What to do when it's not windy in the mountains..

I got pretty lucky this weekend. The snow that was forecast for Friday night/Saturday morning never materialized. I was a little worried when I did a short North Table Mountain loop on Friday that I wouldn't be seeing dirt for a long while, but I managed to get out on some trails for my ride on Saturday. The ride was scheduled to be some tempo intervals, which I usually do on my road bike because it has my power meter. I decided to change it up, do a mix of road and trail, and ride my Pivot Mach 429c. I (obviously) did my intervals on the road, and a bit more road climbing after that, but I ended my road climb at the top of White Ranch where I proceeded to shred down the Belcher Hill Trail. I was planning on doing the whole Longhorn, Shorthorn, Longhord Whippletree descent, but I got to the trailhead at about 5 PM and I didn't have my lights (for some reason). Here in Colorado, or at least in Jefferson County, you get one hour after sunset to ride in Jeffco Open Space areas. Now that sunset times are creeping towards 5:30 PM, I'll be having enough time to get in a decent mountain bike ride after work. Hopefully this will be worked into my training schedule soon. Doing Zone 1/2 stuff at White Ranch will get easier in a few days (hopefully) when I have a new SRAM XX1 kit on my Pivot. I am very excited for this, and for the team to be representing SRAM for the 2015 season. While I don't really like this night riding policy (I would be totally in favor of something like they do at Fair Hill so we can get longer rides in on trail during the winter), I like that we can actually do it here; in Boulder County you can only ride at night on Marshall Mesa, which is so smooth you might as well ride a cross bike.

Road intervals. Mountain bike. Winning

Sunday those of us who live down on the Front Range woke up to five or six inches of snow. I was sad. I thought that our planned Cheese and Fries ride would have to be cancelled. JD messaged and said that he was worried about the snow up where he is, so I suggested fat bikes. There just happened to be a demo Felt fat bike bike in the shop that was my size-ish. I went up there, got the bike set up, and headed out to ride. JD wanted to get 5k feet of climbing to give him an even 30k feet for the week, so we basically road around and climbed a bunch of stuff on fat bikes. If you don't know about fat bikes (what rock are you living under?) let me tell you a little bit about them. They are slow and heavy. There is no getting around that. Even the 22 lb full carbon Borealis wonder bike that I got to ride last winter was slow. Slapping a four or five inch wide tire on a three or four inch wide rim and running it at less than ten psi is going to have a lot of rolling resistance. If you're riding on a road, you'll want to put a few [hundred] pumps of air in the tire to mitigate that as much as possible. I can't see riding them on smooth tight trails at high speeds to ever be enjoyable. Fat bike wheels conserve noticeably more angular momentum then even a 29er.

Don't let that deter you, though: fat bikes are very fun. In the right conditions (ex. semi-packed to packed snow and sand) they are, quite frankly, amazing. This was my first real ride on a fat bike (my Borealis demo last year was at a race that ended up being mostly running), and I had a ton of fun riding some of the trails that I ride all the time in the summer. Even with fat, knobby tires, there is a lot of sliding. That combined with the constant possibility of straying from the section of the trail packed by hikers into the deep, soft powder along it's edges and ending up with a face full of cold stuff. even riding snowy roads with tires at 12 or 15 psi (we added air to our tires for the road sections) was tolerable. The Felt, which was a small, had a super stubby stem so it felt close to what I imagine a BMX bike feels like. Since it put me in a very upright position for climbing, I'd rather have a medium with a stubby little stem. All the shop had was a small, though, so I rolled with it.* JD and I had a fantastic ride up in the mountains, and I was pretty worked over afterwards. I got a few pictures.

Felt Double Double with Bar Mitts (which are also rad).

Coach, team manager, shop owner.

Winter above 8000 feet in Colorado

This is why we ride high

I'm starting to get into a real rhythm with my training now. Wake up, either run or do core work, go to work, come home, ride, sleep. It's starting to feel good. I've already dropped almost 10 pounds from what I was after Christmas (at least on my crappy scale). I don't think I'm fast yet, but fast is closer to the horizon than it has been in a few years. It's a very exciting time indeed.

Laters!

*The Shop has a medium Pivot LES Fat coming in for demo use (can you see the plans forming in my head yet???)