Mountain Biking

Sunday was a beautiful day, in the 70's, partly cloudy.
First we rode up Waterton Canyon Road. The last quarter mile was very steep. As we chugged up in low gear, a dozen deer walked nervously by.
The Colorado Trail had snow on it a few weeks ago, but now it's nearly all clear. Just a couple of patches to hike our bikes over.
I'm no biker. My brother is, but he's a roadie. I ran more miles last year than he rode (well over 2000 miles), so my lungs were up to it, but he had the biker legs. Neither of us were particularly good at the technical mountain biking stuff.

My bike is extremely awesome, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to tackle those steep, rockie trails. I didn't realize that we were going to be chugging up steep switchbacks for miles. My quads were BURNING! My brothers lungs were burning.
In all, we did 16 miles. Not very far, but very intense. I'm surprised neither of us wiped-out. We each came close, and we each stalled out and fell over a couple of times, but no crash-n-burn.

Before turning around, we ditched our bikes and went for a hike down Bear Creek to a resevoir. There were lots of stream crossings. At first, my brother took off his shoes and sox and waded across, but I'm kind of amphibious, so I left my shoes on. Good thing because we had to cross the same stream about 8 times! We would've spent an hour putting shoes on and off.
There was lots of garbage strewn around. Much of it was in camps. It pissed me off. Some of it, though, was obviously strewn around by a bear, but hunters and fisherman are supposed to put there food in a tree when away. And they're supposed to police the area when they break camp. We didn't have packs, so we didn't have anything to pack trash out with.

By the time we got back to the CR-V, I nearly had blisters on my hands, my triceps hurt, I had scratches on my legs, and red abrasions all over. Nothing was broken, and scabs will show everyone how much fun I had.

I needed a day off from running. I don't know why. Last week was only 41 miles. That's not supposed to leave me needing a rest. But there's no way my feet were going to allow it. They didn't hurt, but they felt "wrong", so I wasn't going to push my luck. I think I managed to get a great workout anyways.