out with the cold?

with the death of our snow friend (there was a lump of ice in the yard for almost a week) and Snake Creek 2.0 this weekend, i needed to get out and ride! i tooled around town a bit but decided that wasn't enough to make me feel on top of my game.... so i decided to get some night laps in at Conyers. unfortunately it was still ridiculously cold Thursday night. between the windy 20deg temperatures and the slippery freeze though conditions, i only stayed for a single lap. i was happy to warm up with a beer and comedy night.



i wasn't satisfied with the riding i had been doing, so i was really excited about the weekend and the prospect of an epic day with the crew. we headed up to the Pinhoti (Snake Creek Gap) Sunday morning with the plan to ride the full 34 miles of trail. we brought our own SAG support and shuttle. we dropped a car off at the conference center and then dropped off our SAG supplies at the half way mark and then found the beginning of the trail. we didn't get started until around noon... the first half of the Pinhoti is really fun with some big climbs at the beginning and big jumps at the end. the SAG stop in the middle was perfect with Aaron supplying the best PB&J and cookies i may have ever had. while making sandwiches we watched a few people get started from this parking lot. there was a couple that had ridden the trail before and clearly knew what they were doing. then there was a young guy who looked eager, but maybe not very experienced... we finish up and get started about 15 or 20 minutes later.

i rode fairly hard and was having a really good time. i figured that we would meet up at the top of the gravel road at mile 25. i came out of the single track to see the couple approaching the gravel road. i passed them and they decided to pick it up... i could hear them on my wheel as we pushed each other. this climb seemed longer than i had remembered and i think we were waiting for someone else to crack. no one cracked, but we did stop at the top to chat and i waited for the rest of my crew. the couple took off again and told me they were turning back in 10 minutes so they could get back to their car. that made me think... where was that eager kid that headed out of the parking lot without a water bottle or a hydration pack. as i waited i started to realize that the temperatures were dropping and i was wet from a recent creek crossing. i put on some leg warmers and was ready to go.

we all headed back into the single track for the last and most difficult nine miles. i started to get colder and decided to push hard... i hoped that that would warm me up, get me out of the woods before dark and maybe into some dry socks. after a couple more miles i finally come across the eager beaver. he was standing next to the trail looking a little out of it. i sacrificed some sweet downhill and stopped to make sure he was ok. he was wondering how much farther till he was back at his car. he didn't know that the trail was a straight line and not a loop... he did not bring any water or food and was spent. i gave him my CliffBar and offered to get him back to his car if he continued with the last ~7 miles. he decided to head back the 10 miles back to his car. there was only about an hour of daylight left so i knew he was going to struggle in the dark and cold for a while.

i continue on and get tired and sloppy and have a couple good falls on the rocks. i'm happy to to finally see the cell tower which lets me know that i'm out of the woods. i fly down the gravel road to the highway and then realize that i have to dip back into the woods for a quick 100 foot section of single track that nearly spits me out and onto the highway. at the end of this short section there is a nice lip and i'm so excited that i decide to pull up hard and try to fly to the pavement. i didn't even get close and land hard in loose gravel... my front wheel turns and i superman over the bars. i'm bruised, but happy because i'm done for the day.

we all meet up at the car and go to pick up our SAG supplies and then back to the other car. Unfortunately the kid's car is still in the dark lot at ~9PM. we leave a gallon of water for him and hope that he's either almost done hiking or camping with a guy we saw on the trail. either option sounds pretty awful.





now i'm satisfied - for a day at least. unfortunately i feel like i've wasted whatever edge i may have had on Sunday night by not getting out today. i'll have to do something about that before Saturday. also, i had a ranger visit the trailhead to make sure the kid's car was gone. it was and i'm sure he has a good story to tell.

Snow Day '08

it snowed in Atlanta yesterday and we did what most self respecting Atlantan's would do... we played like children. well - the adult version of children...











**not pictured.
-my friend's (and new neighbor) reveal for HGTV's My First Place. look for us on cable sometime this spring.
-me being pelted in the face with snowballs.
-another friend's (and neighbor) surprise birthday party.
-the jerk who stole my hat off of our snow friend.

here is a before and after just to remind us all that no one is ever completely safe. not even on a snow day when you are the guest of honor.

sympathy pains?

this week has been pretty low key... since our recent knee surgery we've been watching the first two seasons of Dexter and eating tons of comfort food. ok - i didn't have surgery, but my roommate did and i'm starting to believe in sympathy pains. my roommate tore his meniscus during one of our Piedmont Park field days back in November and finally had the clean up surgery. since i was beginning to hate myself for the number of cookies i'd eaten and the number of hours spent sedentary, i forced myself to check out a spin class. believe it or not, my knee was sore the whole hour.

to be perfectly honest, the weather here has been pretty awful this week and i've felt like a wuss. it has been cold and wet, which are both surprising for Atlanta these days, and even more surprising is the fact that we had snow! for the past couple months i had been planning on going to Macon this weekend for the Thompson Appreciation Day but with my friends having other plans and the weather not cooperating i've put the idea to the back of my mind. i was planning on trading in my Thompson winnings from the Tumbling Creek race a few months ago for a new seat post... i'll just mail it in with my condolenses... in a sad turn of events, the man of the weekend, Ronnie Thompson, passed away last week and now the birthday party is a memorial service.

Atlanta is supposed to get more snow tomorrow which could be fun and i guess as a concession we were given a really nice afternoon today. i made a list, pulled out the beater and enjoyed getting some errands done. i even cashed in my winnings from last month’s Faster Mustache Toys For Tots race at Outback. i finally replaced my crushed Giro helmet with an LAS Kripton. it looks fancier and is likely much more safe than my cracked helmet but I’m sure it won’t make me look any less like a tool. point is, it's always fun to play in traffic on a beautiful Friday afternoon.

*********************************************************

IN MORE EXCITING NEWS... i’m officially going to Arizona for the first time!

i’m meeting some friends next month for 24HoursofOldPueblo!!

Thursday, February 14, 2008
US Airways # 617
Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson ATL (ATL) to Phoenix Sky Harbor Intl (PHX)
Departure (ATL): February 14, 7:29 PM EST (evening)
Arrival (PHX): February 14, 10:00 PM MST (evening)

i guess i’ll have to buy my bike some chocolates.

i just hope our knee has recovered by then.

note to self - fix your own chain!

This past week was full of good rides, failed ride attempts and excellent makeup rides. We made it out to our ‘weekly’ night ride on Tuesday... Last winter we rode practically every Thursday night no matter what the temperature. It seemed to always be freezing cold but after a couple laps we would all stand in our steam clouds while talking about how hot we had gotten. This year has either been exceptionally mild or we’ve been much lazier. I have gotten a good number of night rides in but I haven’t seen my own steam at all this winter… It was a beautiful night in Conyers and five of us were there with lights fully charged. The parking lot and the infield of the horse park were becoming covered with dense fog. The lights lit up the fog and limited our visibility making me think this ride was going to fun. We had escaped the fog right as we entered the woods and there was an immediate fifteen degree temperature difference. Throughout the trail there were patches of cold clouds attempting to block our way.

Conyers seems to hand out failures in pairs… On my birthday we had planned on riding three complete laps, one for each decade. We ran out of spare tubes after I got two flats on the exact same root on two consecutive laps. We ended up heading back to the house and kicked off the best birthday party ever just a little early. Tuesday night I broke my chain on the exact same rock where I left a link only a couple months ago. This latest failure has reminded me to buy some QuickLinks and makes me wonder how long it will be before Conyers takes my other collar bone.

Wednesday night is track night and this past week was really great. There were at least twenty people putting in some winter laps. I’m new to the track so I’m just happy to get into some pacelines and eavesdrop on the more experienced guys. I took off a little early so that I could have my favorite spinach salad at Ace’s with a side basket of curly fries. And a couple LoneStars – the puzzles are fun.

I woke up Saturday with 35 miles of Bull and Jake mountains in mind. After a Kirkwood breakfast and some dog park time…. I ended up only having time to make it to Blankets Creek. The place was completely slammed and I was quickly reminded why I don’t ride Blankets during daylight, especially on the weekend. It was actually really nice to see the number of people interested in riding and the number of families appreciating some quality time. It was really crowded, but apparently not many folks venture down to the South Loop.

Sunday I woke up with every intention of catching the airport ride. I ran around in circles all morning trying to get breakfast for Buckley and myself which meant a trip to the grocery store. I knew I was cutting it close, but unfortunately I cut right through it and missed the start. Later that morning I was lucky enough to get an invite to Chicopee and my afternoon plans were made. I broke a chain within the first mile and was again reminded to BUY SOME QUICKLINKS! We rode every inch of Chicopee at a killer pace and I was happy to get home and crash. My legs felt abnormally heavy and it appears my reliabilibuddies are on a mission to take out their revenge on Snake Creek. I guess we are going to ride hard for the next couple of months…. all business I guess? Not sure how I feel about that.

happy friday.

I was minding my own business at lunch a couple days ago when I got a text message from a friend that I haven't seen more than once in almost a year. “omg your blog is so boring!” I would assume this was just a quick pick-me-up from an old friend to help usher in a great weekend, but something tells me it was likely just the opposite. I never claimed to be interesting and I’m positive that the vast majority of people could care less about bikes. I can only imagine what torture reading about the combination might be. So, I’m not arguing the point, I’m just providing disclaimer… This is where I may be keeping some ride and race reports. I’ve enjoyed some other rider blogs for some time now so I guess I am the target audience – chances are – you aren’t.

These lucky bastards are the real thing – you probably wouldn’t like their blogs either:
http://teamdicky.blog.com/
http://eddieodea.com/
http://harveyminton.blogspot.com/
http://namrita.blogspot.com/
http://www.kristapark.com/

Snake '08 - Version 1.0

This is a time trial series where they take the best time of three attempts. There is a 17 mile and a 34 mile option. The trail is so tough that they expect you to have serious mechanical problems for at least one of the attempts I guess. This is the only 5 star difficulty trail in GA (according to Kurt's book). I registered for the 17 mile option which puts me onto the back 17 of the 34 (the ‘impossible’ half).

I had never ridden the Pinhoti before and from what I had been hearing, the trail was impossible. I wasn’t intimidated by the trail, but I was a little intimidated by the 250 bikers there. Everyone looked really tough…

So – I went out really hard with three goals in mind.

1- Ride as hard as possible until I get to the ‘impossible’ parts. Make up time where it’s possible.
2- Always have a rider in sight and work on passing them. We were let out of the gate ~1 minute from each other.
3- Finish before my 2.5 hour playlist.

The ride was fast in sections and very technically difficult. I’d pay money to watch someone clean a couple of those climbs. I ended up with 2 crashes, 2 hikes and several dabs.

Result – I did not get passed. I passed probably 40 riders. I finished with 9 songs left on my playlist.

http://www.nwgasorba.org/Snake2008/Snake08_JanuaryResults.htm

Now I have to go back for Snake2 and 3 in Feb and March to try to improve my time and defend my standing. So far I’m the only rider that has broken the 2 hour mark. I’m fully expecting some competition from some unfortunate riders who may have been dealing with a series of mechanicals.

This is what a sub-2hour effort on the Pinhoti looks like:
(**it's not pretty**)



I should mention that I rode up to Dalton with three of my ‘bros’. My accountibilibros… We have ridden a ton of miles together over the past year and have watched each other improve. We each have our own style but somehow we always finish a trail at the same time… [Example: We rode in the Fool’s Gold 50 mile event (http://55nine.blogspot.com/2007/08/fools-gold-100-50-mountain-bike-race.html ) last summer and after 6 hours of riding we finished within 10 minutes of each other.] We are shooting for taking spots 1-4 once the series is said and done… after January we are sitting in 1,2,4,and 14. Aaron had three flats in Snake1, so we expect to see him up top next month if he can keep his bike healthy.

The important questions…

People often ask me “what made you get into bikes?” I always answer “umm… I was a kid once?”

I am not a serious bike advocate or a world class racer. I haven’t defined a message for myself, nor do I know how many watts I generate in the first 10 meters of a sprint. I am a fan of bike culture(s) and having a good time. I strongly believe that a bike friendly city is a happier city. In any given week I may ride multiple bikes in distinctly different styles with the only commonality being that each one is fun. I ride around town, in alleycats, and to the bar on an old fixie conversion and get a kick out of the hipsters… I ride a geared road bike in large and quick group rides and get a kick out of the lycra-clad, heart rate monitoring cyclists… I ride a track bike at the velodrome and try to keep up with the obsessive track racers who secretly train all year with their coaches and relate every moment to their regimen… I ride my mountain bike everywhere that isn’t paved and love everything about it, including the beer and taquitos…

This is a place for me to share with my friends and family. This may or may not be a place where I share random observations and/or aspects of my life not bike related at all. I make no guarantees about how often I will post as I am typically a private person. That’s something I’m working on… My family feels like I don’t let them know what I’m up to and for years many of my friends have given me the nickname ‘the ever elusive Austin’. Maybe this will help us understand each other a little more. Even though “what made you get into bikes?” is a simple question, it may have a much more complicated answer than we know just yet. Another reason I'm sharing here is for my benefit. Over the past few years it has seemed like every experience is either a first or the best. I realize that a lot of that has to do with the newness of the previous experience being lost. I'd like to make my experiences last a little longer.

the buildup...

A quick story to fill in some of the gaps up to present...

If I claimed to remember learning to ride a bike it would be a stretch. I have a very blurred memory of the event, but I believe it happened pretty quickly. This was before training wheels and helmets were a necessity. All you needed was someone to hold the back of your seat for a couple pedal strokes and then the resilience to allow you to fall a few times without deciding to give up and watch cartoons instead. I do however remember my first bike race! It was a sprint in Spearman, TX. I was seven and it was the summer of the ’84 Olympics, I had been matched up against the fastest dog in the neighborhood. I think he was a black lab, but I’m certain he liked to chase bikes. I was winning by half a dog length when I looked back to make sure my ankle wasn’t about to become a chew toy. Before I turn my eyes back to the road in front of me, my front tire sunk into a bike eating pothole and my chin was sliding across the pavement. After a handful of stitches and more than 20 years, I am still asked about the scar on my chin on a regular basis.

I wanted to race BMX just like every kid – or every kid I knew at the time. We built dirt tracks all over the neighborhood and in the surrounding woods. Our moms would take turns dropping us off at Cheehaw Park in Albany, GA where there was an amazing dirt track with huge jumps. We rode all day everyday and would take breaks to get motivation from our favorite movie, RAD! Like all of my friends, we moved on to freestyle bikes and then skateboards… My mom was the coolest in the neighborhood so naturally my back yard had a half pipe and the street in front of the house had multiple launch ramps, boxes and rails, not to mention at least 3 kids with attitudes drinking our Kool Aid. I also wanted to be a distance runner which was different than any of my friends. I did many junior races with a decent record and 1 triathlon… Oklahoma City, won the 10-12 year old category! Mostly, I just spent my childhood playing. Constantly. Unfortunately, we also liked to be dangerous and one afternoon a trampoline/sprinkler incident led to me having stretched knee ligaments and the development of Osgood Schlatter’s disease. This put an end to my very young running career. So I continued with the typical evolution of an active boy as far as I knew in south GA. I became more interested in girls, playing in bands and working my minimum wage jobs to pay for gas and fast food. And then it was off to college.

With the idea of getting around campus, I bought a cheap mountain bike a few months before I thought I’d be leaving for college. What actually happened was that I fell in love with the bike and I went out looking for the trails we used to ride when I was much younger. Unfortunately the woods surrounding my neighborhood were now just more neighborhoods. There were no trails or woods to be found. I did find some trails on the other side of a narrow highway and visited them practically everyday during the summer after high school. I also liked to surprise my girlfriend and shock her parents by riding my bike to their house. We only lived about 15 miles from each other, but this was in a town with a lot of fast two lane roads and drivers who have never seen a bike outside of a subdivision. Maybe I’m lucky… it had never even crossed my mind to buy a helmet back then. The summer came to an end and I was happy find out that Georgia Southern’s campus was crawling with bikes and several of my new friends in the dorm were equally excited.

I’ve wanted to race mountain bikes since my freshman year of college. I used to ride my fully rigid (clearance sale) Diamond Back all over Statesboro and we would have midnight rides on campus several nights a week after studying. I came across the Georgia Southern mountain bike team in the woods one afternoon and rode with them for a couple hours. I was able to ride along side them and outride some of them…. Yet, they weren’t very friendly and I never saw or heard from them again. I think a lot of it had to do with my ‘WalMart-ish’ bike and I didn’t have the money to buy a nicer one. So, on one really fast midnight ride I crashed and my wrist, lower back and that bike were never the same. I didn’t ride much at all through the rest of college as I moved to Georgia Tech and continued to get busier with studies and figuring out how to pay for the real world.

Every spring between ’98 and ‘03 I would get the itch to go riding and would go bike shopping. I didn’t have nearly the money for the bikes I wanted so I would rationalize why I should concentrate on work rather than risking being relatively broke and potentially broken again. I was living the consultant lifestyle where you didn’t know who was going to write your paycheck from project to project. I had been laid off from projects twice before and was told that my latest contract was going to end 6 months prior to initial thought. So, after being a consultant for several years and not having time to do anything but work, worry, eat and gain my freshman 15 a few years late, I hired onto a full time position which to me simply meant less money but more free time and stability. I could consider a hobby!

With my first salaried position and my first ‘bonus’ (which was not nearly what my imagination had led me to hope for) I did some serious mountain bike shopping. I bought a previous year’s model at a clearance sale and went directly to the nearest trail. I was so eager to get out there that I didn’t wait to get a helmet, water, food….or directions. I ended up lost in the woods for a couple extra hours and as it was getting dark, I started to wonder if this was really something I wanted to get into. Before my next ride I went out and bought all of the essential supplies.

Some time (years) passed and I had gotten a few miles under my belt. I was proud of myself if I got out of town a couple times a month and rode maybe 10-15 miles. I would often take my dog with me and he loved to run the trail right on my back tire. He runs as hard as it takes to keep up and I have to stop more often now to keep him from completely blowing himself up. I was alone at the ’96 Olympic trail in Conyers when I reconsidered my hobby again. I went down hard and could not lift my arm. I hiked back to my car which was over two miles away while dragging my bike and then after asking for directions, drove myself to the emergency room. I had a “shattered” clavicle and had to have a steel plate and a series of 8 screws permanently installed. Yikes! This kept me off the bike for a few months and took a lot of the fun out of riding until I met some great friends who are usually up for riding at any time.

Now I ride often and begin to feel unlike myself if I go more than two days without getting on a bike. I’ve been lucky enough to incorporate bikes into my lifestyle. Weather it is riding to the store, bar, work or on a quick road ride, the track or on some of the great trails that surround us in Atlanta. Bikes have kept me young at heart and have reminded me what it was like to be a kid instead of constantly worrying about the everyday grind that beats so many of us down until we settled into a recliner talking about the good old days. Everyday is a good day and the opportunities just continue.