Pics from Sundays ride!

Bruised feet and big rides.

Ahh yes, it's now mid October and the temps have been hovering in the high 70's all week, if not higher. While this is most likely bad news for the polar bears and those with beach front property, cyclists in Albuquerque are loving life right now.

My weekend was nothing short of cycling awesomeness.

I got out for my first foray into the world of cyclocross on Saturday, racing in the NM Cross Series #3 This is a 7 race series, and #4 will be this Saturday, although I've heard location isn't quite finalized yet.

The racing was fun, despite a course that contained significant amounts of sand. I raced the Cat 4, and the Cat 3/4 races, faired pretty well in each, then hauled off to finish the day at the shop. Nothing like starting you work day with a little bike racing to put you in a good mood.

My feet hurt now, from all the running in my shoes with no insoles. I have nice little bruises on the bottom of each foot exactly where the cleat is. I managed to flip over the bars once, while trying to muscle my way through one of the mini sand dunes that dotted the course. I believe I stuffed the handle bar into my upper-inner-thigh region at that point, which explains the bruise. And of course there are several bruises on both thighs resulting from my far less than smooth attempts at flying re-mounts, like I've seen real cross racers do.

Good times, good times. Now I understand what all the excitement is about every fall.

Then yesterday we had another fantastic day playing in the Sandias. For those that are familiar with the area, our ride was from the 10K trail head, north to the Ellis trail, then back south to the top of King of The mountain, down King to where it intersects 10K, and down 10K to Tree Spring and ending at Doc Long, where we had wisely left a couple vehicles for shuttling purposes.

We hardly ever use cars for shuttling on our rides, but for some reason I thought of it this time, and everybody was happy I did. It's just so fun to descend around 10K, Oso, and Tree Spring, but it is so unbelievably hard to go up that stuff.

For those of you who have know idea what any of those trails are, you'll just have to take my word for it; they are some of the most technical, demanding, and fun trails that you will find anywhere.

There was a serious amount of leaves on the trail, which made for beautiful scenery and moments of terror when you had no idea what was under your tires.

Unfortunately, I have no photographic evidence for any of this, as I have been a habitual camera forgetter of late. Hopefully though, Charlie and / or Richaround will email a couple of pics from Sundays ride soon that I can post up.

As usual, it was nearly an all-Maverick ride, with 5 of the 6 of us on Mavericks (one guy was riding a Santa Cruz, and so far he refuses to even try a Maverick, probably because he's going to have to buy one once he rides one, like the rest of us). And as usual, I was absolutely in love with my bike as I repeatedly got in over my head, pushed the limits of my handling skills, and repeatedly came out alive thanks to some serious ass-saving suspension performance.

Yayyy squishy bikes!

In shop news, we're just cruising right along. I just placed our big 2010 order with Giant, and I'm pretty excited for those to start rolling in, especially the new DH bikes and the carbon Trance X Advanced that we ordered (for Charlie... in my size. Bwah ha ha ha, I can't believe I convinced him to get a large again!).

One of our big new plans for 2010 is to have some high end rentals available, particularly in the Downhill variety. So we will have a couple of Giant Glory's, a couple of Commencal Supreme's, and maybe a few others (Transition and Evil come to mind).

We are also putting in a big effort for trail-bike demo bikes, and will have small, medium, and large demos of the Maverick Durance and the Giant Trance X1. We will also have medium and large Tomac Snypers, and I believe a Commencal Meta 5.5 as well (possibly even a carbon Meta 5.5, if we're feeling sassy).

I'm excited about all this, because I think it's silly to buy a full suspension bike without really testing it first, and also because demo bikes keep me from having to try very hard to sell bikes; just put people on the bikes and let them choose for themselves. Much easier for everybody.

Okay, that's enough words, and no pictures to go with. Lame, I know, I'll try harder to get some more interactive media going for next time.

We have been very busy at the shop recently and Dan hasn't had the time to write a new post in two weeks, so I thought I would put one up.

Props to Tony and his extended crew that took top honors at the red Bull endurance downhill event in Angel Fire this last weekend. I wasn't there but I am told they won the 4man team, the Duo class, and we helped the solo winner too. Tony said that Dan did a great job as the pit mechanic, actually he said "you should have seen Lucero, he kicked ass" but I assume that meant he did a great job.

Interbike was smaller this year than before with many companies deciding to skip because a booth costs so much and times are tough. Still there were some good things at the show: The SRAM XX is cool and is now starting to trickle into stores; American classic has a new set of wheels that are tubeless compatable and available in 29" or 26" abd are very light, but thaey don't yet have them on their website; new tires from WTB (some are in the store) are cool; DT has some insane new wheels and forks- one set of wheels are tubeless and they have two new carbon mountain wheels, one set of which are very wide All-Mountain wheels that come in at 1550 grams, and they cost as much as some cars. There was more but that is the main bit.

If you haven't seen the new tires from Geax take a browse online- we have a good selection in the store and they are light, effective, and priced well.

The local trails are all in good shape. South Boundry (via Elliot Barker) last Sunday was also terrific, although windy. If you haven't done it this year, get up there and do it quickly before it snows over. I'll finish my post by adding a picture of some ride we did somewhere.

-Charlie

Grey Matter

I forgot about this:



Oh yeah, 1am Denny's run before the SSWC, and Paul ordered the steak and eggs (or rather, I ordered it for him). And it was the nastiest piece of meat I have ever seen, grey and bloody, through and through.
Oh yeah, he ate every last bite.

Ughhhhh

Wait.. what happened? Where did September go?

As you might have noticed, from our steady stream of announcements of not being open, this has been a whirlwind of a month for us.

But, we've gotten through the most of it, all the busy crazy-ness, and we're back to business as usual.

Danny's wedding was a treat for us all.


That's a pic of Danny, as dressed up as you will ever see him, and his father.

Then Dan was off on a honeymoon for a few days, and shortly after his return, I took off to participate in the mayhem that was the 2009 Single Speed World Championship in Durango.

I did a poor job of documenting the fun, as all my pictures are from the Friday night before the race.

We stayed at the Durango Hometown Hostel, which was far nicer than we anticipated, and I would completely suggest it for anybody looking for inexpensive accomodations in Durango.

After unloading our bikes and dumping our bags, we quickly rode into town to find registration, with just one stop at the liquor store in between.


It rained, and we hid out like hobos in the park drinking. That's a pic of Paul in front of Durango Cyclery, which is a cool shop definitely worth checking out while in town.

We went from visiting some friends of Rich's (and getting fed pizza) to the official kegger in the woods party organized for the race via the "Test Tracks" trails, that run along the west edge of town. These trails are a blast, and it's unbelievable that they are so close to town. If I lived in Durango I'd be finding excuses to head north/south across town on these every chance I got.

The pre-race party was huge.

There was partying.....


And food and beer was plentiful and cheap.......


And live music to rock your face off to....


It was definitely a fun event. So much fun was had on friday night, that I didn't manage to get my camera out for a single pic on Saturday. I was in rough shape, to say the least. I did manage to line up pretty far towards the front amongst the 1,000 plus other racers. And despite being incredibly hung over and wondering if I might throw up at any moment for the first half of the race, I actually raced well and held my position amongst the masses.
For the majority of the race I was working like hell to keep up with a local badass gal named Sarah ( I learned her name because absolutely every spectator knew her). She was battling with a couple other gals for 7th, 8th, 9th place or so, and I was caught in the middle of it. And it was sweet.

The race was 2 1/2 hours or so of punishment for me, and I loved every minute of it.

Besides all the beer stops, everybody seemed to enjoy the bacon and twinkies stop. Nobody seemed to enjoy the bacon and twinkies puke 20 yards down trail though.

Here's some links to some recaps of the race from people who didn't forget about their cameras:

Article from Mountain Flyer Magazine (best bike mag ever, and also noticed editor Brian Riepe listed as a top 20 finisher in the race, which is bad ass).

Bike Snob NYC's account of the event (Notice the guy in his pics with the blond hair wearing a "Bud" jersey? That's Greg Herbold. So if we can get HB to remember who was behind him for the hike-a-bike, the Snobs secret identity will be totally foiled! Also, I totally finished in front of HB, and therefore also beat the Snob, you know, just so you know, because clearly he took the race very seriously).

"official" SSWC09 Blog

After the race I was actually feeling pretty good, until I drank my finish line congratulatory beer, and then I felt absolutely miserable again. I needed to either not drink at all, or drink way more than one beer.

Being a married man with child, and accompanied by a married man with children and another man to be married within the next 24 hours, we split that evening and missed out on the after party. Which was okay with us at the time.

Then I was home for one day, and split again Monday morning for Interbike. We did two days of Dirt Demo, riding and abusing other peoples expensive bikes for a change, and one day at the show.

I'm not going to bore everybody with another "bike dorks trying to get their party on in vegas" story. Instead, I'm going to go ahead and pretend I am Stevil, and let you read his account of the event, because it's way cooler than mine, and can't actually get me in trouble....

All Hail the Black Market's Stevil goes to Interbike and gets it done.

And if you want to know who reinvented the wheel with some unbelievable new doo-dangle, inevitably made of carbon, there's plenty of places to go for that (because quite honestly, I didn't hardly see a thing at the show, somebody was a little bleary-eyed):

Velo News blah blah blah

Cycling News blah blah blah

Singletrack blah blah blah

and dont forget to check out Bikefix.net for coverage of the show, as Marc and Charlie will certainly have sifted through all the lameness and found something sweet to show you.

Okay, kiddo is bound to wake up soon, my lap is beginning to get warm from my new - used Macbook that I just picked up from Long (wicked photagrapher, but probably sold me a totally crap laptop, check out his site: http://longnguyenphotography.com , seriously, this thing is like lava), and also I have a special limited edition S.F. Brewing Yippee IPA bomber in the fridge that I've been working hard not to open since 12:01, but I think the time has come.

Thanks for reading. If you's got any photos from SSWC or Vegas that you'd like to share with our little Bikeworks brethren, I'd be appreciative.