Training... Sort Of
21 days until the Barking Spider Mountain Bike race in beautiful Owyhee County Idaho. For those of you unfamiliar with my fantasies of being an actual athlete, last year I entered this race as my first organized race on a bike of any kind. I came in second to last in the "beginner" classification and in the two subsequent races I attempted, I came in last. I don't harbor any hopes of being an athlete of the professional level, but I would like to think that I could focus my energy on improving my abilities on a bike. After all, cycling is about all I do regularly other than work, drink beer and struggle learning the "Devil's Tongue". And of those things, cycling is really the only thing I can be proud of, so I might as well try to do it well.
This weekend I decided to eschew the skiing for the season and took my girls out in the beautiful Southern Idaho spring as a sort of training. Saturday, Maria (named after Robert Jordan's love in "For Whom the Bell Tolls") and I went out to Indian Springs to take another stab at Rock Garden, the hazardous, crooked mile up to Sugarloaf over mostly large, volcanic rock that protrudes from the ground like ribbon candy in your grandmother's candy dish. The ride challenged my technical skills, and gave me a few moments of challenging, single track climbing, but I still need to train somewhere with steep, 1/4 mile jeep road climbs that sap the power from your legs and test your balance. You know the kind, no switch backs, no ease in pitch, just a constant struggle over a sandy, rutted road that has loose rock peppered along it to skid your rear tire as you jerk on the handle bars fighting the urge to veer off course. That's what killed me on Barking Spider last year, falling in with the pack up that first climb and battling for position amongst countless "bailers". Had I my choice of lines, I could have made it but that is not an excuse. This year, unless I find out differently in a recon ride, I'm going to red line the granny gear until that first climb and hope I can summit in the front of the pack.
