El Beaver Diablo

The Beaver lurks:


She's 7 miles long, with 850 feet of climbing.  A moody beast - she is choppy at times, but silky smooth too.  Hopefully this big bucket of rain we're going to get on Friday quenches her thirst instead of pissing her off.

You diggin' The Beav?

Sign up, up, up.  

The Beaver Blitz

For this year, at the very least, The Chimney Chase will be departing county land, leaving her home at Walnut Creek, and moving North to private land.  And if the forces that shape our world have their way, it'll be renamed The Beaver Blitz, since there are no Chimneys to be chased, but there is a carnivorous, potentially rabid, cannibal attack Beaver to flee.

As can be expected with any change in venue, we have a flood of questions pouring into the mailbag about course layout, description, length, elevation change, smell, etc.  All worthy questions, especially the smell ones.  The truth is, since there was a wee logging project that recently wrapped up here at the Rancho Relaxo, the course it still, as I write this, undergoing some changes, a nip and a tuck here and there, and being taped for first tracks.  Some of it is virgin, never been raced dirt.  Clumsy, but enthusiastic, and with enormous potential.

I should have a GPX file up here in the next day or so, showing a conclusive distance, elevation gain, and clearly marked danger areas where the Beav might actually try to attack you.  But in a general sense, I can already tell you it's a little smoother than Walnut Crick, a little less climbing that Walnut Crick, and with many, many more bermed turns where you can just neglect your brakes and stomp all over your 10 Tooth cog.

It'll be a lot like this, but not exactly like this:

Think 9 miles with 1,000 feet of climbing per lap.  So a touch smaller that what you see above.  And without costume requirements.  But again, thanks for signing up and immediately questioning your own judgement.  You'll do fine.

You can drop me a line here if you have any questions.   And again, I'll get you a proper map soon enough.

Banana Milkshake to go.

This afternoon, in a unique failure of multi-tasking, I dumped an entire homemade banana milkshake into my helmet.

I tell you this for 2 reasons:

1)  I feel good about -  vindicated, even - by the fact that I don't fool myself by calling it a "smoothie."  Putting a banana in a glass of chocolate ice cream does not a smoothie make, no matter what Dunkin' Donuts tells you.

2)  I feel that the act of dumping a milkshake into my helmet is the righteous embodiment of how busy this summer has become for me.  For a long time, this blog has sort of revolved around the buzz of two events - Il Pantani and The Paranormal, Spring and Fall, with a meager smattering of brain juice in large spaces between.  But this year, there's a 3rd event happening here on the home front, and that is the Chimney Chase.  Given the tenuous arrangement between mountain bikers and the County right now, the powers that be decided it would be best to move the Chimney Chase to private land until this whole Ragged Mountain mess, and whatever else,  blows over.  So here it will be, July 30th.  There's a whole lotta trail work to be done between now and then - which I relish, as you know.  So I've been banging away at the ground like an insane person, trying to dial some new stuff in before the gun goes off, which it will, at 10 AM rain or shine.  And while we might not have Chimneys to chase per se, we do have a Beaver, and the chances of it not being 90+ degrees is relatively low.  So it'll still hurt plenty.  Sign yourself up and partake in the magic.

Did I mention that I signed up to race SM100 on the singlespeed this year?
That's been a long time coming, actually.  I'll be 40 next year, and these knees aren't getting any younger it turns out.  As one of those bucket list races that I realize I just have to get out of my system, SS-M100, as I have dubbed it, is something I can't keep putting off if I actually want to finish it.  The trouble with that, of course, is that singlespeeding is hard.  There's just no getting around that.  I came into the summer in pretty good form riding geared bikes, but upon hopping aboard the 1-speed  and promptly falling apart in under 1 hour, multiple days in a row, I realized I had some work to do.  So I've been chipping away at that, like the trail itself, and progress is being made.  Enough to survive on Labor day?  I honestly don't know, and I think that's part of the appeal.

One interesting nuance of single speeding, especially for long rides, is that there's simply no place to hide.  You can either turn the pedals over or you can't.  On a geared bike, you can always put it in granny, spin it out, and you can pedal to the top of just about anything, eventually, albeit slowly.  But on a SS, you just can't do that.  Nor can you walk the entire last 30 miles of the hundo, unless you want to finish on Tuesday.  So I'm trying to figure some of that out.

And dumping a banana milkshake directly into my helmet is the result, thus far.  So bare with me if the content is a little slow.  This is the speed I've got:


It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock n roll, and sometimes you have to clean up first.  And up, and up, and up.