buyala traguitaori

i just made up the words to the title of this post. it could be more appropriately titled super bad ass mountain bike ride. i did the most epic ride ever today. just for you. whoever you is. i'm putting the stats up for my bike ride. in case someone has google earth and wants to see where i rode, you should check out the grandfather district of the pisgah forest. its just south of the us-221 and nc-181 intersection in north carolina. near linville, NC. so anyways.

so anyways. the ride started around 10:30am from the tablerock picnic area. this is basically the beginning of a huge hill. let me re-state that, an F-ing huge hill. we drove a shuttle car down to the bottom of this hill for my buddy, it was probably a 30 minute drive down and back to the top. alright. enough on the size of the hill. we instantly hit singletrack, its good, rolly, some waterbars. it lets out on a gravel road. my two buddies had ridden this area a few weeks ago, they went the "wrong way" and missed a piece of trail. we rode around on every off-shoot of trail and fire road making sure we didn't miss this sweet piece of trail. so we found it. this trail went through this field and we hit more singletrack. this trail was steep as hell. it reminded me of snowshoe mtn. except instead of my 8" travel downhill bike i was on my 4" travel epic. i did everything i could to stay behind the back wheel, basically. imagine your saddle occasionally touching your chest. thats about how far back i was. anyways. the other two guys were on 5" and 6" travel bikes. it was rather challenging. so we get to the bottom of this trail and go across some waterfalls and stuff. it lets out on a gravel road that my two friends had been on before. this was the gravel road they rode down the weeks before. it comes out on hwy nc 181. we cross the street and sit for ten minutes or so. i eat half of my peanut butter sandwich. actually it was only half a sandwich to begin with. so i ate a quarter of a sandwich. we head down greentown trail. it puts us at a ridiculous creek crossing, and since i'd already walked through a couple creeks earlier, i just walked through this one too. we rode for a while, on some relatively flat stuff. it was slightly uphill, but not really steep. so we come to a trail my buddies had ridden, and to the left there's a gravel fire road. i ride up it while they sit. at the top there is a fire road to the left and singletrack to the right. i head back down to get the crew. we go back up and they're like "i dont know. we should stick to the trail we know." of course, we'd ridden mostly new trail to this point. so i just get on my bike and head down the mysterious trail. it was more of the mountains to sea trail. really, really fast stuff here. big ring fast. singletrack. big ring. 44t. are you getting this?

so there is a split. uphill, and really uphill. we opt for uphill. it connects back to the trail that went up the super steep part. so thats all good. moving along. we get to an intersection with two more trails. one is the top of raider camp. to the left is persimmon ridge. i'd ridden both of these a month ago. i tell my buddies i know where we are and i know where the trail lets out on a dirt road. everyone breathes a sigh of relief. so this was the point a month ago where two of the four guys on the ride were like. okay. we're not waiting anymore for you slow guys. referring to me and my boss. anyways. raider camp is this very talked about piece of trail. its amazing. not really steep, but again, very fast big ring for like twenty minutes. yeah. i said twenty minutes. theres another big creek crossing, then a beautiful creek crossing. this one has a bridge made of rocks. but large rocks. like two and three feet wide and tall rocks. must have taken ten guys to build this thing. anyways. more of this trail and we're on a road. nc-90. we take it out of the way from the car to a grocery store in the middle of nowhere. literally. look up mortimer, NC on maps.google.com. see how bad it is. anyways, none of us had any money on us when we got to this store. which was about three miles down the road. so we turn around, ride right past where raider camp let out. continue for oh, three more miles past the trail exit. we knew the dirt road came out on nc-181 and that we'd have to climb a ways to the shuttle car, but on the right there was a forest service road. fs-982 i think. we took it. thinking, this has got to be more direct. climbing now. climbing still. we crest the hill and its 27mph downhill on f.s. road. sweet. at the end of this, it splits. my buddies recognize it. this is where their known trail from earlier would have come out. oh well. we learned something. so we stay on the road to the shuttle car. it was 31.56 miles to this point. my two friends were like you want to ride still or should we take you to your car. i being the tough stupid guy i am was like i'll just ride to my car. there must have been a few thousand feet of climbing in the eight miles remaining back to my car. i rode up 181 for almost 6 miles. then there's a turn on the left at gingercake. rode past some million dollar houses and the road turned to gravel. it crests, downhill back to my car. its over. finally.

so...

my HRM says:
6:33:04 training time
143 avg hr.
176 max hr.
7362 calories burned. (this made my mexican dinner a bit better...)
22% easy zone
32% middle zone
43% hard zone

my computer says:
5:24:40 ride time
7.5mph avg speed
40.67 miles (yes that 40.67 miles)
28.5mph max speed
613.1 miles odometer (since november 2005)

so. today was quite a day. thats all for now. work tomorrow, and a recovery ride. and a very easy week, to get my legs back for the tanasi serc #8 a week from today.

jg

thanks for reading this.