For worse or for better

This weekend we (me, Chris, Scott, Melissa, Bill, Mike, Jeanie, John, and Jason) went up to Winter Park to pre-ride the next race course.

It's a longer race than the last one, so I wanted to preride to make sure I could do it without coming home hating the sport.

Good thing I did because the smile in this pictures is VERY forced! (what's the deal with my tippy helmet? Do I have an uneven head or something? I even messed with the straps before this ride to fix this problem of looking retarded in pictures, hmmm)

I'm still officially undecided about the race, but I'm leaning more towards no. It was a long ride (even if we did go off-route a little, and stop a lot). The course was fun, but not so fun that I'm dying to do it again. There was a lot of climbing on dirt roads, with some fun rocky dowhills, some hike-a-bike-up-long-hills, a wild river crossing, more climbing, and a little more downhill. Eh. Parts were fun, parts were crappy, hence the still officially undecided stance. Melissa (pictured here) is signed up for the series so she doesn't have much of a choice -- she's going to do really well though. She was strong on the climbs and pulling away on the descents.

It was my longest mountain bike ride to date I think. My bike computer had 18.5 miles from the car and back again. My computer has a slightly longer mileage than the other people in the group, but I'm chalking that up to all of my weaving as I got tired. As mentioned in my previous post -- my endurance level hovers around a pathetic 7 or 8 miles. So, needless to say, it was a long ride for me. It took the group around 3 hours or so with stopping and chatting and huffing through the river.

We even climbed our bikes up to where there's still snow!

Overall it was a fun ride. Beautiful scenary. Great company. Delicious spinach/artichoke dip at BeauJos afterwards. Only one crying incident when I thought were were almost back to the car when the route took us up onto another trail where we had to huff our bikes over some downed trees. Mentally I was done. All was good though. We'll see what happens from here.

Anyone else see the inadvertant smiley face on the dirt on my leg after the ride?

P.S: Pictures of new kitchen remodel and new baby blanket knitting to come!