Twinkle, Twinkle

There's nothing like savoring some of that late-season fitness with a solid mountain bike ride. Just over a couple hours in the saddle tonight, I watched as the sun went down on the trails around 6:00, the temperature fall to about 45 degrees, and the colors of the leaves turn from slightly orange to fire engine red - all as daylight faded and the night progressed.

Every year around this time I ask myself: "Self, why don't you do more mountain bike rides during the summer?" The truth is, I really don't have that great of an excuse. I honestly don't know - mountain biking has just always seemed like an "Autumn" thing for me. As Fall-like as apple pie, hot chocolate, football games on the TV and Halloween. But, believe it or not, there was a time where I used to only ride the mountain bike. Yup. Day in and day out, that was my bag. There was also a couple-year stretch where I was racing the mountain bike circuit in college throughout the northeast. Every weekend mi amigos and I would cram ourselves (along with 350lbs of gear) into my broken-down car to travel to some 4+ hour, out-of-the-way college to compete in a 2 hour cross-country race. We were usually running on 4 hours of sleep or less, bad coffee and in race conditions that hovered around freezing and were drizzling wet. I can't help but think that this what cemented the equivalence of mountain biking to the third season for me. More enjoyable than the actual racing, however, were the post-race festivities which almost always consisted of hunting down anything that resembled a Mexican restaurant, and endlessly ragging on whomever took the lowest position in the race that day. Good times.

I take racing and training a little more seriously these days, that's for sure. But there's always been something about riding the mountain bike, especially in the late-season. With the flow of terrain underwheel, the blur of colors rushing by at night, and that endless bliss that comes with cleaning a new piece of singletrack - every now and again it feels as though I'm right back at the beginning of it all.

See you out there.