lots and lots of riding.

lets see here....since july 24 I've ridden a ton. that day I did the farmhouse classic gravel grinder hosted by joe fox of cycle city. great free event north of kc. ended up with 78 miles around 7 hours total time w/breaks and all.

the next day I did cliff drive laps and a downtown river/west bottoms ride with clay. ended up doing 35 miles when I had planned on 15.

monday was the mccoys ride and we did an extended after-food ride. another 25 in the book.

tuesday I rode swope for like 4 hours. awesomeness as always. having multiple loops to choose from now is awesome. as is having open connections :)

wednesday I ventured up to he northland with eric a for the humpday ride at the smok and davey trail head. huge group, i was having slider problems still so I ended up doing about a half lap then another small loop later. smithville trails are really fun on a single speed.

thursday was swope again for another 4 hours. 2 before the race, I timed, then 2 after plus another one with adam riding blue river road to the trolley trail back to the plaza.

friday I took a little break. :)

saturday (yesterday) I did this:

Decided to hit Clinton today instead of the river. I was really leery about doing so cause I had already seen the damage but was really happy after 4.5 hours of riding :D

There are lots (and I mean lots) of areas that have become double track or wider. The farther west you get the better it gets, generally. There are also numerous trees down, washed out creek crossings and the lake has reclaimed parts of the low lying blue trail. There are still the occasional mud holes, and even a few areas with standing water in the tread still cause there's no where for it to go. All in all though the trail tread has packed back in well for I'd say 90% of the trail.

I rode from northwest lawrence over to kasold, took that south to k-10 then took the south lawrence trafficway trail out to clinton. Continued out to Sander's Mound then took the connector up to the north shore trails. This was the first time in a long time I had ridden that connection and you can definitely tell not many people ride it. Basically a mowed grass path now until you actually get up to the tree line.

Once up to the actual trails I rode white for the first 5 miles then took a connector down to blue about 1/4 mile later. Finished Blue to land's end then continued on blue to campground 1 where I refilled my bottles. Jumped back down from the campground and took the white trail again for probably another mile or so then connected back down to blue which I finished riding out to the skills park. Rode the skills park for a few laps then decided to ride the cactus ridge loopm as it is one of my fave areas of clinton. I thought I was eating spiders before but this section was terrible, literally stopping ever couple minutes to de-web my face. The trail in this area is also extremely overgrown and the tread is actually un-follow-able through the meadow sections because of weed overgrowth. Just needs a good weedeating and some wheels and cactus ridge will be buff again. Got back to the skills park, did another couple laps, got to the end, hit a good 2 foot drop off the ties then got an infamous clinton thorn in my rear tire, which I had a tube in still. Changed it and got probably 25 psi in and decided it had been almost 4 hours and I had no patches, no tube, and had now lost 11 knobbies off my non-drive side rear tire. Needless to say I jumped back out to the road, past the park gate then dropped back in to take the last mile of trail back. Made it through then hopped back down to the paved trail and took it back north along k-10 and back into north west lawrence.

I was riding w/breaks for 4.5 hours and probably managed 40+ miles. Great RIM training! I forgot how humbling the roots of the white trail can be, those climbs are NOT single speed friendly.

Today I rode out to Perry to watch the racing action since my rear tire was trash and no shop was open until noon. 50 miles roundtrip and got to watch 3 hours of good racing on even better trails. wish i would have had the 29r as I don't get to perry often anymore. It was really hard being there and not being able to ride trail.

I found out some shitty news in the past couple days. The man I have considered my father for a long time (since before my real father was murdered) has been told that he basically has about 6 more weeks to live if he's lucky. He has had cancer for over 6 years now, multiple rounds of chemo, had multiple surgeries, is on enough drugs to literally kill someone else, and is is need of 24/7 care now.

Because of this I have decided to cancel the MTB Tour of Kansas City to take a trip to Arkansas with him. We have done this a lot and I would like to do it again. It just sucks that this might be my last chance so I'm not going to miss it. I will be rescheduling these events in the near future. mtbkc.blogspot.com for more info

peace and riding!!!