Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, Back to work I go.
Bike commuted to work today even though I felt a little tired and groggy still. I don’t get to bike commute very often so I’m glad I took advantage of it while I could.
About 11 miles total.
On Saturday after some quality time with the families playing around and doing some paddling Joe and I were able get a ride in. We opted for the Yawkey Unit so we rode the Drag Line to get there and the Haul Road to get into the trails. We did Man Cage, Manuel, Skip, and Grizzly before heading back on Haul Road and taking the Man High option before ending up at the campground.
I think Yawkey is some of the best trails in the group. We did Skip twice before coming back down and doing the whole loop a second time. I can’t really describe it, but you end up at the top of a mountain in a pine forest (see top picture) with some pump track on some narrow turns and cliff edges! Manuel is a hard climb but totally worth it!
Total ride was 9.5 miles.
We are camping with friends in Cuyuna Country State Recreation area, which means that we’ll be getting some great mountain biking in! Since we needed two cars, I was able to leave before the family and get some riding in.
We were there two years ago and that was my introduction to mountain biking. I didn’t ride a lot of trails that weekend, but this weekend I hope to get quite a bit in. Today was a good start for that. They have recently opened a bunch of new trails and basically you ride out on some “easy” trails before having options on they way back to the trailhead of staying on the easy or progressing to the harder stuff. For the most part the harder stuff has a lot of climbing or some steep switchbacks – there are a few more technical side trails or sections that you can bypass as needed.
For the first ride I rode out on Easy Street and then took Mucker Mountain, Sand Hog Mountain, Hopper Hill, Low Grade, Trammer, Roly Poly, Miners Mountain, Crusher, some Sidewinder, back to the Rally Center and then Switchback (plus the new return trail) to the road and back. That ended up being almost 13.5 miles.
After lunch at Red Raven (which had an excellent Reuben), I went and setup our campsite. I was the first one of our group so I had my choice. Once everything was setup, I realized I had time to do another ride. So I hopped back on the bike and left from the campground and rode the Drag Line and Haul Road. It was in the 90’s so it was hard to stay up on hydration. There are some cool Yurts off Haul Road that had nice cool water! Haul Road and Drag Line make a nice easy loop so that’s what I did. I decided not to hit Man High or Man Cage yet! When I got back to the campground some friends were there and taking a cool-off dip in the lake so I joined them! My second ride was about 7 miles.
Surprise 1 Rep Max Squat Day. Had I been paying better attention I would have known it was coming and prepared a little differently in the morning! Oh well.
After a different style warm up including cross body kettlebell deadlifts, pulsing squats and jump roping we hit the rack and started squatting! I had been super consistent early in the squat cycle and then with my races missed a few weeks and didn’t really get back into super heavy weight. Thus I wasn’t sure what I’d do.
We did several rounds of squats getting the weights up there. We made too small of a jump early and made up for it later. Long story short. I hit 205# which is a 5# PR!
When it came back to me I tried 210#. I thought I needed to get further down and when I did I lost the tension and my knees collapsed so my spotting crew helped me out and 205 was the ticket for the day. Always pleased with a new PR!
Afterwards we had a 1 minute Max Effort Assault Bike challenge. The measure was calories. I accidentally started pedaling backwards somehow, but squared it away. That was possibly the most painful minute ever. My heart was flying and my legs were cooked. I was standing too so man was that a long minute. I got 22 calories! Not too shabby!
In the evening I racked up 4 miles on the bike pulling the trail behind!
I started out on my mountain bike and hit the Classic Theo loop, before I got a flat tire. Ugh.. in the same spot (at the bottom of the stem). NBD, I had a spare so I changed the tube and guess what… I had a presta hand pump and not a shrader one. Ugh. A few rider had passed while I was working on it and they checked on me, but I thought I was good. Not another walk out of the trails. This is the third tube that’s popped there, Before inserting the new one scraped out the hole with my multi-tool but I didn’t actually see anything that might be causing the problem. I didn’t see any other riders. So I rode 2.2 miles and hike a biked about a mile!
When I got home everyone was still sleeping so I decided to switch bikes and went for a quick ride on my Motobecane. I’ve taken it a few times on the mountain bike trails between Glenwood and 55 so I did that again. It still has CX tires on it so it handles the dirt just fine and that section is mostly just riding up the hill and flowing down with a few pump track parts. Perfect for my bike! I rode around Cedar Lake and to the Mississippi River before heading home. Total miles for this ride were 10.5 in 48:58.