NEW BIKE

HOORAY! After three and a half years I have finally replaced my silver Specialized bike with this:

From Blog Pictures

It's a 2009 Epic Expert Carbon bike. I have come into some good fortune financially and that has allowed me to get the new bike. I got a great deal at The Path which saved me roughly 800 dollars.

I just love riding right now. I'm riding familiar trails in the hopes of setting personal bests. So far I've taken my Old Camp-Luge time down by 10 minutes and my Whiting-Luge time down by 8 minutes. On Thursday morning I'm going to see if I can get my Beek's time down from 49 minutes.

The new machine weighs in at 25.8 pounds and my old bike was tipping the scale at around 29 pounds. I'm planning on upgrading a few things a few months before Vision Quest in the hopes of dropping another pound. I just don't want to spend anymore money for the time being.

God is always good, but I feel like He has been especially good to me as of late. I was so desperate for a new bike earlier in the year but decided to wait. Even better is that I get to go to Mammoth this weekend to really break in the new ride.

Where did the month go?

Hmmmmmm. Last post was a month ago? Seems about right. Life has been chaotic at best over the last month and biking has been the farthest thing from my mind.

Some notes:

- I went and did a Whiting-Luge lap yesterday and got a new personal best by a minute (1:23). This shocked me because I've been feeling slow on the bike lately and I haven't exactly been training hard. When I train hard I don't seem to grow and when I don't ride I grow a little? Makes no sense.

- Injuries. Ugh. I added to my injury list last Friday. I crashed in the first five minutes on Deer Canyon in El Moro which gave me a huge bruise (maybe even a hematoma) on my right knee. It's a black spot about the size of a softball and it's sore.

Beyond that my left wrist still hurts from a crash in February and my left knee still hurts from my crash on Trabuco. These injuries only manifest themselves on longer rides or when I'm pushing really hard.

I have so many aches and pains I can't even remember where half of them came from. Oh well. Need to crash less.

- Our 3 man open team got fifth place at 12 hours of Rim Nordic. All in all I was pretty happy with the race. I did my first two laps on my rigid SS and the next two on Matt's SS. I just couldn't take the rigid fork after the first two laps. I felt quite a bit better on the Rita.


I think that's it really. I still dream of getting a new bike and I'm starting to doubt whether or not I'm going to do the 24 hour race in Hurkey later in the year. Unless something major changes with my motivation for riding I just don't see that happening.