What to do when it's windy in the mountains...

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Last Sunday, I had a bigger ride on my schedule. We had planned on hitting the Big Classic (Shop > Boulder > Shop) loop, but I got a Facemessage from JD at about 05:30 hrs saying that his house was shaking from the wind and that I probably shouldn't make the drive up; riding would not be fun. Instead, I headed up to Boulder and did a big dirt road loop with some teammates on CX bikes. While the ride was not quite as hilly as I had planned, it was good nonetheless.

Flat dirt roads

I was accompanying Shane D. and Mike B, and since there were only three of us we moved along at a decent clip. We never had any paceline going because all of us were mountain bikers and two of us didn't know how to paceline properly. I found myself, as the youngest and apparently the most "roadie," teaching the other two how to paceline. I tried to channel my inner Fatmarc, or Tom McD while doing this, as those are the people who taught me how to ride in a group.

A small riser, only Long's Peak in the background.

Still riding towards Long's Peak.

Obligatory dirt road selfie.

On the climbs, like I was going to do on the longer climbs in the mountains, I rode a solid tempo pace. We ended up putting in just under four hours and just over sixty miles. It was definitely one of my better days on the bike in a long time. By the end of the ride, my legs felt snappier than they have felt in maybe a year. Then we went to Twisted Pine Brewing Company and ate pizzas and beers.

Monday was a planned rest day, so I took the opportunity to clean both my mountain bike and my cross bike (see mud on jersey in previous). I used the chain cleaning technique espoused by Matt on Just Riding Along (a Mountain Bike Radio podcast... if you don't listen to it, you should). So now my chains are extra clean.

Yesterday I had an easy ride scheduled, so I went exploring. I ended up taking a trip up and over Dinosaur Ridge, back down through Golden, and back to the office. This was definitely a fun ride, and definitely one I'll be repeating soon.

The climb is short, but the road is completely closed to traffic.

Ripple marks!

Dinosaur tracks!

Ash layers (glasses for scale)!

Red Rocks!

The weather is starting to take a turn back to winter, so this weekend might be a bust for riding around here. A few 92Fifty folks are looking into some more southern options for riding this weekend; hopefully that pans out.

Laters!

The First Week in Trianing

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Last week I pedaled a bicycle for six consecutive days. This is more than I have done probably since we moved out to Colorado, approximately 1.5 years ago. I didn't do any hard efforts other than my field test on Friday, so my legs aren't that sore; they do reflect the effort I have put in over the last week, though. Especially yesterday's 2x20s. 2x20s are more or less the foundation needed for all types of endurance racing, so while they are not the easiest intervals to do, they are necessary. I don't have many pictures from the week, and those that I took I already shared on some social media, so I won't bother posting them. Let's just say that it was 68F yesterday when I started my ride, and averaged 58F over the almost three hours I was out. Riding in shorts and short sleeves is one of the privileges of living on the Front Range. Everyone thinks that winters here are horrid, but they're really not; there will be a handful more days like today before we transition to spring weather. Plus, even when it's cold down here (up in the mountains is another story), it's not that cold. The low humidity means that even on the coldest days I rarely break out my full winter gear. I usually have stuff with me, but I may only put it on for the longest descent.

After riding Saturday morning, Mrs. Geology and I set out for a night away. We had bought a deal online for what we thought was two nights (it turned out to be only one) at the Claremont Inn in Stratton, CO. Eastern Colorado isn't the most exciting place, it's very flat, and the elevation drops off rather quickly until you hit Kansas, but it does have this place, so it's got that going for it. We enjoyed a wine tasting with very liberal quantities of wine, a fantastic dinner and breakfast the next morning.

I'm looking forward to more riding and training this week. I have a lot of work to do before I take the start of the True Grit Epic 100 in March.

Laters.

Going to Try This Again...

I'm going to try and start writing here again.  After half a year of not writing, the shorter forms of Bookface and Twitter are no longer cutting it for me.  Plus I have a new thing for 2015, or more accurately restarting an old thing.

Starting on Monday (January 12 for those counting), I'm going to be coached by Jonathan Davis, who is the man behind 92Fifty (the team race for) and Elevated Legs.  He is a very experienced 24 hour (former national champion, if I remember correctly) and 100 mile racer, so I'm very excited to be working under him.  He will be working around my busy work schedule, so when I'm travelling I'll be running and doing core work and cross training.  I actually like running, and there are some pretty fun places to run where I usually travel.  After 1.5 years in Colorado and basically three years off any formal training plan, I'm very excited to get at it.  There are a lot of great races here in the West, and I have gotten the itch to explore them all.  To the right of these words is what I'm looking at for this year.  As you can see, there's the possibility of a full NUE season there using none of the NUE races I've done before.  Also there is the Vapor Trail 125.  I remember reading about this race many years ago and thinking that it would be hard; all but the first 10 and last 10 miles of the race are over 8500 ft and you spend a good portion above treeline at night.  JD (who has done many 24 hour solos) says it's the hardest one day race anywhere.  I want to give it a try this year.  My goal is to finish, and hopefully finish strong.  Another big one is the Maah Daah Hey 100.  That is a 105 mi point-to-point singletrack race on the Maah Daah Hey Trail in North Dakota.  North Dakota you say?  You're confused about why one would go to North Dakota for anything?  Well, I can guarantee you that it will be worth it, and I haven't even been there yet.  I'm very excited for both of these races.

Saturday I got on my bike for the first time this year.  I did a short loop at White Ranch because I was heading up the mountains on Sunday to do a 4 hr ride from the Shop down to Idaho Springs.  Saturday's loop was fun, if a bit icy.  I rode early to avoid snowmelt, so everything was still very frozen.  I had a hiker ask me at the trailhead how I did with ice.  I told him that it only made it more interesting.  I think I'm one of those mountain bikers who is not turned away by bad trail conditions (unless I'd damage the trail), so riding on packed, footprint-ridden snow was just another thing.  I doubt many people rode trails that day.  It was a good first ride of the year.  Later that afternoon Mrs. Geology and I went on a walk on some of the paved trails around Golden.

Sunday's main event was the classic Black Hawk to Idaho Springs loop coming back on Oh My God Road and Dory Hill Road.  It was a good ride, but definitely a hard jump into 2015 training.  7k of climbing over 45 mi in 5.5 hrs, but I made it home in good spirits.  Now I'm shoving food in my face and waiting for a reasonable hour to go to bed.

Some pictures from White Ranch:

Hogbacks.

Icy trails.

Tire tracks in big snow crystals.

Good Pivot... stay Pivot.

Denver over yonder, plus more hogbacks.

Until next time...

Northern Exposure: Fairbanks Days 1 & 2

I'm going to try and do some quick posts about my trip to Alaska.  Yesterday morning I arrived in Anchorage.  My flight got in at around 12:45 AM local time.

Anchorage, AK framed by the Chugach Range, 12:45 AM 

It was definitely weird to go to sleep on a plane at dusk and wake up a few hours later at dusk, but I really didn't think that much of it.  I shacked up in a hotel by the airport for the night, and went to sleep.  The next day I grabbed my rental car and headed north.  I had the option to fly directly into Fairbanks on a few flights totaling 14 hours of sitting in a plane, or flying five hours directly to Anchorage and driving seven hours to Fairbanks through Denali National Park.  Obviously, I took the latter in high hopes of being able to see the highest mountain in North America.  Unfortunately my plans were foiled by the weather.

Denali South Viewpoint. There should be a huge mountain there. 

Denali North Viewpoint.  Again, insert mountain here.

Not quite dejected (the scenery was still pretty amazing, I drove a bit into the National Park proper and stopped by the visitor's center.  There were some pretty amazing mountains there.

Hanging glacial valley much?

 One of my favorite parts of being up here is how low tree line elevation is.  I did some Google recon on it last night and the tree line elevation in the Chugach mountain is around 2500 ft.  Compare that with approximately 11000 ft in Colorado and 9000 ft in Montana.  This is primarily due to how far north Alaska is.  There aren't many trees that can grow up here anyway, and those that can grow can only grow at the lower elevations.  It makes the mountains here, although they are for the most part much lower than mountain in Colorado, look much more impressive.  Denali itself has approximately 17822 ft above tree line.   There is no mountain in the entire Lower 48 that is even as high as Denali's above tree line elevation.

So much space above tree line.

And again.

After passing through Denali, I proceeded north along Highway 3.  There were some road works where the road was completely gone.  I drove through seven consecutive miles of dirt roads on the highway.  Only in Alaska...

This is a highway.

On my second day here, I went to work, and went for a little bike ride afterwards.  I had posted up on the Alaska forum on MTBR and some guy PM'ed me and offered to let me use his Pivot Mach 4 and to show me around some trails while I was here.  Obviously I accepted.  We rode the Esther Dome Singletrack today.  It was pretty much exactly like the Allegrippis Trails at Raystown Lake, but a lot shorter.  I had a great time, and I'm looking forward to the Fairbanks Cycling Club Tuesday Night MTB Ride tomorrow.  It will be about 3 hrs of riding from 7 - 10 PM with no lights.

Sweet singletrack on a sweet bike.

Birch trees a-plenty.

That's all for now.  I have to go to bed even though it's still light out.

February & March Part II: BC, NV, & UT

It's May now, so quite frankly I barely remember February and March.  I know I went to British Columbia for about three days.  Fernie, BC to be specific.  It was pretty rad.  I have never been to western Canada, but one of the mine's I am responsible for is in Sparwood (just north of Fernie), so I'm looking forward to visiting there more.  Since it was late February, the first day I was on site it was about -1C, but the next day it was -34C.  The day I left my beard froze on the approximately 50 m walk from the rental car facility into the airport terminal because it was -36C outside, which may be as close to the Celsius/Fahrenheit crossover temperature as I think I've ever been.  I try not to complain too much about the weather, but that was damned cold.  I didn't spend too much time in Fernie, and the trip was kind of last minute because it happened approximately 36 hours after I got back from Italy.  Fernie is in a narrow river valley surrounded by pretty damn impressive mountains.  Right now they have a rental unit, but are in the process of buying a unit of their own.  That means that I have two weeks in Fernie sometime in my future.  Which likely means a ton of mountain biking, so I'm pretty damn excited.

Just a little taste of Fernie, BC.

I got back from Canada on a Saturday afternoon, and left for Elko, NV on a Sunday night.  There's nothing much to say about Elko.  It's in the middle of nowhere.  There is some pretty cool national forests around it, so since we had some time, we took some time to explore some of the trails.  There was also a mine, with super muddy roads.  We got to drive around them in out small-on-the-outside Fiat 500L.  It was pretty rad.

The Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest Ruby Dome District would be a pretty cool place for backpacking.

Fresh cut trail with half a hundred switchbacks.

Valley views.

Some interesting metamorphic rocks.

Muddiest Fiat ever.

The reason why.

Got to drive through the Bonneville Salt Flats and decided to stop and take pictures on the way back.

Big view.

I got back from that trip late on a Friday night.  The next weekend I headed to St. George, UT for my first race of the season, the True Grit Epic.  It was pretty rad.  I ended up having a big crash on a fast section of singletrack resulting in some broken parts and a scraped up leg, but I finished the race in not last place in the Pro/Open 50 mile class.  I bought this picture, taken on the Zen Trail, after the race.  It was taken by Crawling Spider Photography, a creepy name for some people that do pretty good work.

Zen Trail was freaking rad.  I could ride stuff like this all day.

Two weeks after True Grit, Mrs. Geology, KMill and I went to Moab for the 92Fifty Training Camp.  Moab is really cool, and you should go there.  I don't have any pictures, but we rode a ton, and I got to see most of the new trails that have been made in the eight years since I was last there.

Now that it's May and I've barely traveled since the beginning of March you'll be back to your regularly scheduled race reports.  Except for some more interesting surprises coming up in June.

Laters!

February & March Part I: Italy

It's been a crazy 2014 for me so far.  In January I did a fat bike race up around 3000 m in Como, CO.  It was rad, and fat bikes are also rad, if you live in an area that get sufficient snowfall.  I do, so I could totally justify buying one.  It's definitely on the bottom of my list of future bike purchases, though.  I suppose I'm lucky enough to have friends with fat bikes.

Como, CO.  Fat bike racing at 3000 m.

The venue.

My borrowed Borealis Yampa. A carbon fat bike that rode just like a regular MTB.

I participated in the 4 person relay with teammates Jonathan, Les, and Brian.  We won that category, mainly thanks to a blistering lead-out lap by Brian.  Since that race was the Colorado Fat Bike Championship, I suppose that we are the 4 person relay fat bike champions of Colorado.  Special jerseys are in route...

No that long after that I found myself lining up for a month of traveling for work.  First up was a week long maintenance trip to a mine in Safford, AZ.  I had a semi-chance meeting with Tom McD in Phoenix, and, since he had a spare bike with him, I managed to sneak in my last ride of the month on the McDowell Mountain trail system.  It was pretty fun.  Smooth and ripping fast desert singletrack.  Two days after getting back from that trip, I was on another plane...

DIA with snow.

... to Italy.  I never thought I'd really get a chance to go across the pond, let alone basically for free because I was visiting the head office of the company I work for.  It was a pretty cool.  I spent 2 weeks in Pisa (where the office is), and traveled everywhere I could.  When I say "I," I really mean "we" as I went with two of my coworkers.  We traveled overnight through through Philly and Munich.  When we arrived in Pisa, we immediately walked into the center of town to try and find some towers.  We found them (it) after a few hours of walking.

The River Arne.

It definitely leans...

Just a Tower peaking around a corner.

My favorite picture of the day.

We spend the week at work learning about our equipment, and how the company in general works.  The next weekend we found our way to a train station, and ended up in Florence.  That was probably my favorite part of the trip.  We walked around for a long time, ate the best steaks of our lives, drank in a bunch of bars and clubs, then walked around some more the next day.

Of course when I saw a bike shop, I had to visit.

Duomo group selfie.

Duomo.

Fantastic stonework.

Inside the dome.

I climbed this tower.

Top of the Tower.

Best steak ever.  4 cm thick and as raw as is healthy to eat.  Sold by the kilogram.

After somehow making it back to Pisa, we worked for another week, then headed home via a 300 km/hr train to Rome.  I liked the fast train, and really wish the US had more of these.  They totally make sense given how huge the country is.  If you take a train from Chicago to Denver, a distance of 1600 km, it takes you 18 hrs on the California Zephyr.  The train we took to Rome would do it in 5.5 hrs.  When will this country every come into the 21st Century?

Colosseum.

Entrance to the Forum 

One Centurion wearing Timberlands, one in period sandals.  The one in sandals was playing with an iPad.

The Wedding Cake.

Vatican City

Forum ruins.

My favorite picture/spot from the whole trip.  Trevi Fountains at night.  Taken on my cell phone.

The next morning, we were on a plane to Philly.  Our plane was delayed at the gate due to mechanical issues (something with a temperature sensor).  We sat there for three or four hours and watch two planes arrive and leave from the gate next to us.  By the time we got to Philly and through customs we had about five minutes to make it completely across the airport to our Denver flight.  Needless to say we didn't make it.  The airline put us up in a hotel and gave us some food vouchers.  My parents ended up driving down into the city for a surprise dinner at our hotel.  It was cool to see them.  The next morning we were up super early for our flight back home.  It was a good thing that we had all taken the next day off work to sleep because we ended up not getting back home until about 2 PM the next day.  Much sleeping was done.

Tune in soon for some bike racing reports...

Big Classic

Sometimes living in Colorado is great.  This weekend our Big Classic ride saw temperatures in the mid 60s by the time we reached Boulder.  We did a ton of climbing, and I got to see some pretty cool views.  Sometimes, though, it isn't so great.  While my friends back east were enjoying cold, calm rides in the woods, I was fighting very strong headwinds at around 9000 ft.  I would be lying if I said that I enjoyed it.  I'd also be lying if I said I didn't.

We left The Shop early in the morning and began heading northeast.  The plan for the day was about 65 miles of dirt and paved roads totaling about 10000 ft of vertical on our mountain bikes (because we're, you know, mountain bikers).  This ride could just have easily been done on a cross bike or a properly equipped road bike, but it makes sense to break out the full knobby tires if your goal is to ride them fast.  Horses for courses and whatnot.  After the first hour the wind, which had been blowing at the start, died down a bit, and we soon found ourselves in Boulder.  Well, when I say we, I mean that I made it to Boulder probably 15 or 20 minutes after the rest of the group did (I may be mostly acclimated to the elevation, but I don't have big mountain legs yet).  One of our number turned back to make a shorter day, and we picked up one more for the climb up Sunshine Canyon.  Just to give some perspective: Most people (roadies) only do the paved part of Sunshine (5.7 mi, 6%, 1699 ft of gain), and that's considered a solid ride.  Something to do after work on a Tuesday.  We were doing the whole climb all the way up to Gold Hill (9 mi, 6%, 2938 ft of gain).  More accurately we were doing the whole climb all the way to the Peak to Peak Highway (16.3 mi, 4%, 3809 ft of gain).  It was a lot of climbing.  Once I hit the dirt sector, the winds kicked back up again, and by the time I got to Gold Hill, I had all the clothes back on that I had removed down in Boulder.

If was feeling confident when I got to Gold Hill, it was the seven miles between there and the Peak to Peak that destroyed me.  The road goes just about due west, and with an estimated 30 mph wind with gusts up to some speed which stopped me in my tracks and made me put a foot down a few times, the nice circles I had been pedaling quickly turned into clumsy squares.  By the time I got to the Peak to Peak, I was ready to be done.  Luckily I knew that it was mostly downhill to Nederland.  In Ned, I found a cool coffee shop, and called the shop for a pick up.  I had about 15 miles of highway to cover to get back to the shop, and I knew there were a bunch of two to three mile long climbs in between.  Given that, the fact that the wind on the Peak to Peak is notoriously ridiculous, and the fact that I was running out of daylight, I decided that calling it would be the best idea.  Luckily, the shop owner's wife happened to be there to pick up the phone, and she volunteered to come pick me up.

Final tally, I got about 53 miles of the ride, and 8226 ft of climbing.  Next time I'll get the whole thing.  Maybe even do what Jon did and add in one more climb just for the fun of it.

Thanks for reading.