Big Bikes

What in The Wild, Wild World of Animals is Going on Here?

I'm not sure why I'm even going to say this but...
I am going to try to keep this one short (famous first words of what will now likely be an epic novel) I need to find more time to sleep, or try to sleep at least and I can't see myself retiring my blog any time soon. Since Whittingham (that's the guy I linked to back there) isn't going to be talking about himself on the inner-tubes for a while (I hope he'll be back) I will talk about him for a minute.

Jeff has a garage which smells of wood and gasoline and is full of manly tools.

Isn't that a good story?

But wait - there's more!

Sort of.

When I was a kid I always thought I'd grow up and find myself in a house attached to a garage full of manly tools too. It hasn't worked out that way. Jeff has chainsaws and axes and lawn mowers and all sorts of other crap I have no idea how to use. I live in a house without a garage, I have bike tools and a pair of hedge clippers which I have used exactly once. I might have a glue gun in a milk crate in the basement. For crafts.

And no, I do not have a point.

I was inspired by Tomi's post this AM to go out and put up my first Fells NEMBA MTB loop time of the year. The original plan for the day was to do an all business hilly road road ride. Good thing I'm a fucking idiot. I forgot my road bike at work last night. It's a long story. It was a longer 11 mile walk home in my helmet and Lycra. Took me two miles to realize I was missing something. So I had to ride one of my mountain bikes and get something like a decent workout in. According to my moronic interpretation of the Joe Friel bible I was supposed to be doing either Lactate Tolerance Reps or Criss Cross Threshold, whatever that is. I decided to split the workout, do the fun MTB TT thing then the puke and die uphill sprints.

The TT was fun as all hell. Near race pace makes riding tired trails way more fun, you take different lines, things look totally different. I missed a turn on a downhill, went off the loop for a probably close to a minute, had to backtrack but still came through faster than I did it last year...I think, but I suck at keeping records. So here's my record for next time.

NEMBA MTB Loop TT

done in a clockwise direction starting at the juncture down the way from Governor's Ave.

Bike: Superfly
Gear: 34 X 18
Tires: XDX 2.1 run at about 25Psi (Front)
Xr1 1.9 run at about 28Psi (rear)
Time (not accounting for going off course, we pay for our mistakes here on The Big Bikes):
28:38

Then I rode up a hill (Wright's Tower) twelve times, which takes a little over 30 seconds.

The Snake.
This is really what I came down here to talk about today. When I was spinning around warming up for my TT, heading up a washed out fire-road I saw a serpent up ahead. Its head was all flattened out, for a second I thought it was a viper of some kind which would have been really surprising, but no. It was a huge Garter snake with its mouth wrapped around a toad the size of my fist. All it had a hold of was the head, the rest of the toad's body was still writhing and kicking.
No way, I thought, is that little snake going to get that thing down its throat, no way in hell. It looked like an Elephant trying to get in a Smart Car.

I cursed up and down that I had opted not to bring my real camera, "Oh, I'm just doing a workout, no blog-fodder-shenanigans will happen out there today". Thing is, you don't choose when blog-fodder-shenanigans will occur. Oh blog-fodder-shenanigans, you are a wily and capricious mistress.

After the TT I returned, not knowing what macabre scene I would find waiting for me. At first I couldn't find the snake at all, I thought, perhaps he and the toad had decided to go their separate ways. "I'm sorry big guy, you are much too large for me to eat, my bad". "No problem chief, I wasn't that into being eaten alive anyway, see you around".

The two of them had actually shuffled off to the side, under some dry leaves. By then the snake had all but the legs down - and the legs were still twitching. The toad was no longer the size of my fist, at least not volume-wise, he was all kind of elongated and smooshed down the snake's throat/body (not sure how a snake works anatomically, exactly) and there was blood kind of oozing out around where the snake's mouth was locked on.

My proximity made the snake a little nervous I guess, so it sped things up, and as I stood there taking a crappy photo with my phone he pretty much finished up the job. He's probably going to have to sleep that one off for a few weeks.

Sleep.

My day was a whole lot better than that toad's day.

Highbridge report Monday!

-t