Saturday morning arrived way too soon. I met most of my friends at Cracker Barrel for an early breakfast and we chowed down, talking nervously about the coming adventure. Then we headed off for the Pisgah Ranger Station, the start area of Pisgah Mountain Bike Adventure Race, aka PMBAR.
On the way I stopped at the Hub to throw my bike and gear into Nick’s truck and we rode in together.
With not one, but two big events coming up very quickly, I took it very easy the week before PMBAR. I think I spent more time in Motion Makers getting bikes into riding shape than time spent getting myself into riding shape.
Which also means my wallet is getting thinner faster than my gut is. The rest of the story »
In past posts, I’ve made a few brief references to PMBAR, the Pisgah Mountain Bike Adventure Race. The best way to describe this race is to copy directly from the event website:
“On Saturday May 5th, 2012 Teams of two riders will race to reach 4 of 5 checkpoints, in any order, and return to the start/finish. Checkpoint locations will remain secret until start-time and there is no suggested route. Routes will vary between 50-80 miles, will include 9,000-15,000 feet of climbing, and should take 6-12 hours to complete. PLEASE DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE EXTREME DIFFICULTY OF THIS EVENT.”
Apparently when I first started claiming that it never rains on me, I forgot to rule out the possibility of hail. In western Ohio, it does hail occasionally, but in all the miles I’ve ridden a bike I can only think of one or two times that it happened. Not so in the mountains. In the past three weeks I’ve been caught out in hail four times.
This is the story of the third time.
I can barely remember the last time I went for a run. Without looking it up, I think it has been nearly a month. Even though I have only been riding in this early spring, I’m doing a wide variety of types of rides. This couple weeks have included commutes, group road rides, solo road rides, solo mountain bike rides, group mountain bike rides, flat(ish) rides, mountainous rides, smooth flowy rides, technical Pisgah rides and more.
Maybe that’s why I own so many bikes.
Another gorgeous weekend, another long ride. This time it was a road loop, but for once didn’t include the Blue Ridge Parkway.
OK, so maybe it included a little bit of Parkway, but only about six miles up near Mt. Pisgah to connect between two other roads.
April is becoming a month of extremes. Instead of a long series of similar rides of similar lengths at similar times, I seem to be going on all day adventures or taking rest days.
This week was particularly light. The rest of the story »
The day after 6 Hours of Warrior Creek was a perfect spring day… browns turning green, deep blue skies, things blooming (never mind the allergies) and perfect temperatures. I could have been convinced to sit at home all day and relax, but as I frequently say, active recovery is the best recovery. I wanted to get out and enjoy the nice weather and do it in a relaxing way, so I opted to hop on the Tricross and go for a casual afternoon ‘B’ ride.
B is for Bent Creek, B is for Blue Ridge Parkway and B is for Biltmore… a whole lotta Biltmore.
There’s nothing quite like signing up for a six hour mountain bike race on a whim. Except for maybe signing up for a six hour mountain bike race on a whim and then racing it on trails you’ve never ridden before.
That’s what I did at 6 Hours of Warrior Creek.
March is supposed to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. From a riding perspective, this March went out like a lion raging on PCP. There are two epic rides to talk about, but before they happened, the last week of March was fairly calm.
The calm before the storm, which looked something like this. The rest of the story »
On the morning of the Pisgah 111k preview ride, I woke to find myself sore and fatigued. Very sore. Very fatigued. As I’ve mentioned a million times, I don’t have the ability to lay down and go to sleep earlier than normal, so when the alarm went off at 7am I had gotten at most about four hours of broken sleep. After turning off the alarm I gave myself about two minutes to quickly assess the situation and decide whether I would be smarter to bail on the ride and go back to bed. 9 times out of ten, that exactly what I do.
This time, I got myself moving, dressed and out the door.
Look over to the right of this page, and you’ll see a quote from T. S. Elliot. It’s a quote I live by. I push myself pretty hard and pretty far pretty much all the time, and I’ve while I’ve gotten close to going too far many times, I have never actually made it over the edge.
On April 1 (ironically, a day for fools), I actually managed to do it.
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