Riding as therapy

For any of you that I know closely, you know work has been tough lately.  It's been rough and time has been scarce to ride at all.  I have been lucky to get out one day a week lately and when I do get out it's a squeeze.  I was able to do one Friday night urban ride with a couple buds a couple weeks ago, then on Saturday I was fortunate enough to have Kris watch the kids so I could go on a ride down at the John Muir trails.

I haven't ridden down there for years, I was trying to figure out how long it's been and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it's probably been 10 years.

The trails were great.  I got up super early to get on the road in time to ride and then drive back before dinner.  I rode blue loop first, then came back and grabbed the fatbike for a loop on Orange then on Red(Brown?).  After that, I exchanged the fatbike for the scalpel again, headed down the road to the Emma Carlin connector trail and rode that up and back.  There was a race going on at Carlin so I didn't go around those loops, I'll save that for another trip.

It was one of those days where it's humid enough it feels like it could storm at any minute, but never does.  It was wet - sticky, and hot enough for me.  I left the trails pretty tired but mentally refreshed after a couple real ass kicker weeks at work.

What I need to do is keep finding ways to carve out that time to ride as it definitely lets me clear my head up quite a bit.  Short rides help, trail rides help, commuting helps, anything.  What I find is that riding a bike just does that for me.  I just need to find more time to make that work out for me.

Red Earth Classic 2015

So, the last race I did was the Red Earth Classic, up in Negaunee, MI on July 18th.  I had signed up for the "Beast" 32mi race but ended up swapping mid-week the week prior to the 20mi "Loader" race.  Two reasons - one is I haven't trained a ton, and two is my family vacation the week prior meant the family was going to be waiting for me to race.  Instead of doing a race starting at noon that would take 3-4 hours I did one starting at 10 that took <2ish (can't remember my time already).

The race was great, the start was in the same park that I remember being around/near for the Ore2Shore start a couple years ago, and started immediately up a big hill of two-track dirt atv trail.  Not enough roll-out to get the pack separated enough unfortunately but I guess that's how it goes.  Basically, about 50% of the climing in the race came in the first 5 miles on two track that honestly was not too fun.  Then we started alternating between singletrack and doubletrack for the remainder of the race.

My race went well, I was mid-pack as I'd expected but felt pretty good.  I was happy to have gotten out there.  I think the singletrack was fun, a bit tighter and not a ton of flowy sections like I'd hope for but it was mostly OK.