Weekly Wednesday Wildness

If you've been coming out for the Wednesday Night MTB ride you probably understand the title of this post. It seems that since I resurrected the MTB ride, every week has proven to be an adventure. But at the same time each ride has taught us something new. Here's a quick re-cap to get you up to speed on our lessons learned.

Week 1 - A dude (you know who you are Navid) shows up to ride with a bike and a helmet. No water, no repair kit, no nothing. Normally I would have picked up on the lack of equipment, but I was running late and in a hurry to get the ride started. So what happens? About halfway through the ride I'm feeding him water from my camel bak (fyi it gets hot in the woods) to avoid dehydration and a few minutes later he gets a flat. Lesson learned, carry extra water, an extra spare tube or patch kit, and a pump (in case you run out of CO2).

Week 2 - We come up to the big tree crossing about mid way through our first lap and a different dude gets a flat. To make light of the situation, Dustin and I build a small lip out of rotten wood (not a good idea) to make a tree ride. That kept us entertained as it took "dude who will remain anonymous" way too long to fix a flat. We finally jumped in there, got it done, and he's ready to roll. At least that's what we thought...now the friggin front tire is flat! Good thing we learned to bring some patches and a pump last week. Got Adam (oops) fixed up and we had time for one more quick loop. We're now three quarters of the way done and I hear, "Hey guys you ain't gonna believe this..." Yep, dude gets a third flat!!! We make like a Nascar pit crew and knocked it out all while trying not to get eaten alive by skeeters. Lesson learned, teamwork and bug spray is a necessity.Dustin traversing the tree with the aid of some rotten wood that is moving beneath his wheel. You can see flat number one at the bottom left of the pic. Pic by Scott's iPhone.

Week 3 - As we hosed ourselves down with some bug spray before the ride, we started joking around about what could happen this week. The ride was going fine, no flats, trails in good shape...what's going on here? Have we been spared? Mechanically yes, but as we waited to re-group a couple times it was a total blood bath as the mosquitoes started to dig in to any exposed skin. How could this be possible? We practically bathed ourselves in bug spray. Lesson learned, different bug spray.

Week 4 - We had a big group this week, so I'm immediately thinking we now have a greater chance of mechanical disaster or physical injuries. We're getting through the ride with no issues and everyone's having fun. We all go to finish up the trail in disbelief, we make our way out of the woods, and BAM! Here's our weekly lesson. Seems that a train has come to a complete standstill blocking our access point to the towpath. We can't go left as the engine has stopped halfway across the bridge. We look right and all we see is train. Thankfully we've learned the art of teamwork from prior weeks, so we made the game-day/potentially deadly decision to hop the train. A couple people get on the other side and we start an assembly line feeding bikes through in a most expedient manner. Everything's moving nicely with only a few more bikes to go and we here a big rumble followed by Kim yelling, "It's moving!!!!" We freak out thinking the train is about to start moving, and now we're slinging bikes like scrap metal and people are jumping through the train in a total state of panic. Come to find out it's just some dude with a boomin system in his truck. Everyone's laughing as we get across the train with no injuries, just the world's blackest grease on our hands. Lesson learned, the art of train hopping.

So what will we learn next time? There's only one way to find out...show up for the ride.