Baking not biking

Geen gusting for biking today, trails are muddy, stayed indoors and made this instead.

Unemployment ain't so bad.

It's practically summer in Belgium

Yes, the rain is here.  It's amazing what 3 degrees celsius can feel like after a few weeks of sub-zero weather.  I almost felt like riding in short sleeves.  Alas, skies are cloudy and trails are muddy which means I'm washing my bike again.

Today I took the  cross bike out for one last snow ride, the wet snow gave more traction.  But it was still a wintery mess around Diest, the river was still mostly frozen, minor roads still covered in ice and snow...

Why the cross bike?  Usually I would buzz around on the 29er, but on my last ride a giant stick jumped up and snapped off my brake lever.  So until I get my lazy butt into the garage to do some repairs, no 29er riding for a while....

Ivan's crash

Flipping through the photo album, I come across Ivan's famous crash from February 2007.  I was in LA and every time I'm in LA I visit Ivan and Jenise (and Ike) and make sure to ride Ivan's Trail.  Ivan's Trail (as dubbed by the local mtb community in Santa Clarita) is one of the most fun local loops I've done, it's about an hour and fifteen mintues long with a gradual dirt road climb, and a ridge-line gnarly singletrack descent.  It's beautiful.

Mike P was with me and we were determined to ride Ivan's trail despite the fact that Ivan only had 2 mtbs - a 40-pound DH bike and a dirt jumper.  Then Ivan found the solution - he proposed to ride his beach cruiser.  Sounded like a great idea at the time.

The whole crew set out, Jenise came with us with Ivan in the sidecar as far as the trailhead.  We were a surly-looking bunch.
Ivan was looking tough on the beach cruiser.  With only one gear and a rear coaster brake, it was going to be a pretty monumental task.  Was he up to it?
Ivan is taking the pictures on the climb because he was KILLING us on the beach cruiser.  With only one gear, he stormed up the hills while Mike and I took our time in tiny gears.  
The DH bike was not suuuuper fun to ride up...but it went.
And eventually we made it to the top.  There's a concrete platform of what used to be a cottage (or what was going to be a cottage), with big, sweeping views of the mountain ranges north of Los Angeles.
Spirits were high before the descent.
Ivan schooled us even more on the descent.  The long wheel base and huge tires of the cruiser made it extremely stable and fast on the trail.  

Was this a warning sign?

Mike and I pause to laugh at Ivan's first crash.

So we got going again.  Trail conditions were loose and fast and we were ripping it up.  Bringing the DH bike was beginning to pay dividends.  Here Mike was bombing a steep section.

Here is Ivan, again flying on the cruiser.  We made it to the very end of the trail with one last sketchy section left.  It was about a 30-meter trail that was very very steep and all loose, impossible to get any traction and hard to keep the wheels turning.

Ivan started and I turned to talk to Mike when all of a sudden there was a scream - the coaster brake, all the grease cooked out, was locked and he was heading at about 30kph straight into a concrete wall at the bottom of the descent. 

He hit the wall head on at full speed, the bike bounced, Ivan bounced, laid on the ground, and screamed.  After all the commotion and ambulances, Ivan thought he was ok, only to find out that he had 5 broken ribs and some internal bleeding.......nothing more, thank goodness.  If it had been me, I would be dead for sure.

Just goes to show - wear your helmet.

Lummen Toertocht!!!!!

Yeah, it's that time of year again, or it was just after Christmas anyway - the lummen toer tocht.  It's a good one, some of the best trails in Limburg (I suppose) and anyway I can ride there from my house.  A few days before it got suuuuuuper cold in Belgium which meant that the trails were basically like concrete.

A couple of real Belgian good ol' boys...

I left home on the single speed and met up wit Jan V and his buddy Wouter at the start,  the Lummen swimming pool; we set off for 40km of cold mtbing.  Already some km in I had problems with my rear wheel, I hadn't touched it in about a year and it had always been fine, but suddenly in a steep climb out of the big pit the wheel slipped in the dropout and I had to stop and adjust it.

I then decided to hustle to try and catch Jan, when I was almost there, once again, issues, the chain came off and I had to again adjust the wheel.  Damn.  I caught Jan and Wouter at the halfway food station, had 2 cups of warm soup, and off we went.  

The beloved half-way feed tent...
...with its mountain of waffles...
...and its cups of warm, salty, flavorless soup...

The next section was the very very flat section, and the single speed was no match for Wouter, who apparently was in training for the paris-roubaix, sooooo.....i figuratively shifted down a couple gears and watched them disappear into the horizion.  Lucky for them I suppose, since I was to have 2 more nagging wheel issues...I guess there's something to be said for bike maintenance.

Some graffiti on the course - punk rock is alive and well in Belgium

In the end the Lummen tocht was rad, fun trails, kinda crazy with the frozen dirt and mud so you had to be on your toes.  In total 50k on the single speed was pretty meaty, the 29er would have been a better option that day in retrospect.  For the most part it picked up all my favorite trails and took some in different directions to give me some new ideas.  

The bar in the Lummen pool after the ride

First (and last?) Belgian cross race

Ok.  Racing is retarded.  I admit it.  But something deep inside, some dusty cobwebs were shaken and the old competitive spirit reared its pathetic little head.  All those years of dreaming of doing a cross race in belgium, mud and cobbles and embrocation and pits with power washers....  So I decided to do a cylcocross race.  Ok cross racing is not exactly ripping sweet singletrack.  But it's on the dirt and, well, hopefully makes an interesting blog post.

Now there's no fooling anybody here, this was not a call-up to a UCI world cup race, this was the back-yard, sign up at the bar at the soccer field, no license required and no skills required either type of race.  Lapped riders did not get pulled.  So at least I could finish.

It was cold as can be, Belgium had hit a cold spell and the ground was frozen and hard and fast.  The course was more like a Seattle cross course, with fast singletrack and not really and cross-esque course features.  It was kind of fun zipping along rolling singletrack trails in the woods.  I must say I felt pretty good...except for the fact that I was going much slower than everyone else.

In the end...I finished 22/25 or something like that.  Ok, considering I hadn't raced in 3 years or something like that.  And it was fun, that's most important right?  But best of all - I got prize money.  I don't want to know how or why, but I got 2 euros back for 22nd place.  Sweet!