I've recently taken an extreme liking to apples. Their manageable size, cruncy texture, and ideal sweetness make them an easy and healthy snack on the go. And I haven't been sitting around much lately.
Take Saturday for instance. My phone rang at 1030am. I was expecting this call but I wasn't expecting to be this tired. It was another night with less than four hours of sleep. I wasn't feeling well. Friday's diet consisted of two cans of red bull and a Burger King value meal. Hardly enough to get me through friday much less Saturday.
Aaron and I were going riding and I wanted to try a new route. We would ride to Shingletown Gap, follow Lower Trail until we were able to hike up onto Bald Knob Ridge Trail. I wanted to try a downhill, having had little to no downhill experience. Too often I earn elevation the hard way only to waste it coasting down a fire road. On Saturday Aaron and I earned the elevation the very hard way. Bald Knob Ridge Trail is super duper (this is a technical term) rocky. It's not a technical kind of rocky, but the type of rocky that will keep you out of your seat and mashing down the pedals to keep up the momentum. At one point there is a large climb through these rocks that took a tremendous amount of mental concentration to keep from getting off the bike and walking through it.
Eventually we arrived on top of Bald Knob Ridge Trail about two hours into our ride. I hadn't anticipated it taking this long, but as far as I knew things were easy from here on out. The downhill was gentle at first. Fun even. It's as if I had forgotten what a steep trail it was despite hiking it a couple of times. Before long the inevitable happend and I found myself going over the bars. This happens a lot but usually not as violently as one might think. Only my right pedal didn't disengage and as my bike and I crashed to the ground my handlebar grabbed my right leg pressing it against my frame while the rest of my body came down on the bike. Essentially my leg was being crushed and as I sit here I have a super gross ginormous bruise on the inside of my leg. In pain I got back up and continued on, being thrown from my bike once more. In the distance I saw Aaron had crashed at essentially the same time I did.
At the bottom of the trail we needed to regroup and discussed our future over some apples. We tried to shoot some video of me going through a rock garden. The first and second takes were utter failures.
Luckily the world will only see this third time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS8N7xFAzq8
I had remarked that this might be one of the better rides that I was on this year which caused Aaron to remark that I'm a goddamned idiot. Aaron was right. the tail end of the loop was a muddy disaster featuring flowing water and holes of unknown depth. No one went for a swim, but it was one final ass kicking on a ride that thoroughly kicked my ass. And I enjoyed every minute of it.
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