It's 'appening Again

Well, this early season hasn't been shaping up the way I had hoped. Overall, I've been getting in a decent amount of ride time with a decent amount of quality but I think (and next weekend's race will confirm for sure) that I'm not getting quite enough. So, in addition to starting a semi structured training plan I'm also now going back to my roots and getting up uber frickin early to squeeze in extra rides. I don't plan on doing any interval type stuff at 4 a.m. but tempo work and endurance is certainly a possibility. Probably the hardest part of this plan will be keeping Marcy from stapling my scrotum to the door frame because I keep waking her up even before the buttcrack of dawn.

Day 1 of the new plan was Tuesday. It sucked that the temps had dropped into the mid 30's and I had to dig out some of my cold weather gear but it turned into a pretty good ride and I'm sure there will be many more to come.

As my brother would say, this is my patented Rick Nelson pose. It's really more of a Jeff Kerkove but who am I to argue?

2/3's into the ride I came across some sweet fields with mowed "trails". I'd recently put some fatty fat fat 25mil tires on the road bike so I figured why not take it off road? Flat areas were fine but any slope had me zizzz, zizzz, zizzzing and struggling to put enough weight into the rear wheel to maintain traction on tires with absolutely zero tread. It was actually good training for climbing weight distribution.

I rode the trails until I came to this beaut. I may come back some time with my mtb to try this but that was a little too bumpy for me to try.

When I got back on the road I was hearing a constant scraping and found the culprit to be an accumulation of frost packed into the top of the fork.