New Year's Day Ride, and random bits.

Photo is representative of my ride, but not me. It was taken from this site and was taken by Kathi Merchant during the Iditarod trail race.

New Year's Day

New Year's Day sees a lot of group rides. Many are like the one here in town; a group meets, rides the same amount of miles on pavement as the temp is outside, and then huddles in a coffee shop congratulating themselves on a job well done. The first day of the new year and I was sick with a nasty cold. Lots of snow tempted me as we had decided to spend our time up in Cable, WI at the cabin. Several inches dropped while the year clicked over and I thought my sickness was clearing up, so off I went into the sunset.

During my 3 hour ride I went rather slowly as I was not 100% and the trails were chewed up from fresh snow and fresh tracks. However, I did cross off something on my to do list; crossing Lake Namekagon in the winter. It is an odd feeling when the temps are in the teens, your riding over a wide open frozen lake, it is night, there are sleds going by in large groups, and a nasty cross and then head wind is causing lots of drifting snow.

Halfway through and my cold was getting the best of me plus I was on a 5 mile section of trail that was especially chewed up, but I managed to finish my intended loop with just a small section cut out to save time. I figured the temp when I left was about 20 degrees, and my mileage was 20, so hey-0! It may have not been the same type of ride many New Year's rides that day were, but I did the same mileage. Bad thing? My cold retaliated with a vengeance (or revengeance?). I am trying to get back to health now, slowly.

Random Bits

With this cold and my desire to get in lots of hours on the bike I may be skipping my intentions to race the Triple D in Iowa (plus with no snow what is the fun?). Next week hopefully will be fulled with lots of long rides. A few 4 hour rides are going to do me better than worrying about racing well in Iowa.

I am reading about others planning on summer races. Weird. Brendan Moore (the Bad Boy of MN mountain biking) is saying he is scaling back next year. He is debating 2 "teams". The rumor is one involves him racing sport for the Peace Coffee team, the other is he'll ride a steel single speed while sporting a cutoff denim jacket covered in PBR patches.

My Superfly 100 with Sram XX and carbon wheels is going up for sale, interested?

I had a talk with the Dave "the legend" Pramann. Sounds like Arrowhead may be heavily populated with strong riders. I guess we'll see how that shakes out.

I am sick of coughing and using up Kleenex after Kleenex.