Poke-em
02-11-2007, 07:18 PM
Whoooo hooooo! After a couple of hours of half frozen skiing on Saturday morning, I took a trip down to Park Point just to see how the ice was shaping up on the shore. The local paper had done a quick shot running down the length of the point just to show how much of the shore was covered. As I was standing down there taking it all in, I noticed the footing wasn’t too bad considering I was on sand. Then it hit me… ‘I bet I could ride the o’l monkey on this stuff’. So after giving my dad a quick shout, we decided we could give it a shot and claim it as our first ride of '07.
After some planning on appropriate clothing and so forth, we agreed on heading out around 1. The temps weren’t as bad as we’d thought they were going to be, and we both were dressed just about perfectly. Riding on the sand wasn’t bad, but wasn’t easy either. The stuff still drifted in places, which cause little spots where it was just a battle, but in others, all the moisture was out of it and it was nice and hard like pavement. No special Pug tires or anything, just some 29er Kenda's...but I never got out of the middle chain ring, but did have some speed up places. By about an hour in, I was sweating like a pig, which was pretty normal, but was a little surprising knowing it was February. We stopped enough times due to just being exhausted, or hitting some very loose sand and being stopped in our tracks, or just to see what others were doing on/in the lake.
We ended up at the furthest point south and decided it was time to turn back, which we obviously had to do, and the second we turned back, we noticed the wind was coming right into our face and dropped the temps about 20 degrees. It was sick… and there was nothing we could do about it. Ha… it made the trip a little cooler on the way back. We decided to hit the road on the west side of the point to speed it up a little. Battling the wind, cold, and being soaked in sweat wasn’t horrible, just kind of annoying. We kind of figured that we were going fast enough that we didn’t even notice the wind on our way out. Oh well… kind of how it goes… By looking at the pictures, you can almost tell when the wind kicked up, it’s about the same time the blue sky came into play.
We made it to a small convenience store to recuperate a little, had some fruit and PowerAde, it was nice to get out of the saddle for just even that little bit. The WTB got a little cool and hard on the last stretch, so it was nice. We finished up the ride and went our separate ways, both exclaiming how much fun we had, and how good we both felt. I don’t know how many more runs we’ll do like that… maybe going the opposite direction or something, but we’ll see. All in all, 2+ hrs in the saddle, 11+ miles, something like 2,500 calories burnt, 0 scrapes, .5 broken spirits (dad said he started whining a little on the home stretch) but more importantly 2 guys who both said they ‘needed that’. For a handfull of pictures, go here. (http://picasaweb.google.com/downhillin007/1stRideOf07)
DH
After some planning on appropriate clothing and so forth, we agreed on heading out around 1. The temps weren’t as bad as we’d thought they were going to be, and we both were dressed just about perfectly. Riding on the sand wasn’t bad, but wasn’t easy either. The stuff still drifted in places, which cause little spots where it was just a battle, but in others, all the moisture was out of it and it was nice and hard like pavement. No special Pug tires or anything, just some 29er Kenda's...but I never got out of the middle chain ring, but did have some speed up places. By about an hour in, I was sweating like a pig, which was pretty normal, but was a little surprising knowing it was February. We stopped enough times due to just being exhausted, or hitting some very loose sand and being stopped in our tracks, or just to see what others were doing on/in the lake.
We ended up at the furthest point south and decided it was time to turn back, which we obviously had to do, and the second we turned back, we noticed the wind was coming right into our face and dropped the temps about 20 degrees. It was sick… and there was nothing we could do about it. Ha… it made the trip a little cooler on the way back. We decided to hit the road on the west side of the point to speed it up a little. Battling the wind, cold, and being soaked in sweat wasn’t horrible, just kind of annoying. We kind of figured that we were going fast enough that we didn’t even notice the wind on our way out. Oh well… kind of how it goes… By looking at the pictures, you can almost tell when the wind kicked up, it’s about the same time the blue sky came into play.
We made it to a small convenience store to recuperate a little, had some fruit and PowerAde, it was nice to get out of the saddle for just even that little bit. The WTB got a little cool and hard on the last stretch, so it was nice. We finished up the ride and went our separate ways, both exclaiming how much fun we had, and how good we both felt. I don’t know how many more runs we’ll do like that… maybe going the opposite direction or something, but we’ll see. All in all, 2+ hrs in the saddle, 11+ miles, something like 2,500 calories burnt, 0 scrapes, .5 broken spirits (dad said he started whining a little on the home stretch) but more importantly 2 guys who both said they ‘needed that’. For a handfull of pictures, go here. (http://picasaweb.google.com/downhillin007/1stRideOf07)
DH