CYCOPATH

So my best friend and I tackled Daley Ranch the other day. Let’s just say it wasn’t a fun ride.

The place is gorgeous. Here are some pictures to prove it.

Yeah so super pretty right? Sure. Until the bitchass unleashes a can of whoop-ass on your innocent little legs (okay so my legs aren’t little…but they are innocent).

This is pretty much my best friend’s old mountain bike stomping grounds so she knows the place like the back of her hand. The trails are really loopy, sticky, and fun. There’s just about a 100-200 feet of climbing for every mile you do. So yeah…only that.

Let me put it in perspective. The day before we went on this ride I went on a road ride where I covered 12 miles in 47 min. There was 1200 ft of climbing. We went to Daley the next day. Did 6 miles with 1200 ft of climbing. In effing an 1:03. Half the mileage…whole hell of a lot longer time. Super frustrating.

My patient best friend keeps explaining to me how hard mountain biking is. I know this. I started cycling with mountain biking. I didn’t sit on a road bike until like 6 months ago. However, I never really understood the sheer stupidity that mountain biking is. It’s so hard, so grueling, and so killer you really need to be a sadist to do it. It’s gorgeous and its fun (on the way down) but man is it a bitch until you get good at it. There is such a big learning curve with this sport it’s not even funny. Road biking…pssh. Anyone can do it and get GOOD at it. It IS challenging in different ways and it is hard. But it is so much easier to learn (and I now know this from personal experience). It is so much easier to see improvement quickly on the road than it is on the mountain and that’s just weird to me…but kind of neat. It makes me proud that I can do both and do them fairly well (okay I still suck at mountain but I’m trying lol).

Anyways…gonna be a long couple of months…blah.

(PS thanks to Mountain Bike Bill for the pics!)