Season wrap up.

On Sunday the Maine Mountain Bike Association held their awards ceremony. In what has now become tradition the awards banquet was preceded by a large group ride. This year it was held at Bradbury State Park. As I've mentioned before, Bradbury has been busy adding new single track to their already nice selection on the non-mountain side of the park. 30-40 souls showed at 10:30 to feast on some of these new trails. All in all we got in about 2:00 of riding. The group split into two rides, the "A" fast ride and the "B" less fast ride (but probably still fast considering that they were on the heels of the A ride in the beginning. One interesting thing that I noticed on the A ride was that a full 1/3 of the group was on single speed rigs and those riders tended to stay at the front of the group. Very interesting. I rode my single and did manage to stay at the front but I must admit that I got worked over pretty hard in doing so. I had all that I could do to keep the pace and did manage to eat one major dirt sammich on some of the twisty single track. I had been completely redlining to keep up with the leading rider (on a single speed of course) and in my bleary eyed state grabbed a bit too much front brake coming into a hard right hand turn. I did manage to do a nifty shoulder roll when I hit the ground and thus avoiding any horrendous injuries so all is good.

Immediately after the group ride (and a bit of cleaning up) it was off to Thatcher's for awards and beer. There was a good turnout for the awards portion as well with all of the available seating spoken for. After about 50 door prizes were handed out (I nabbed two) awards and thanks were given. The category awards this year consisted of a small marble award about the size of a playing card and a custom embroidered winter hat with Maine Mountain Bike Association along the edge. Pretty cool but a bit on the large side. The hat fits my bulbous melon quite well but I feel bad for anybody with a normal size head. Oh well, thems the breaks.