Easter Sunday 2011

After attending the "sunrise" service at my church at 8:15 this past Sunday, I headed down to the Lorton area to explore the Laurel Hill trails system. I've been hearing for the past year or so about these trails, but had never been or explored them myself. So I hopped on the mountain bike and set off to see what the terrain was like. 

Actually, the night before I had looked up a trail map and directions so I at least had a small inkling of what was in store, but looking at colored lines on a map is entirely different from seeing the trails while riding. Here's the website that I used to read about and find the trails: Trail Voice: Laurel Hill Trails Here's a quick overview of my ride, and you'll see that the gps tracking lines I made are [almost] identical to the trail map. [I did the blue loop twice, and used the Cross County Trail a couple times as well to connect the different areas.]

[Click 'View Details' to expand for more info]

After an hour and change, 11.5 mile ride, I headed over to my parents house to celebrate Easter. As with many families, we always do an Easter egg hunt, and it's now become my job to go out and hide all the eggs before the hunt. I try and get pretty creative and sneaky with the hiding of the eggs, making it difficult to find them all, I'm sure we've lost a couple over the years. But once I'm done hiding the eggs, everyone participating in the hunt gather just inside the front door ready to be let loose. My extremely competitive caring sister, Erika tends to end up with the most, but that's because she will bull rush ya to get an egg. As a spectator, it's almost like being at the colosseum.....okay not really, but you get what I'm trying to say. Either way it usually produces a couple really good photos. Below is a great shot of everyone charging out the front door at the start of the hunt.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Urban Mountain Biking

This is nuts, yet insanely awesome at the same time. What do you think was the craziest part of the video?!

[Urban Mountain Bike Race]

New Bike!

A couple months ago I ordered a new mountain bike, and I got word this past weekend that it finally arrived. Since I had today off from work, I headed into the shop to build it up and bring it home. [SUPER thankful that I finally have roof rack on my car now!] 

Anyway, the bike is a 2011 Gary Fisher HiFi Deluxe. One unique and pretty cool feature is that it has 29" tires/wheels vs the more traditional 26". If you click HERE, you can read some more about the theory behind using 29" wheels. Right now we're getting hit with some more awesome sucky weather, so I probably won't be able to take it for a ride for another week or so, but I'm really looking forward it! I'll be sure to report back on how the first ride goes at that time. I'd really like to get a ton of riding in this spring/summer/fall, and perhaps even take a crack at the Shenandoh Mountain 100 bike race in the fall. Here's a couple shots of the new bike! [Click any for larger version]

2011 Gary Fisher HiFi Deluxe

Of course this bike came from The Bike Lane,
the greatest bike shop of all time. All time!

Blue Mountain Snow Cross!

I survived! In the previous post, I talked about heading up to PA to try the dual slalom racing on snow, and I'm happy to report that I made it up there without issue, had a blast riding my bike down a black diamond run on the snow like a maniac, and made it home all in one piece!

There were just over 40 people who showed up to race. We all got one practice run, then the racing started. We went down in heats of 4 racers, with the top 2 finishers in each heat advancing to the next round. Somehow I managed to actually advance through the first AND the second rounds...but didn't make it past the third round. I was pretty happy with that though, since I wasn't even expecting to advance past the first. There were some really fast guys out there, and it was obvious they race this kinda thing all the time. So for not having the race being broken up into different ability classes (beginner, sport, expert) I was very satisfied with how I did.

Here's some pictures my friend Andrea took of me, the course, and some racing action. And I got some pretty decent footage from the camera I had mounted to my handlebars, so I edited together my three race runs so you could get a better idea of the course and how fast we were going! Enjoy!

Snow-Cross Dual Slalom!

Take 4 mountain bikers, put them in start gates at the top of a mountain and send them off at the same time trying to get to the bottom first while flying over jumps, banking berms, and knocking each other over....oh yea, and it's on snow. Yep, this sounds like a good idea. Count me in!

The event is being held up at Blue Mountain in PA this Saturday, and I'm heading up to give this a whirl and hope I don't kill myself. The race entry is only $20, but that also includes an all day lift ticket to go snowboarding after your eliminated from the racing [I'll probably get eliminated early, so if nothing else I get a nicely discounted lift ticket for being a crazy person attempting to ride a bike down the snowy mountain] - Sounds like a pretty good deal to me! Here's a quick video of the past years events/preview of what this years should look like.

Blue Mountain 4X Biker Cross from Spinteck Limited on Vimeo.

Should be a fun time! I'll bring my camera along and hope to get some good pictures, and maybe find someone to take some shots of me crossing the finish line totally wiping out. Stay tuned!