Wednesday MTB Ride Green Mountain

Another great ride tonight. The group was thin, but solid. So tonight it was Chris and Marni, Whiskey Dave, and myself. Dave and Chris were riding their big fat tire snow bikes! Crazy-looking rigs with large cool-factor scores. I had never seen them, and Chris explained them to me. Chris is an engineer and so I can understand his frequency. I like to know about details of things. Some folks dont explain them well. Chris does. Or at least he makes sense to me. The bikes Dave and Chris were riding were different...Dave goes fixie and Chris is geared, but they are the most odd-looking MTBs. I understand from Chris' explanation that they are sick in the snow - thus the point of the design in the first place. After getting set up, we rolled about 20 after 6 or so.

Dave had some mechanicals and turned around early, while the rest of us spun around at a fairly relaxed pace. Green Mountain is not super technical or difficult. There are a few short steepish sections, but nothing to cry about, really. When we got up to the top of the mountain where the radio tower is, there was an incredible moon rise over Denver. Full moon, or close to it. I really need to start bringing a camera with me. I checked my GPS, maybe 6700 feet up on top. Not a huge climb at all, but the view of Denver is well worth it.

A few minutes into the downhill come-back trail, we hit the lights, and then Chris and I promptly took diggers. Poor Chris...he reaches down to do some adjustment to his light or something and I was behind him, and just at the point he has only one hand on the bars, a large granitic cobble moves right in front of his big fat tractor tire and takes him out. Freakin cobbles, man! Always playing games!

I rolled up on Chris, and he was on his back, sort of contorted on the side of the trail, laughing......usually a good sign that all the body parts are intact. Chris eventually got up after I removed my headlamp beam from his face (sorry dude.....Im new to the night-riding thing, still working on light ettiquete), he did a quick check for limb activity, they all checked out in the 'functional' range, no large pools of blood had accumulated on the trail, so we mounted up and pressed on. Another header, another party. Right?

About 60-seconds later, I go down! A stupid endo, but..I have a really good excuse. Chris was behind me at this point and he has this freakin midnight sun monster zillion candlepower nuclear fusion bomb flood light that casts this insane shadow all over the zip code. So as he was slowly rolling up on me from behind, my own lights began to get flooded out by Chris' far more powerful fusion UFO photon beam. So as he got closer and closer, my light/shadow perception got more and more jacked up (thats a sort of undefined technical term I use often to describe situations that are..........not as they should be), and finally he was right on my wheel and there were these giant bizzaro-world exagerated geometry shadows all over that looked like some kind of freak scene out of Apocalypse Now, and I was watching them and not the trail and next thing I know, Im off the bike, curled up in the middle of the trail hoping Chris doesnt roll right over me with his monster bike! Thank God for disk brakes I guess.

Im all for crashing usually......crashing pretty much rocks (unless you jack up a bone or tendon or something, then crashing blows - see the link to the right to Mike Brevoorts blog regarding why crashing blows) But I dig stuff that rocks. And if the body stays intact, crashing is no biggie - as long as the kit doesnt get jacked up. Skin grows back, free of charge. Lycra is not free. I rolled the Hammer/TVG Racing Team kit tongiht, as I am proud to wear, and I need to keep my stuff intact for next season. I cant be buying new cycling clothes every week. Im not made of money. Note: Dirt endos are reletively safe on the kit - what with the lack of asphalt. The 'clothing success rate' for road endos sucks. Conclusion? Ride dirt more often.

Marni is a very good rider and did not crash! I should also add that she has the same light Chris has and between the two of them, it is quite the daylight out there.

Anyhow, we had a great ride. We saw some deer on the way down the hill, then we met Whiskey Dave back at the parking lot and saw some other folks about to head out for a night ride. Green Mountain is very much like so many SoCal ride areas - it is not pretty or fancy, but its dirt. And Im starting to really like dirt.

Thanks for reading.