Gravel Grinder Wrap Up Or The Beast With A Million Photos

I'm tired. I mean, my fingers and hands hurt too much to write in any kind of vigorous way. I would never use the word "vigorous" in speech, in that context. The blog-o-verse version of me is such a douche. The new job is the ultimate excuse for getting out of blogging...or anything. It's like having a kid or a dog, but it's not...because people only have a small number of kids or dogs; I have hundreds of kids I have to put on bikes. It is literally like I am raising hundreds of children, so all parents and pet owners can pretty much suck it, because I am a better, cooler, harder working person than all of you motherfuckers put together. Even if you had mutant powers and Nobel Peace Prizes, you still wouldn't have shit on me. 

See, what did I tell you? Blog-o-verse me...such a douche. 

I Rolled It Forward today, I rolled it backward today, I rolled it every which way, and now I am just going to lay down some photos, lots of photos, and talk about them. 

I Went To Vermont And All I Got Was This Stupid New Name

 Saturday afternoon I was feeling a little lost. I haven't talked a lot about it here, but I basically can't ride a bike to save my life right now. Can't train in any kind of serious way anyway. I'm a mess. So I was driving around, doing work-related things (we'll talk about the new work, i.e.: "my good excuse for not blogging" later this week). I was thinking about how the Ronde De Rosey was the next day, and how, if I rode it, I would destroy my knee for the entire season and how that would suck more than the big suck I am experiencing currently. I thought about how the Gravel Grinder charity ride was going down in Waterbury, VT the next day as well, and how I was really sad that I wouldn't be riding bikes and drinking beer up there. But then I got a call from Gravel Grinder organizer George W. Bike29 and he was like "Aah! Come up and drink beer and hang out, you don't need to ride bikes to have fun!" And I said

Gravel Grinder

Oh I don't have good excuses, I have GREAT excuses (for why I didn't get a post up yesterday as promised). Theses excuses involve a four hour mountain bike ride, the discovery of the sweetest new riding spot I've seen in a long time, and my grandmother. They may involve a four hour mountain bike ride with my grandmother. You'll just have to tune in tomorrow to find out.

As for today, I recommend that you mosey on over to the 29er Crew site and check out The Gravel Grinder Report.

-t

Two Days in The Valley

Heading up to Vermont for the it's-not-a-race Gravel Grinder ride was a great dry run for actually heading out to the races, something I won't be doing for another few weeks. Except it was more of a wet run...cuz it was wet. Hur. If I were going off to a race I would have been sweating over what crap I should be bringing, ending up with a double-wide milk crate full of redundant superfluousness. This was not the case as we packed up Friday afternoon. I threw a pump, a tube, and a multi-tool in a backpack with a pile of clothes and we were gone. Only I did bring a something I don't normally bring to the races — a bucket, brushes, and some Dawn. I was fearful about the snowy/rainy conditions and the havoc they would wreak upon my snazzy new drivetrain. (Do geared bikes even work in the rain?) I wanted to be able to scrub my bike down after Saturday's ride to and make sure it was functional for Sunday's not-a-race.



The not-a-race was on Sunday up in Waterbury, but the bigger beat-down would come on Saturday while out on a "mellow ride" with a gorilla who was shaved down, taught to ride a bike, sold on the blackmarket as a human child, and named Jeffrey by his unwitting adoptive parents. In the above photo he puts the finishing touches on his engineering masterpiece — a stilt made of two 2 X 4s, buttressed by rocks, sitting precariously on a picnic table. It was used to hold up the leg of a pop-up tent which was being employed to cover a grill, a grill that was in the process of cooking a a chicken with a beer can shoved up its ass. There's allegedly some sound culinary theory behind the shoving of a beer can up a chicken's ass, but think about this for a second...or picture this...your butthole (it's yours so it's not so incredibly gross). Now imagine trying to insert a beer can into that not-exactly-enormous opening. That would hurt. Now imagine that you were the size of a chicken...and your butthole was proportionately sized. That would hurt even more. It would hurt so much that it would cause you to sing Moon River, even if you were dead.



We went on Jeff's "hour-and-half loop" and it took us two-and-half hours. We did get up above snow line, where we caught some "freshies." Mountain bikers get hella-stoked for freshies. At one point I tried to duck a trail-blocking fallen tree by bringing my leg around the back of my saddle like an old lady getting off a three speed, crouching on the left side of my bike as I rolled beneath the obstruction, all my weight on my left pedal and my eyes level with my handlebars. It was so slick! Except I then rode into a deep puddle. That had a rock in the middle of it. I flipped into the icy waters and went AAH! Luckily I was wearing wool socks. Suckily it was 33°.

Jeff takes a walk next to his bike.

I try to hold onto my breakfast just a little longer.

This was the first time I'd ridden with Jeff while he was single-speeded and I was geared. The irony was that I would sit there watching him go up some impossible incline going "how the hell is he doing that? That is insane!" as I bobbled in my 26 X 28 and ate shit.



He took me out on the trails around his house in Waitsfield Vermont. He lives on an massive hill. As we descended away from his house, I wondered if he was going to pull some amazing trick where we wound up coming back to his house on a downhill. Jeff is apparently not a magician.



Although I did think it was kind of magical when I saw all the wee-baby ferns popping up trough the thin layer of new snow.

Oops, I'm out of time. Gravel Grinder not-a-race report tomorrow!

-t

The Weak(or so)in Photos

I think my eggs are trying to tell me something about the abject horror that awaits me at the Gravel Grinder this coming Sunday. "NOOOO! 30's and rain...GET OUT (of it) GET OUT (of it)!

Ya, ya, yesterday was kind of my photo-cop-out post of the week, but I ain't got time to shave my chest and glue the hair to my face every day y'know. Besides, I only have one chest to shave. I suppose I could shave somebody else's chest...and glue the shorn hair to his (or her...ew) face, but in most cultures that would be considered rude. In fact they'll strap you to the electric chair for such an act of malfeasance in Texas.

Years ago I was in Turkey — Please, don't confuse this with the story your buddy the de-boned duck told you. He wasn't in Turkey, he was in a turkey being served in a dish called "turducken." But I can see where you'd get confused...in speech it's hard to convey the capitalized "T" thing. In Turkey, turkeys the bird are banned, just to avoid confusion. You can do things like that when your government is no longer secular. If you get caught trying to smuggle turkeys into Turkey these days, you get sentenced to 30 years in Turkish-Man-Rape-Prison. (Don't worry, that's a safe link, it doesn't go to Sweeney's favorite website. And Kevin, I apologize, but Greg "The Leg" doesn't have a blog, or I'd link to him in a heartbeat on something like that.)

Butanyway (I just decided that's one word. You hear that Merriam Webster?) I was in Turkey. — and now this story is damn near completely pointless — and I was talking to a Turkish guy about stupid-racist-American-stereotypes about Turkey, mainly based on the film Midnight Express (guess what, if you didn't click on the "Turkish-Man-rape-Prison link, and I have no idea why you wouldn't have done that, it actually goes to the Midnight Express Wiki page. And explaining that was so much more effortless than linking to it again) and the notion that the Turks will imprison Americans indefinitely for nearly no reason (and man-rape them). I was surprised when he informed me that Turks are afraid of certain areas of the states as well. "What, like New York or L.A. or Baltimore?" I asked. "No...Texas. They kill people all the time there." He wasn't talking about murder, at least not the free-for-all disorganized kind, but state-sanctioned murder (as I see it, but I'm a knee-jerk liberal) — capital punishment. This totally freaked him out.

And that is why I was not supposed to talk today. Not a good talking day for me. Here...you...look...photos...instead...I...shut...gob...now.

McKittrick completely outclasses the competition in the shoe race
at the benefit for MM Racing at The Ride Studio Cafe.

Hey! Oh...OK, that's cool. Sorry I bristled there for a second.

Jorge "George" Cardona commuting like a madman from Salem to Newton. Jorge is the man. He is always on the bike and he only has one speed — wicked frickin' fast.

Jerry Garcia gets the most out of his 30-something-pound trail bike. "Oh ya, it was made for this shit!" That's the real live down-hilling nut-job Jerry Garcia, not the deceased hippy one by the way, in case you were wondering. Which reminds me of a quote from Dr. Bryan Philbrook: "Phish only exists so that the Grateful Dead aren't the worst band in the world." Doctor I concur! I mean, I'm pretty tolerant of other people's horrible music, and admittedly I listen to some abhorrent stuff myself, but Phish? I would rather pass one of their albums through my urethra like a kidney stone than listen to it.

Jerry is one of the best bike handlers I know. I saw him do things on my Superfly that it only does for me in my dreams. He only bit it trying to ride through this puddle because Eggleton and I had ridden through it ahead of him, muddying the waters, thereby concealing a large, submerged rock.

Due to all the time I have spent in soaking wet bike shoes lately, I actually have things like this growing on my feet right now.

Colin has a magnificent beard and rips it up on the trails.
Which is impressive for a guy riding a recumbent.

Why do we clean our bikes lil' skipper?
So we can get 'em dirty again, that's why.

Man, it just dawned on me that I'll actually have something to talk about Monday AM...I mean Tuesday AM, Patriots day y'know, I'm very patriotic. I've been invited to take part in a reenactment on the Battle Green in Lexington that day. What they don't know is that I'll be showing up as Kimbo Slice. That shit's gonna be over at one minute and forty five seconds of the first round!

-t

Getting The Hell Out of Mordor

I gotta say, I'm looking forward to getting out of town for the weekend, even if the forecast for Vermont is looking grim — 40's and rainy. We're heading up to the George's Gravel Grinder race...I mean ride, regardless of the clemency of the weather. Nothing a little Gore-Tex and a whole lotta wool can't handle.

However much I enjoy coming out of a trailhead to views like this...

and riding along washed out crap trails like this while powerlines buzz above me and cause tumors to form in my already feeble brain...

and as much as I love rolling over piles of sparkling, tire-puncturing glass...

or pedaling around man-made mosquito ponds
filled with fetid water that resembles elephant diarrhea...

Stolen courteously from the Bike29 site

I do have to admit that I will gladly welcome sights like the one above (even if the sky is gray and it's viewed through mud-spattered glasses).