Mammoth Turned Sour

I went to Mammoth over the weekend for the annual bike trip and had a pretty awesome time. I got about around 2-4 hours of sleep every night and when you combine that with a lot of bike riding, I had a few moments of anger and grumpiness, but overall it was a good time.

Despite having a good time, I'll always remember the trip because of what happened when I got home. I had to put my dog Amy to sleep only a few hours after getting home. It ruined any happiness or good memories of Mammoth and so this post is going to be fairly short - or at least a lot shorter than it would have been had my dog not died.


Good memories:

1. Shuttle day. I love shuttle day. Minimal climbing and a lot of fun singletrack.
2. Trying a Bionicon bike. It wasn't as much fun as I hoped it would be, but it was definitely different. More suspension doesn't seem to do that much for me.
3. Fart contests _all_ weekend long.
4. GeoLadders prank on Andrew.
5. Andrew's birthday. The singing, the dancing, the cake. All was good.
6. Hearing the competition in the bathroom at McCoy Station. Wow.
7. Jacuzzi after the second day of climbing.
8. Watching Die Hard _and_ First Blood on tv at the same time.
9. Every night we ate out. Good food and good company.
10. Jason's wig prank to kick off the weekend.

Bad memories:

1. Tipping over on a switchback and hitting my right knee on a tree root. Ouch.
2. Going over the bars in front of two girls that had stopped to walk a section.
3. Going over the bars on a technical section and almost cutting my rear brake cable in half.
4. Jason + beans + confined spaces.
5. Gondolas way high up in the air with wind. (How are these things safe?!)
6. No sleep and plenty of fatigue.
7. Giving Andrew a really hard time on "Follow Me". Sorry about that.


Even some of the bad memories are funny in retrospect. A memorable weekend for sure. Some of the downhill confidence I had built up before going up was taken away with a few crashes, but overall I still feel pretty good about my descending ability.

I took my bike into The Path and I'm hoping they can fix it up. This is the third shop I've taken my bike to in the last month and I'm getting tired of paying to have it fixed.

Also in other news I bought a new wheel for my SS to replace the old dented one and I'm looking forward to riding that bike again.

As one final note I was able to get my shoes replaced by Rock and Road, which was amazing. I had no expectation of getting a new pair, but they said that I was a good customer and helped me out. I'm very excited about the shoes because I couldn't afford to buy new ones.