Memorial Day weekend has passed and I’m just starting to recover from all the fun and excitement we had!! It all started on Saturday, with some beautiful weather, we had a great day at the shop, it was great to see so many people anxious to get on their bikes. I was off on Sunday and Monday, so I wanted to get as much in as possible. More »
There’s a ton of 29er lovers out, expecially here in the midwest. These are the folks that are helping fuel the revolution.
Meet Damon, aka D-Wags
What flavor 29er do you ride? 2007 Fisher Rig
Rigid or Suspended? Rigid all the way
Geared, single or fixed? Single
Favorite place or trail to ride? Crowder State Park, Missouri
What do you love most about your 29er? The bigger the better
Will you ever regress to paper boy bikes? As long as I’m on a bike it wouldn’t matter
What’s your goal this riding season? To pass as many geared guys as possible
This past weekend I headed east to North Carolina for the Burn 24 Hour Challenge. This is my first 24 hour race on the year, and I had been looking forward to it for weeks. Although the race didn’t turn it quite like I had hoped, the positives of the race definitely outweighed the negatives and it ended up being a great weekend.
Since it would be a shame to break tradition, I was awoken in my tent on Friday night by the sound of rain. Luckily the rain was light, and the trails were bone dry for the entire race. There wasn’t a single puddle of water or drop of mud at all. I had plenty of time to kill before the noon start, so I wandered around and chatted for a bit. I ended up pitting in the same place as last year. I was pitting with Florida’s Chris Johns and Chris Janiszewski, and we were right next to Mark Hendershot and the pair of Daves from up north. It was kind of funny that we were all back and in the exact same spot as last year. More »
It really helps to have good support when it comes to bikes. My main support of course is my wife Jody. She sees to it that we have first-class accommodations. Namely this ranch. She also pays for most of my bike gear. What more can a rider ask for? It also helps to have supportive friends. Especially ones that can ride well and love bikes, as I do too
. Of course the gear & gear supplier are extremely important as well. That is why I have chosen Gary Fisher Bikes and their partners in biking equipment, Trek and Bontrager Bicycle Components. It just so happens that they have chosen me to use their gear, because I know quality when I see it. Thank you very much to all of you!
OMG! - How time flys! It flies faster than this Fisher 29er rigid mtb. After an extended leave from this site to take care of matters relating to the big move, I have returned to share with ya’ll the activities of these Fisher 29er bikes that we are all so familiar with. I hope you’ll still welcome me back into the Fisher family!?
Six weeks into the big move all bike activity consisted only of eye-balling the fine lines & curves of my custom Fisher 29er rigid training bike hanging by its seat post from its bike stand in the foyer. When walking by it while performing tasks I would try to put out my hand to stroke the seat & knobbies. But the bike hung high off the ground, neither tire touching the floor, so momentum gain it could not… It’s not as if I wasn’t doing physical training though. Don’t think I was gettin fat & out of shape. To get through the work day I wore my running shoes, and would run & sprint between tasks, to get from point A to point B… One can do a lot of running on 10 acres of open land, if they so choose… And of course working on a ranch/farm is plenty physical unto itself… Along the way the 50-year birthday came & went…
Gradually bikes were re-incorporated into the daily life. For motivation & future planning I invested in the “ultimate ground scraping tool” at our local hardware store & started scraping out my private bike trails upon my 10 acres. The property is at the bottom end of an immense alluvial fan. In Spanish they call these geographic features a “bajada.” I like to call it my “therapeutic bajada”, as this land form seems capable of bestowing upon the person utilizing it for physical activity a therapeutic effect upon the mind & body. So my 10 acres is formed around the lower edge of this bajada & as such the land has some interesting inclines to utilize for biking purposes. The trails I scraped out on my land make the most use of the inclines that are offered. In between house & yard tasks, several times a week, I would indulge in a bit of trail work with the scraper tool, forming my trails. 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there…before long I had created a fun & useful network of desert ridin trails that have now come in handy for my friends & I… And of course these trails connect up to the multitude of fine desert riding trails emanating from all directions out to the horizon…
Six weeks of non-ridin was all I could take. Three weeks ago I resumed ridin, in spite of the multitudes of tasks that still beckon to be completed. What have I done? I keep asking myself this question. I’ve bought the ultimate high-maintenance property and it just might eat me alive physically. I could give up bikin & runnin forever & still keep my musculature in shape by performing ranch/farm tasks until the day I die. This place was once a goat & chicken ranch. Now I’ve turned it into a bike & desert tortoise ranch. Though can’t neglect the citrus orchard, & numerous fruit trees, including peach, fig, apricot, grape, dates, pecan, pomegranite, etc. And of course there is the eucalyptus forest & numerous exotic trees & shrubs, all kept well groomed & watered by previous owners. Thank heaven there is an automatic watering system for all of this foliage, otherwise I’d go nuts trying to water it all. Little wonder that the previous three owners of the property sold it because it was too much work. At least they worked the land as hard as they could until old age set in & retirement beckoned with easier, low-maintenance housing… Ridin a rake, raking these millions of fallen leaves, has become my new-found sport…
Three weeks ago I resumed ridin. It’s all been upon my 10 acres of land, on my own trails that I’ve created, with climbing forays up onto the therapeutic bajada to play with the incline given to these Fisher/Bontrager 29er wheels. And what therapy this lends out. So far, in these three weeks of riding, I have had NOT ONE car pass me by. That is my ideal preference, though sooner or later a car is going to pass me by. How many cars have passed you by in the last three weeks of your bike ridin?
Last 2 weekend was busy with the presentation of first and second round of the Canada Cup in Bromont and Mont Tremblant respectively.
Bromont was my first real race of the year. After a bad night sleep (my little baby girl didn’t want to sleep that night!!) I wake up very tired but I was able to do a nap after breakfast before my start at noon. I did a good warm up in order to do a good start because of the narrowest first climb and 68 riders on the starting line. So after the sound of the gun, I did my plan and place myself between 10 and 15 positions. I was feeling really good but I was not sure if I could keep this pace for 8 laps. I knew I had the intensity but not sure about my endurance past 1h30 of racing. On lap 3-4 and 5 I was sitting on 12th position and was fighting with a guy who was faster than me on climbing but I was faster than him on downhill. Finally on lap 5 I had a bad luck with a puncture. I hitted a rock badly!! No I am not tubeless yet and I am waiting for the famous rims strips!! I changed my flat and continue with low air pressure ( 16g c02 is not enough) and on last lap with about 2km to do I did another flat and this time I finished the race on the flat tire. Finally I ended up 26th in 2h13min. That was not a good result for me but in overall I was happy to finish the race (this is a good attitude) and happy about my general fitness.
Last weekend was Mont Tremblant second round of Canada Cup. The week prior of this race I tried to put my wheels in ”homemade tubeless mode” but with no success!! I had to do another race with tubes but this time with more air pressure. The course was very technical with all the muds and there was 2 good climbs (6 min and 3 min). We had to do 5 laps of this physical course with 69 racers on the starting line. My strategy was to start slower and move upward each laps. It worked well! After the first lap I was 24th and I finished 16th in 2h07. I was happy with this race but I think I didn’t go hard enough because after the race I was still feeling fresh!! This day I was a really good climber (big wheels were going fast) but I was weak in the downhill part. The bike was hard to control (reason was probably to much air pressure).
I am skipping Canada Cup # 3 in Ontario and will do some trainings to be in great shape for Canada Cup #4 in Baie St-Paul in 2 weeks. I need to put more mtb millage and I am expecting a good result. Definitely, this time I will be more aggressive and I am hoping to be tubeless at this time!!
Expert/ 3 laps of a 5 mile loop with over a third of a lap being very technical narrow single track… Tree dodging fun big time. Sunday I was feeling better and decided to go up to Fairfax in Marin to do the Tamarancho race. This was my second ride/ first race on the Superfly.
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I headed out to Crystal Ridge at 7:30 this morning shortly after Creepyfriendly and his better half headed back to Madison after their long night of spoiling the liver on the expense of others. However, I think the 20 minute wait at the T-Bell drive thru was worth it. Keep in mind that the 22nd and Whiskey location no longer carries the cheesy gordita. I met P. Hailey and Jack Hirt for what I thought was going to be a hammer fest but due to thunderstorms last night the single track was virtually unridable. Anyway, I was able to prospect the newest edition of singletrack for the Wednesday night time trial. We ended up doing the back section hill relatively hard and riding multiple laps of the short section of single track in the southwest portion of the loop. Fortunately I had the bright idea to reverse the course and pound UP the switchback which resulted in a pretty good hill work out for the morning. River trails for the next two hours and I’ll call it a day.
This past Saturday was the start of the Wisconsin Endurance Mountain Series (aka WEMS). The series kicked off with the 12 hours of Gears race at Kettle Moraine Forest Preserve in Kewaskum, WI. I deiced to do the 6 hour event which started at 1pm and ended at 7pm. The field had around 25 riders in the 6 hour solo format. As in most endurance races there was a run lead out to our bikes. The run was more of a 25 foot sprint then a run at all. I placed the paragon up just past the main group of riders hoping that a strong sprint would allow me to get an early jump on the bike and avoid bike mounting and race start traffic. Sadly this was the first of many miss-happenings of the day. Once the race countdown was announced and the sprint began someone happened to place their bike almost directly on top of mine. This meant even though I got to my first i had to move another bike out of the way! In the time it took to remove such bike the whole field was on top of me mounting and riding up the start hill. Once mounted and trying to make my way threw the large group of riders the field began to split as usual. I was able to get into the lead group of riders and about 4 wheels behind my fellow racer and friend Nevada Dave of Johnny Sprockets. I remained in this group until my second misfortune of the race happened. About 3 miles into the race while entering into some very tight single track I made a right hand turn but my wheel didn’t respond(not a good thing when entering a sharp U-turn after a blazing decent)! This caused me to fly into a tree directly in-front of me! After getting up after the crash i realized that my stem was not tightened enough to the neck of the fork allowing it to move freely without a corresponding movement of my wheel! A quick fix got me back into the race a minutes later. I was then able to make my way back into the main pack. I stayed there for the reminder of the lap, finishing with a lap time of 28 minutes. Before continuing onto my second lap I made a pit stop to check my stem again and re-tighten anything that might have come loose.
After three laps into the race my third and final misfortune took place. I started to respond negatively to the Perpetum that I was fueling off of. I began getting a terrible stomach ache and headache as my body started to shut down. Realizing that it was my drink that was the cause of my dismay I switched to water and Heed after taking a long break to allow my body to recover and my stomach pains to calm. Still not feeling 100% my mentor, mother and other teammates encouraged me to get back on the bike against what my body wanted to do-Rest and Recover. I did another lap surprisingly fast despite my bodies pains and pleas for rest. Before going on another lap I put some solid food in my body hoping for a faster recovery! To my surprise I began to fell better but still not the way one would like to feel when racing. As before I was encouraged back on the bike. I went on to ride for the remainder of the race only pitting to replace my empty water bottles.
In the end my three misfortunes cost me valuable time, especially the long recovery after lap three. I was not able to reach my goal of 12 laps with only 8. Discouraged and a bit angry at myself I began the drive home only to get a phone call from my sensei Paolo. We discussed what happened during the race and he helped me to understand that the race wasn’t a complete failure as I thought it was. He expressed to me that being only 17 I am still finding out how my body responds to certain fuels and that my body doesn’t respond to the same way as other people. He also boosted my moral by explaining to me that my perseverance to finish the race was extremly impressive under these circumstances that I faced. As for my friend Nevada Dave he ended up winning the 6 hour solo race with an extra lap over the man in second, he was a machine. The race turned out to be more of a learning experience then anything and because of it I can ride, train and race better in the future.
Knees are feeling better, rides are getting longer, Fisher catalogs have been reviewed, burritos have been eaten, and you guessed it, rocks have been thrown. TJA training in full swing. Big Ring next weekend, be there. hopefully i’ll be behind the number plate.
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