Wardsworth Creek

Riding Time: 1.25.01
Actual Time: 1.38.00
BPM Avg: 157
Miles: 5.7
MPH Avg: 4.6
Elevation Gain: ~1100 feet

Sometimes I wonder what in the schmack are we thinking attempting an epic?

I love the idea of an epic ride. I love to read about people doing the impossible. In my mind I see myself finishing the CT or, eventually, the GDR and totally bask in the idea. I want to be that person who fine-tunes their body, bike, and gear and then spends 5 days sleeping in the mud and eating twizzlers for breakfast. What could be cooler?

Then, my poor desk-jockey body slaps me back into reality and I seriously wonder what it will really take to do an epic ride. Certainly more than just dream about it.

Saturday afternoon I took a few hours and headed up towards Wardsworth for a ride. This was somewhat of a litmus test for me; I wanted to get an idea of where I was after years of riding a Herman Miller.

Here are the some of the findings:

• I'm out of shape
  
• After years of not riding, I'm still at a roughly intermediate level in my technical skills (it's kind of like riding a bike...)
  
• My bike performed much better than expected. I'm getting the hang of the new geometry and the 29er effect
  
• Having a heart rate monitor is both useful and distracting ("Okay, I'm coming up on my max BPM, better slow it down....Wait, that tiny hill caused my BPM to spike!?!)
  

Though it was a heavy dose of reality to find that an hour, 1100 feet, and 2.85 miles of uphill could be such a challenge, it wasn't all bad. If I had read the trail guide a little closer I would have made it to the top. I was only .75 miles and 300 feet from the finish. Though my BPM was a quite high, 157 isn't a bad average, right?. And while I did have to stop a lot more than I am proud to admit, was on my bike far more than I was off it.

It's a far cry from the 78,000 vertical feet of climbing the CT will demand, but let's just take this one step at a time.

All-in-all the trail was a lot of fun. It's intermediate-level rating, showed me that I need to work a little harder before I feel confident in placing myself in that range. I have to say that, fitness-wise, I'm on the lower end of intermediate; technical skills, somewhere in the middle.

The trail can be ridden as a loop or as an out and back. After an hour of granny gear and not knowing exactly where I was, I decided I'd better turn around. Before turning around I let my BPM return to ~100 before changing my mind and recommitting to finishing the ride.

Maybe I could go a little further.

I turned the bike uphill only to find that the trail had, again, turned into a stream. Nevermind, it was time to turn around.

The downhill was a lot of fun. Virtually all the creek crossings that had challenged me on the uphill were not a problem coming down. The single track was fast, but not too much for my disc brakes. I had ridden part of this trail last fall (beware of cow guacamole...) and found my rim brakes to be severely lacking.

At one point, I hit an unexpected uphill and lost momentum before I hit the top. I tipped over, rolled off my bike, and slid off a log into a bunch of sharp sticks. Without tearing my lycra, they scraped a chunk of flesh right off my bottom -- right on my sit bones. Consequently, sitting on my saddle was less than comfortable. I suspect in that crash, rather than at any other bone-jarring section of the downhill, is when I lost my brand-new $30 mini pump. Grrr.

With the exception of the small chunk of flesh I left at the crash-site, I came off the mountain none the worse for wear. I'm proud to say that my quads and calves aren't in the least bit sore. There are a few little-used muscles that are complaining (especially around my IT band, but other than that, I hope my body was reacting more to the altitude than the actual exercise.

Maybe I'll go back next week and see if I can find that stinkin' pump...



Springtime runoff would have made the first two crossings tricky had it not been for the "bridges."



A downhill section. It looses some threat in the photo. In real life those rocks loomed large.


Several small straight-aways made for a fun singletrack experience.


Too bad I didn't study the trail guide a little closer...


At times it got pretty technical on the uphill.


The "trail" to the left wasn't really the trail. The real trail was under the stream. The actual stream bed lies where the downed logs are. 


End of my uphill. A few meters up the trail was yet another trail-stream. Time to turn around. I found out later that I was very close to the top.