Pete's Log: Log Entry 312
Entry #312, (Sports and Athletics)(posted when I was 21 years old.)
went on my first ride of the summer with mark and evelyn diamond and some friend of theirs. i don't remember their friends name, but i remember that her husband is a commercial fisher in alaska. we rode strand hill, which has always been a favorite of mine. i've not ridden it since high school, tho, so my memories were kind of vague. i remembered that it had a fairly tough climbg at the beginning, but in high school i had always been able to make it up that climb no problem. so, we ride out brush creek road, pick up cool spring water (mmmm...) at the spanne ranch, and head for the trail head. before we arrive evelyn is kind enough to remind me to switch into low gear. thank god for that. what came next were the toughest two miles of my life. i don't think i ever breathed that hard in my life. i had to take breaks regularly, just to keep my lungs from exploding (stupid not being adjusted to life at 9000 feet (and above since we rode uphill)), but with only about 7 or 8 stops i made it to the top. i think my pulse maxed out at about 150. luckily i had nice spring water to cool down. then came the downhill. luckily i'm still in decent technical form, so i kept up/lead the pack down. i made it down almost all the challenging technical downhills, except one where i wimped out because i wasn't yet read to ride off/over a huge rock that spanned the trail. but that's ok, i'm quite happy with that. i also made it up some good technical climbs that were scattered throughout the downhill. so overall it was a success. of course, i forgot sunscreen, so my arms are in quite a bit of pain (which is ok, itt masks all the other pain my body is in). towards the bottom was a largish creek that used to have a log across it, so i got to the bottom of the downhill approaching it and started looking for this log instead of powering thru the stream. oh well, i made it halfway without any momentum, and i would've gotten wet either way.
i decided along the way that mountain biking was a great engineer's sport. you have things like gears 'n stuff, and you have to worry about fuel (water) consumption, and weight distribution is key, as is knowing how to use your body as a shock absorber (my wrists hurt badly). so i'm hoping to do many more rides this summer.