Santa keeps on giving

What a guy.  Looking remarkably like my mother, Santa came and brought me quite possibly the most important cycling garment I now own, the Endura Stealth mtb jacket.  Used it twice already and it kicks ass.

Santa is my best friend

Finally got me some new shoes.  What a guy!

Bilzen toertocht = mud fest

Bilzen - the south east corner of flanders, where the flat flemish plains start to break into gently rolling hills and garden gnomes have attitude.  I joined Alex and Luc at Alex's house in Martenslinde for the pre-christmas toertocht.  It was supposed to be a nice gentle 45 km with rolling hills, perfect for the single speed.

10am start, no rain, here we are nice and clean.

The start was about 200 meters from Alex's house, we rolled down and signed up.  The Martenslinde community center was pretty dead, the cold temperatures and bad weather keeping people indoors.
Right off the bat - a bad sign, we head through a grass field that has turned into a mud bog.  Herculean efforts are required to move the bike forward.
Lo and behold - mud to make your bike stand up.  Spinning wheels and somersaults and the whole ball of wax.  It was a complete mess.  And slow.

22km in and nearing death...mud soaked through even garment.  The hot soup at the bevooradering (the halfway waffle tent) was salty and a gift from heaven.  From here it was only 16km from the finish....16 long, wet, muddy, slow kilometers...

Best investment of the year by far award - mtb booties.  Kept the feet warm, dry, and clean!  Worth every euro cent.

Swiss breakfast of champions

Picked this up while driving through switzerland, hans "no way" rey on the cover of a bag of muesli.  Is he even swiss?

Kinda cool though.  Nice product placement for Fox.

A mystery unraveled...

Why the company espresso machine espresso tastes like crap!  This must be affecting my riding.

Lummaloop night ride

It's cold in Belgium at night...

Our international crew rolled out last night in the deep dark forest of Lummen.  Conditions pure Belgium - endless mud pits and myriad consistencies of the slippery stuff.  Jo, Alex, Maarten, and I donned our lights and cold weather gear for a good slosh in the wet.

It had been a while since I had done a real night ride, and it was good to get out there.  Maarten was on his new bright orange Cobra (no brakes!), Alex with his busted-ass Blaze, and Jo on a racy carbon Ridley Ignite. 

Despite Alex's rear shock blowing up early in the ride (that's what he gets for riding a fully suspended bicycle in Flanders...), things were pretty ok until Maarten took a header into a ditch, in a spectacular fashion.

No mtbing for one month. No, more.

Ja it is kind of starting to suck.  Too long without a spin on the lummaloop.  We're planning a night ride with the belgians tomorrow but if it rains.....could be cancelled.

In the meantime here's a pic on Mike Parsell's fat chance in oakridge.  

Visiting old rides

It's 12:18pm in Belgium, and "Heart of Rock and Roll" from, yes, Huey Lewis and the news, is on Belgian radio.  It has been a week since a good mtb ride.  No, more.  Snow fell then rain fell and now it's just cold as can be.

So since I'm trying to figure out how to edit video I figured I'd tool around with some old video.  This one is from a trip to Scotland with Greg for his 40th b-day.  We arrived at Prestwick and drove right to the most famous of the seven stanes, Glentress.   How do you say super fun in Gaelic?

The next day took us to Mabie forest near Dumfries, still in Lower Scotland.  This one had a ton of woodwork, it was pretty impressive.  From there we drove up to the highlands to ride on the Isle of Skye.  Rated as the best single track in the UK, the Glen Sligachan ride was everything we had wanted - sublime trails, stunning beauty, clouds of midges, big mud bogs and peat moss, and a good dose of freezing rain.  It was excellent.

That was our last ride.  We made our way back to Glasgow the next day and spotted a mythical Scottish creature on the way.

Langdorp Toertocht

What's a Tour Tocht?  Every weekend in Belgium there are multiple organized mountain bike rides call tour tochts.  Hundreds or even thousands of belgian mountain bikes show up and pay around 3 euros to ride a marked course, followed by the ubiquitous beer (or 5).  Riders can choose one of three lengths, those generally being around 25, 40, and 60km.  And while you could hardly call them epic.....they can be super fun, especially if attended with friends, especially if it is not freezing and raining (which does happen in belgium), and ESPECIALLY if you're riding a single speed.  Because it seems that just about all these courses were designed for single speeding.

The registration/beer hall can be a soccer field clubhouse or community center.Every good toertocht has a halfway break with chocolate covered waffles and bananas and sportsdrink.
By far, the perfect machine for such a ride is a single speed.  Especially one with green grips.

The gang prepares for their ride.  Thankfully, no suicide 7:30am start.

A weekend or two back Peter from work invited me to do the famous Langdorp toertocht.  Langdorp is reputed to be one of the finest trail areas in Flanders.  It's where Sven Nys lives and does all his training.  It's where Davy Coenen won a flanders cup race.  It's where Peter has been trying to get me to go for about 2 years now.

Peter's brother Stijn is on a racing frenzy and super fit, luckily for the rest of us he was sick and taking it easy.  So we meandered through the 40k course fairly easily, grunting up the climbs and enjoying what I must admit was some tasty bits of singletrack.

The great thing about a tour tocht is that you see all types of bikes out there.  A lot of people are road riders staying fit, others just riding what they have in the garage...the new mtb revolution is on in Belgium, and although nobody is riding a mtb fixie with a full sleeve of tatoos...slowly but surely we're seeing fewer hydraulic rim brakes and cable v-brakes in favor of real live disc brakes.  Every once and a while...a riser bar...can you feel the excitement?

Heb je honger?

The LummaLoop

Everybody has their home loop.  For me, it's the lummaloop, located in Lummen, Belgium.  It's not epic but it keeps me occupied for about an hour and a half to two hours, almost all on single track.  Not scary, but scary enough to keep me from falling asleep or thinking about work.

It's super fun on the single speed, but lately I've been riding the Ridley 29er prototype, the PERFECT mtb for flanders trails, which are invariably straighter, less technical, and flatter than just about any trails you've ever done.

Luckily, I got me some curves and small little challenges on my loop, and it's kind of an ugly figure eight so I can reverse direction on some parts and keep it fresh.  Which I rarely do, home loops are not supposed to be fresh...

So in the 2 weeks I was home I did a couple laps on the lummaloop.  AND I bought me a collapsable avalanche shovel to do some trailwork.  For when I get the motivation.  Anyway pictures and such to come.

TAPEWORM

Any rider who has spent any time in the Seattle area has ridden the tapeworm.  Located just southeast of SEA in beauuuutiful Renton, WA, tapeworm is some of the best trailbuilding and maintenance I've seen.  Hand-sculpted on a slope just above Renton, it's a chunk of forest saved from certain cookie-cutter home development thanks to a power substation and some pretty thick powerlines overhead.  No worries.  Us mtbers don't mind cancer.

Tapeworm is actually a network of 3-4 trails, most of the time we start with DNA.  All of these trails are slightly different but similar in that they pack a ton of riding into a very small area.  They are constantly turning back and forth on each other, and keeping momentum and speed is key to both having fun and keeping the pedals turning.  It's a sublime example of urban trail building in a compact area, Belgians - take note!!!  The trail is dotted with little baby stunts to keep you on your toes.  After DNA and Tapeworm you finish on Parasite, which is more of the same but with several log crossings across the trail.

I did a solo ride here (GG once did solo rides before work here on a more than weekly basis) before a flight out, you can come to the tapeworm and do 1-2 hours and be super sweaty no problem.   Rocking the carbon single speed...

the colonnade

Seattle mountain bikers have always been creative (being the smart people that we are).  So when the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance decided to make a mountain bike skills park under the I-5 freeway, right in downtown Seattle, it seemed like a good idea.  And it rocks.  You can go rip for a couple hours and stay dry and get real better at your skills. Unfortunately, when GG and I went to check it out, I had a Ridley carbon single speed with 1.9 inch tires.

The Colonnade is a muntain bike skills park located right under the freeway, with all types of structures from beginner to pretty gnar level stunts.  Teeters, skinnies, jumps, drops, rocks and bridges...  It's pretty short and not for getting exercise per se...but you could easily kill a couple hours there getting better at riding your mountain bike.

Rolling there on the carbon single speed was kinda silly but we just wanted to check it out and roll around, turn the pedals a few 

times.  There were some underage kids there making us look silly, I offered to race one of the downhill bikers up the hill but he declined.  It's a pretty amazing set up for a local group of people, tons of woodwork and very solid structures, and all very safe.

GG runs away from the big drop....

Damn this free rider looks talented...

MOAB

What else is left to say about Moab?  Best town in southern utah, cool people, good restaurants, stunning setting, sweeeet riding...  But...2 years in a row and 4 visits in the last 6 years...too much in my opinion.

That said, if you twist my arm...  And there's that new trail, Hazard County.  Which was itself reason to visit Moab.  So I conned the others to make the haul across Utah state for 1 day of riding.  Sweet.

Last year's hazard county ride was unbelievably fun and epic.  Top three in a lifetime ride.  This year we were expecting nothing less.  The dark clouds hovering above the La Sal mountains had a different idea...it was freezing and raining when we got out of the shuttle van so we donned the rain jackets and started pedaling.

Hazard starts out on a gentle downhill slope with sublime singletrack that winds in and out of the juniper trees, with spectacular views of the Moab valley below.  The trail was super slick with fresh mud, lucky me had big tires and had a blast.

Mike was the hero of the weekend, Porcupine Rim is not an easy trail on any bike and he did the whole thing on his 29er hard tail...studly.

Rain jackets...

As Hazard trail merged to Kokapelli, the trail had suffered under the rain and the soil had turned into something like nearly-set concrete.  Without a ton of momentum you couldn't go 10 meters without your bike coming to a complete stop.  Luckily for us Eric ignored the warning from the shuttle driving and bombed down, leaving the rest of us to walk...  After a bit the trail dried out and became rideable, but we missed a nice fun section of fast double-track.  Damn.

Since last year there had been a fairly big forest fire, and it wasn't too long ago as the burnt smell was still in the air and riding through the burned-out section was pretty surreal.
The beauty about this trail is that you descend for an hour plus, all single track, then come to the very top of Porcupine Rim (stunning views, don't let your gaze linger as that is a cliff there...).  From there it's another 1-1.5 hours of ridiculous fun in the hot desert - rain jacket long ago discarded.
By this part of the trail the hard tail was starting to kick Mike's ass a bit.  Long washboard sections of sharp rocks.  But it was beautiful as heck and a stop every now and then would let you to look around and appreciate the Moab desert. 
During the last 30 minutes or so we passed and got passed by a fairly old guy who was out there keeping it real on two wheels.  Pretty cool. Hope I'm half that active when I'm his age.
All in all a extremely excellent ride.  Would do it again in a heartbeat.  The conditions mixed it up for us and made it interesting.  But one day was all we had, from there we headed back to Vegas to board planes....

Utah - Hurricane Rim

Time for our annual post-vegas mtb trip, an exodus to escape the sin city as soon as possible and get somewhere...real.  Luckily some of the world's most beautiful, and best for mountain biking, places on earth are within striking distance from LV.

Our trip was a little balled up this year since the seattle crew went to moab with half the rest of the civilized world, plus half our crew could not leave until Saturday, not Friday like the rest.  So we did a more local ride on Saturday afternoon - Hurricane rim in Hurricane, Utah.

I had to scramble for a bike and managed to borrow an Endorphin from Knolly - usually a perfect bike for the Utah desert but it had big tires and a heavy fork and a huge coil shock, so it was a little heavy for pedaling.  But when the trail went down it was sublime.

We all felt pretty terrible after a week of Vegas, so pace was slow (well Eric and Chris were doing their best XC racer impersonation).  We were chased around the desert by thunder clouds but just managed to escape the rain.

Mike was rolling his custom hand-build and self-designed Proletariat 29er, perfect bike for this trail.
I was dead last but glad to be turning the pedals and the trails were siiiiiiiick...
Eric had 2 flats, setting a trend for the weekend...
A nearly lost phone and 2 hour car ride later we were in the general direction of Moab.