Vernal Equinox and a nasty climb

Happy First Day of Spring! Mark, Hanggi and I celebrated today with a ball buster of a ride. Mark and I picked up Hanggi on the way out of town and pointed our noses south to Naples. We fought a brutal headwind the entire ride south and east. With out legs already fatigued a little bit from that effort, we undertook a daunting task. One that no man has tried before, probably because we were far too smart to attempt. I had tried several years ago, but gave up after a brief effort that resulted in my defeat and me on my knees cursing the world. What was this task? Wolfganger climb, a brutal dirt road that rises 1500' right out of the valley of Middlesex. The road is pretty much straight up. If I were to guesstimate I'd say the average gradient is around 23%. For 35 minutes of climbing, my average cadence from my power files was less than 40rpm! The road was steep, nasty steep and being Spring, it was muddy. With the wet soil it made the effort twice as hard as you were sinking into the mud and also trying to keep your pedal stroke smooth. We ended up walking several sections. Let me just say that speedplay cleats are not made for mud. It took me a long time to get my pedals to engage again. After what seemed like eternity we hit a short flat section, only to turn the corner and realize we weren't even close to finished and the worse was just beginning. (Many curse words followed that corner).




As we finally crested the top we were exhausted, and relieved that it was over. But like any good dirt road climb, we had to go down. And down a loose, wet dirt road on skinny road wheels is best left to... us! Damn, we bombed that thing! Descending that road leads to an incredible view of the Naples valley. We were going to fast and I was having too much fun to pull out the camera. Diving in and out of the tire rutted corners, dodging potholes, sliding around on the mud and snow, all at 45 mph.

After a short break for some fuel up at the arrow mart, we headed home. Much to our enjoyment we had a nice little tailwind. It barely helped though, we were pretty crushed from the efforts of the climb earlier. We just buried our heads and plodded along. Once we got closer to home though, our legs started to show some signs of life and lead us to the promised land. We narrowly escaped the oncoming rain this time and arrived home totally wiped out

For those wondering if I was a good boy or not over the weekend; I was!!! I did a little xc skiing on saturday with lizzy at dryer rd; followed by some trainer time. Sunday was some trainer time again, but was cut short by a power outage that left me with now visual or even any fans. After an hour of that I threw in the towel


Digging Fire It Up from the album "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank" by

Modest Mouse