A dry ride?? How could that be...

Well we got lucky, we finally got to ride and see the sun. I have been getting used to riding 6+ hours in driving rain so I was not sure how I would react to warmer/dryer temps. So we all met up at 5AM and had a good ride and did some exploring around Crt Conway and Conway Lake areas. We headed over to Redstone and I wasn't able to remeber how to get to the top of Redstone Ledge so after a riding around there a bit A1 needed to make a pit stop for some lube as he was getting bad chain suck. He didn't have a lot of luck but they did have some 3 in 1 oil and he proceeded to squirt it everywhere. I think the EPA was there this afternoon doing the cleanup. Well from Redstone we headed to the powerlines and up and across Peaked Mtn. at the bottom A1 blew up literally, well his tire did. Turned out none of us rocket scientists had a spare tube with us so he was walkin. DEA and I continued our trek over to Cranmore and the Access Road to the top. That climb was different as we usually do it first. I was definately feeling it after riding for 2+ hours before hitting it. We made it to the top a little off our usual pace but as we headed across the connector trial to Redtail I was feeling very poor. Maybe I was bonking or just had not eaten enough. I started eating some and once I made it to Redtail we began our descent. The trail was in nice shape considering the rain we'd had on the top 3/4 of the trail but the bottom section has seen better days. The trip down gave my legs a chance to recover but my hands and arms were screaming by the time we were done. We heard from A1 that he was not going to meet up so we headed over to Whitaker Woods and then to refuel in N. Conway. After snapping into a couple slim jims, a red bull, some gatorade, a power bar, some peanut-butter crackers and some H2O I was feeling a lot better. We made our way to Echo Lake and then worked our way over to Cedar Creek for some fast single track. After a spin there we started climbing the forst road to the Mineral Site and that was a pretty good climb considering we had been riding for quite a while. We then took the Mineral Site trail across to the High School trail. SOme more climbing and a fun downhill. At the bottom we dd another loop around the single track before we stared back to N. Conway and our trip home. We did sticks & stones at a not so fast pace missing all the stunts and elements. Odd way to ride it as I'm usually trying to ride over something to hurt myself. Once back on the power lines we cruised back to 302 and the hammered back home. THe number on th day from the GPS are: about 7 hours on the bike, 48.86 miles, 5,174 feet of climbing, averaging 8.3mph. So we had a productive training ride, the weather was perfect, the views from Redtail were supreme, someday I'll remember a camera, and we learned a little more about our crew.




JJ