The 45 minutes I’ve been spending doing my best to hustle on cross courses on Sundays from NH-VT-and Back to MA seem to me to be an end to a means of motivating Monday rides that are much more a test of the bike and rider than anything the UCI or USAC would sanction. I’ve been dipping into fast trails that dance off to the sides of some of the popular road routes out of boston and through Bedford, Concord, Lexington, and on into Sudbury and further south that offer punchy little climbs, plenty of sections technical enough to make a skinny cross bike buck with wide open dirt roads that beg for hard pedaling. Getting out of work on the early side on Ben’s day off meant pushing through the initial discomfort of yesterdays race on the legs to hit these trails as hard as we could and for as long as we could. That as long as we could meant we would be riding hard for 5 hours wasn’t anyones guess at the beginning of the ride. Perfect weather, the fall light, good company, the perfect nutritional sustenance of Calli Gurley’s Power Turds and confidence in our bikes and handling of them made it pass in a blur of trees, hills, farm fields, and drifting turns through fallen leaves and acorns in all the colors of New England. Not as grand in scale as the huge trail riding in VT but faster and more accessible.
The races are a good time and bring riding to alot more people but in the end you rode the same thing five times and a ton of other people did too, some faster some slower. A ride that goes somewhere seems to offer something more that you take away from it that is wholly yours. The knowledge that the guys lined up in front of you Sunday probably hadn’t spent Monday like that feels pretty good as well.
