such adventure, much blog, many words, wow.

axcxnj said:
I was foruntate (or unfortunate, depending how you look at it) enough to borrow one for the USARA national championships this past year. i was very surprised at how much i noticed a difference. Before that i always saw the price of them and scoffed...now my wallet is alot lighter, along with my paddle .

whats the deal/advantage of those greenland paddles?
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Greenland paddles will have absolutely no advantage for you if you are racing. For racing, you can't beat what you have there. ^ Wing blade will give you the most bite and allow you to achieve the greatest hull speed your boat is capable of. You'll probably never see someone racing with a GP.
The Greenland Paddle shines when it comes to constant effort of travel. Long distance endurance type stuff. You can do all sorts of different kinds of rolls & braces with a GP that you can't really do with a euro paddle as well. And there's the purist aspect - It's the same type of paddle the inuit used back in the day when the purpose of a kayak was to hunt seal... I just like them.
My expensive carbon paddle hasn't been used in years.
 
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welp, ive just registered for my first expedition adventure race. Untamed New England 2014. This is one of 2 adventure races in the US that is on the World Series circuit, and the only one on the east coast. This year it is getting pretty hyped up to be one of the best races of the year. oh boy.

Quick overivew:

about 200 miles total course distance, starting June 17th and finishing June 22nd. I think that Winners are expected to finish in 4 days.
disciplines include: mountain biking, trekking, wilderness navigation, ropes, canoeing, packrafting, and whitewater rafting

Ive got alot of feeling going on right now...a ton of excitement, a bit of "uh oh..what did i just get myself into" and a fair amount of disappointment because my brother is not able to come and race with me for this. John and I would watch the eco challenge on discovery channel and just get so inspired by it when we were younger..and i feel like this is finally coming full circle. this is a race that is at that tier, and im pretty bummed out that i wont be able to race this with my best teammate.

The current world champions will be racing, along with many other top ranked world teams. AR is unique because the pool of athletes is honestly pretty small, therefore there arent tons of divisions. So i will be lining up against some pretty impressive athletes. but anything can happen in AR 😀

there will be live satellite tracking on every team as well, which should make it interesting for people to watch online.

oh boy...
 
a tent for the team and sleeping bags for each racer is mandatory gear. there may be dark zones for some of the water sections (a timeframe, usually at night, where you are not allowed to move onto the next leg for safety reasons) that can be used as planned sleep times. but we wont know any of that until the morning of, or the night before the race. so the teams will just have to decide on sleep strategy.

this aspect of racing is a whole new world for me. my longest race to date has been 30 hrs. Races up to 48 hours you generally do not plan for any sleep, but beyond that you need to get some form of rest during the race. the million dollar question is how much is too much, and how little is too little. this is where the experienced teams will really shine, and people like me will still have to figure out. I would expect to not sleep until the second night though, unless there is a dark zone prior that we catch.

pearl, there probably wont be live video feed or anything like that, but there should be a picture feed along with live satellite tracking which updates a leaderboard. So you should be able to look at each teams tracks on a map at any point during the race. With a little bit of understanding on how AR works, looking at the satellite tracking can be pretty interesting.
 
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took advantage of the long weekend and Aly and I drove out to raystown lake friday morning and came back sunday.

we set the alarm friday for 4 am, hoping to get a jump start on the day....yeah..that didnt happen. we finally rolled out at about 8 and took the scenic route to raystown. We had a last minute stop at the walmart before arriving, then ate lunch and we were rolling by about 2:30. we stayed at the ridge camp, at the 7 points campground, which is nice, because its basically ride-on-ride-off with the trailhead right there. Friday we knocked out the smaller half of the park and got back into the flow of the place. had a good campfire that night, and slept well thanks to it being pre-season for the campground, so most of the sites were empty. and the few other people there were cyclists.

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saturday we knocked out about half of the rest of the park, before i double flatted. since i had no more tubes left, but could still ride, we rode back to the campsite then drove into town to restock on tubes. the bike shop in town was pretty cool. they stocked alot of salsa bikes. i want to replace my touring frame with a fargo =]

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we ate lunch in town then drove back to the trailhead to ride again. I was hoping to hit every trail during this trip, but Aly's legs had about had it..so we cut the ride a little short, so there are 2 more trails i need to come back to ride.

that place is so much fun. If you havent been, i highly reccomend it. we met two people that drove 8 hours from quebec just to ride there. the campgrounds are clean and orderly too. quality stuff.

now i get to mount up some new tires for the upcoming racing season, which starts this weekend down in the shenandoah valley in VA. cant wait!
 
axcxnj said:
I was hoping to hit every trail during this trip, but Aly's legs had about had it.
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you can say that i had choc milk and was about to poop my pants too.. i have little shame when it comes to that.. and it certainly doesn't exist in a group of mtn bikers 😉
 
tore the sidewall on my tubeless tires on friday. spare tube went in, that tube flatted.

if you ride tubeless and dont carry a spare tube, youre doing it wrong
 
yeah, since it was early season, the trails were not as smooth and clear as they normally are. i clipped a stray chunk of shale and it got my sidewall good
 
How did Aly do on the trails? We're thinking of doing the drive-ride-camp-ride-drive thing soon.
 
she did great, we stopped by last year and she wanted to stay on only the easy-moderate rated trails, this year we got on everything and she realized that those difficulty ratings are really meaningless...if anything they are just a rating of how wide the singletrack is and how steep the hill that the trail is sidecut into is. I think we had the most fun on the hydro loop, which is one of the black rated trails.

i also read somewhere, advising people to ride DOWN osprey and not UP. glad we took that advice.
 
mounted up my new tires tubeless yesterday...theyre most likely pretty old..hence why they were on clearance on chainlove. the front mounted just fine..but when the rear was inflating, i could hear the tire carcass stretching and cracking inside from the rubber most likely drying out a bit too much. pinholes everywhere. they sealed, but lost air..so i kept pumping them back up and swishing around the stans to try and cover the pinholes. did that 2 or three times, then let them sit overnight. they werent flat this morning, thats a good start, so i flipped the tire once more and will pump up the pressure a bit tonight to see if the stans worked enough.....

sometimes being a cheapo doesnt pay....
 
I'd throw a bit more Stans in there myself. Well, Utah might, I would just think about it but never do it.
 
yeah thats probably a good idea. every time i would pump the pressure back up, i could hear all the pinholes opening as the psi approached 30. i wont feel comfortable riding it unless it can hold 50 psi without blowing out all the pinholes. we will see.
 
lay it down flat on a garbage can or something so the stans sits on the sidewall overnight. then flip it over and do it again the next day. Usually you don't have to do this, but if your tires are especially leaky than you do.
 
So since Aly and I moved right next to mahlon dickerson, ive been wanting to get out for a longer than average ride there. Saturday finally brought that opportunity for me.

sorry i have no GPS files to share..i dont ride with GPS, but for this ride i brought my running watch which uses GPS to track distance, but isnt able to give me a map/stats.

My goal was to get 30+ miles of dirt, door to door. I generally leave my house, ride 1.5 miles of road, and then im at the lower lot for mahlon, and i go in from there. another option is to ride .25 miles of road and get into the trail system by lake shawnee that i take up to mahlon dickerson. I took that route today. its mainly fireroad and doubletrack, but there is motorcycle singletrack that is rideable, hidden in some of the nooks and crannies of that area. I caught some of that, and got a little over 5 miles in before even making it to the rock rill parking area (bottom of yellow trail)

From there, i made my way up to the rail trail and into the WMA to do some more exploring there. I havent ridden that section a ton, so i wanted to see where some of the turns that i dont normally take, go. i did a loop in there, but still left a bunch of trail unridden, by the time i made it back to the saffin pond lot at weldon road, i had just about 15 miles done.from there, I took the double track over to the campground and then up to the white trail, to start that loop, branching out to the purple trail. I got caught in saturdays rain about then, and worked on continuing around to go back on the orange trail. while there, i heard some thunder and decided to cut it short.

i can handle a little rain no problem, but i didnt have a desire to be in the woods, solo with lightning and thunder. I was still a bit from home, so i worked my way back to the rail trail and took that back down to the rock rill parking lot, then hopped on the road to go home. Final tally was 27 miles. about 1.5 of it on road, the rest dirt Riding time was 3:33. I didnt even touch the wall/stone gate, or any of the unblazed single track. I feel like i could probably get 40 miles in there with minimal backtracing on trails. theres just so much trail there...its awesome to be able to ride almost 30 miles of dirt, from my door in NJ.
 
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