankfully I was wrong.

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Par

By soiledchamois on July 4, 2014 in Cycling

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Oh, the 4th of July… time for fireworks, cookouts, random bad drivers sporting American flag bandanas (for the love of God man!!!) and spending time with family and friends to celebrate our founding fathers and all they did to establish this pretty darn good country. Or if you’re me: time by yourself spent sleeping in, drinking coffee, going for a better than “subpar” 17 mile ride on singletrack trails being taken over by wonderful ferns followed by enjoying the day watching World Cup football, having a few cocktails and eating alone.Not my ideal 4th of July, but I’ll take it. Better yet, Wifey and B-Man will be back this time tomorrow and all will be right in my world. Holidays are great, but having my family unit around is better. Bring on Saturday the 5th!

Subparness, Sniff It

By soiledchamois on July 3, 2014 in Cycling

With B-Man and Wifey on a short jaunt to WPA for the July 4th holiday and me at home on Jake (the dog) duty, I was hopeful that the later part of this week would be filled with miles and smiles. Sadly it has been filled with suck, subparness, wind, rain, few miles and fewer smiles. Oh well, it beats not riding at all! Or does it?

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A/V: Racing The Untamed

By soiledchamois on June 12, 2014 in Outdoors

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If you haven’t seen Epic TV’s five part series Racing The Untamed, Team Bulls at the ABSA Cape Epic, then you’re missing out on some great coverage on some of the top mountain bike racers in the world at one of the most amazing races in the world– The ABSA Cape Epic.

Team Bulls is a German based UCI mountain bike team made up of Germans Karl Platt, Stefan Sahm, Tim Böhme, Simon Stiebjahn and Martin Frey, as well as Thomas Dietsch of France and Urs Huber of Switzerland. If you are into endurance, marathon and stage racing, I recommend following Team Bulls on Facebook and Twitter, they do some of the coolest races in the world and are not shy about sharing photos, videos and recaps to promote their team and the sport of XC, marathon and endurance mountain bike racing.

The first episode is posted below with subsequent episodes linked after. Really great, well produced stuff. Check it out…

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Random Rides In Pictures

By soiledchamois on June 9, 2014 in Cycling, Random

The past few days have been filled with random rides that featured varying degrees of misfortunes, aches, issues and minor successes, like forgetting to charge my Garmin 500 for weeks and having it die before I even made it to the dirt roads on Friday. If you do a ride and there’s nothing to record it, did it really happen? I’m joking of course, and in my case my ride, the stats are best left unknown.

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