Mohican State Park ride

Sunday was maybe the last Big Ride of the season, heading to Mohican State Park for the 25 mile loop there. I've only ridden this once before--about six weeks ago, buddy Marc and I hit it, and that time I sailed through the trail without feeling broken and old by the end. Things weren't so smooth this time around.

We had a group of four riders. Kelly, Chris, and Peter were all Mohican newbies. Sunday was clear but cold, with the temp about 30F when we started riding at shortly after 9:00 am. The trail starts off with a long, steady climb. In fact, much of the first eight miles is mostly climbing:

Ways to Build a Surly Cross Check

My Surly Cross Check is the longest serving bike in my fleet, coming in at almost five years old--that's ancient in my skewed world. I'd been looking at getting a CC for quite a while, and finally gave up on waiting for some miracle deal and paid full pop ($420) from Speedgoat.com (RIP). Through the years, I've been consistently impressed with the design that went into the CC. Some may complain that it's too heavy, or that the tubing is too stiff (or flexy), or something, but the smartly designed flexibility is something that I've really grown to appreciate as other pretenders to the Cross Check throne have come and gone from my garage.

My initial build is still one of my favorites:

Singular Gryphon Rises Again

What do you get when you cross a Singular Gryphon with an OS Blackbuck? I've had both my Singular Gryphon and my OS Blackbuck framesets for sale for quite some time without much action. Both bikes had some things I like (Blackbuck: handling, Singular: looks and ride), so I wondered if I could get the best of both worlds?

I thought about calling this "Project Pheonix" to fit in with the Gryphon theme, but WTB already has that name, so I'm going call this project "SingBuck":

S24O to Stealth Spot

When I was out running around with the kids this summer, I kept my eyes open for spots that offered the potential for some stealth camping. I expect if I were to check the Dublin city code, it would prohibit overnight camping on city lands. But I'm not going to check, because I want an alternative to trekking to Alum Creek and paying $28 to sleep on hard ground next to noisy neighbors with an RV.

After a summer's worth of planning for this, we had an unusually warm Saturday night forecast, so Henry and I headed out about 4:00 pm. We made one detour on the way there, to pick up the Riverbox at Amberleigh park:

Trail-a-bike Twins

An evening spin tonight to hit a few playgrounds and enjoy our last few nice days of fall. Mostly, I'm making this post to show this picture of Kate:

Both twins are starting to ride the Burley Picolo trail-a-bike and really enjoying it. Sam's hair just doesn't flow dramatically like Kate's does:

Now the question is, how to hook two trail-a-bikes together?

Stupid Things Found in Mountain Bike Action (Nov issue)

Despite the fact that I get too many magazines, for some reason I recently subscribed to Mountain Bike Action. I got the November issue in the mail a few weeks back:

After reading through the issue, I thought I would start a (likely) semi-regular feature of my blog, "Stupid Things Found in Mountain Bike Action." Sure, there's the usual stupid stuff, such as their insistence on weighing everything in pounds and ounces (true weight weenies are metric, except for complete bikes and maybe wheelsets and forks), and their use of "feet/crank rotation" to measure gearing (which is logically better than the commonly used gear inches, but everyone uses gear inches, so "feet/crank revolution" is thus a worthless benchmark). But I'm going to focus on the stupid stuff specific to this issue.

Here we go:

Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day

Today was IMBA's official "Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day." Although Henry has a few trails under his belt, now that he's a big ol' seven year old, I figured it was time for him to hit a real trail. Besides, there was supposed to be free stuff.

We got some rain on Friday (no doubt due to the President's Cup being in town), but the trails were still in good enough shape for riding. We loaded up Saturday morning before swim lessons and headed out. We got there right at the start, and the COMBO guys already had their tent set up. Henry was excited to get a number plate: