Jun 28, 2008

Baking on National

A crew that consisted of CactusJoe, Bike=Good, Chongoman, Durtgurl, Daugela, Yuri and I did a ride up Javelina, Mormon Loop and National this morning. I had a really great climbing day the other day, but for some reason, that confidence was spoiled by a skipping my in my favorite gears, poor nutrition the day before (including one too many beers), fatigue from this weeks workouts, and the heat. Don't get me wrong this was an excellent ride, but I wasn't totally on.

I've been having a tough time on the spine of the waterfall, and after about half dozen trips down it, I finally figured out that with my lefty, I need to hit it with much less speed and more control.

I left my camera on the day before, so I had no battery left. However, DurtGurl caught a bunch of really neat shots.

Here's her Vid:

Jun 14, 2008

Pedaling up Pinal Mt and down Six Shooter, Globe AZ

The heat is here, but that didn't discourage chollaball, Alex, skinnytire and myself from meeting up in Globe, AZ for a little pedal up Pinal Mt, and then down the sweet, sweet trail of Six Shooter. We split from the parking lot at about 8:20, under blue skies. We knew it was gonna be warm, but we also knew there would be nice long periods of shade and cooling from being about 4k vf higher than our starting point.

I did this pedaled this about month and half ago with Paul B., and we did the climb in 3.5 hours, but today with a couple stops along the way we managed to do the climb in 3 hours. Actually chollaball and Alex knocked it out in under 2.5 hours.

Skinnytire gets the guts award today for bringing the 40 lbs of Kona up the hill.

The trails were fast, but after the long climb up, I wasn't seeing the trail all that well. I struggled to track good lines down the trail. Today, we did some sessioning on some of the features on the trail. First tries didn't always meet up with success, but we also didn't get banged up either. I did take a stupid little spill, and cracked my knee cap on sharp rock. No blood, but it did kinda smart. I neglected to bring the bash pads up today. Last time I leave those in the car on this ride.

I got a 100 oz camelbak and sucked nearly the whole thing down on the roll up the hill, so I was outta water for basically the whole ride down. The bummer part about this was that it was getting hotter, and hotter again as we lost elevation. That and I had downed nearly my whole gatorade on the break at the top.

We found a new exit today, down by the windmill, thanks to some other doods that we came across that shuttle to the top of the hill. As hot as it was, I wasn't looking forward to the no momentum riding on the exit that I usually take, especially considering that it was prolly about 95 degrees outta water, and we'd been on the trail for about 5 hours.

Here's a vid of the day:




And for the patient, here's a high res - Six Shooter Ride Quicktime Version (it'll take about 3 or 4 minutes to load up)

Jun 8, 2008

Riding Prescott, AZ

Got some riding up in Prescott today with a stack of 15 other MTBR riders today. We meet up at a the outa business Chinese restaurant behind Costco at 8:00 and then shuttle our bikes to the other side of town near Granite Basin. Not your ordinary shuttle though, because I think we actually started lower than our ending point. As Dave, Ionmuse, put it; "today is the anti-shuttle".

The temps were nice, and being back into trees again was neato. We kicked off from the parking lot at about 9:00, and from the beginning, the trail numbers became a blur. We basically did a a semi-circle around Prescott. The trails were pretty tame, except we managed to do a lot of climbing.

A few minor hangs up happend, but the we did have a pretty serious crash around mile number 21, where Kennith from Prescott had a high speed crash on a rutted out jeep road. He hid really hard, and bashed up his face and shoulder pretty bad.

At this point, we got back down the Highway, and made some phone calls to see if he could picked up and taken back into town. And this kinda killed the mojo for me and bunch of other riders, so some Helimech, a Prescott local, called in for support, and had is wife pick us for the trip back to our cars. A few hardy soles did manage to complete the full meal deal, but I ended up with about 23 miles and 4,400 vf of climbing.

Anyhow, here's vid of the day and a link for other pics:



And for the patient, here's a high res - Prescott, AZ Ride Quicktime Version (it'll take about 4 or 5 minutes to load up)