First Mountain Bike Ride in 8 Years

Yep, me and my 15 year old hard tail were finally reunited. See, I used to mountain bike quite a bit. I'd say 12 years ago I did 30% off road and 70% road riding. Then Jeremy had a mountain bike accident which not only broke his bike, but also caused some expensive and painful dental work. So he gave up mountain biking and my bike went into the shed. Occasionally I'd thought of riding it again, but as years passed, the amount of work to make the bike rideable seemed insurmountable. Finally, I pulled it out this year. I took it over to U-Bikes and asked what would need to happen to make it go. They recommended about $125 worth of work, but thought it would be rideable with some new tubes and the tires pumped up. That all happened about a month ago, and for the last 4 weeks my mountain bike got an upgraded spot in the garage, but the cleaning and tire changing still seemed like too much work. I finally got inspired when I realized that today could very well be the last day of Indian summer and when I got down to it and did the work, it really did only take 45 minutes to have a mountain bike again.

Now the other reason why we stopped mountain biking was that it seemed like too much work. You had to put your bike in your car and go somewhere to ride. With a road bike, you need only point it out of the garage and then there are 100's of miles of possibilities. Today I took the same strategy and pointed my mountain bike out of the garage and rode to the Marshall Mesa trail head in 15 minutes. From there, I rode up the mesa:



And then crossed highway 93 and rode Dowdy Draw to a new section that opened fairly recently, Spring Brook. This trail was a nice loop and though only 3 miles, was really nice single track. I like mountain biking, but I don't like the kind of mountain biking that involves jumping over fallen trees or off 5' high rocks. This kind of mountain biking:



By the time I finished the loop, I needed to just take the Dowdy Draw trail to Elorado Springs and ride home on the road so I could still make it to masters.

And the best part of living is South Boulder is that there are still many many miles of trail that I did not ride today. Hopefully there are still some riding days left this year and I can go a different route. Hey, who knows - maybe I'll even do an Xterra triathlon next year.