This is bound to be a shorter entry. Its late, its been a long day, and I'm going to be getting up to ride my bike at 6:00 AM tomorrow. Today we had to battle the heat a little bit- forecast called for mid 90s. Ideally we would have done our skills work in the morning and then taken what was practiced and applied it on the trail. We just thought it was in the best interest of everybody to try to get the ride in earlier in the AM while it was cooler.
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| The climb up.... |
We rolled out shortly after breakfast. The past few days were starting to take a toll on some of the riders and today wasn't going to help the matter. The ride planned was going to bring us onto some of the best singletrack around, but it was also going to bring over 2000 feet of vertical gain. We topped out at 8200 feet today- a climb that was more than plenty for a lot of folks. But the views were awesome!
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| Group pic at summit- Mondays ride will put us at horizontal line of center peak in far distance. |
It was interesting that we have all these trails thanks to motorcycles. They're really the ones that did all the work out here, and whats great is that they are considered multi-use trails. We saw a couple motos on the trail, but everyone was super
courteous- it was great to see that all the different recreational parties exist together out here. From the top of the climb we actually got a glimpse of where we are heading on Monday- another 2000 feet up.
After lunch it was back to working on the skills development. We spun out to one of the pump tracks in town so the riders could practice negotiating bumps and using their momentum to carry their speed over the obstacle. Then it was back to the park to break into individual groups again. This time around I worked with Sean to go over bike mount/ dismount.
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| Get off your bike, get on your bike! |
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| Keeping the momentum. |
We rushed back to campus for dinner then it was time to get down to business with the educational sessions. Ryan led a great talk on nutrition and hydration and spurred on a lot of great discussion. Even though that talk went pretty long, we pressed on and I gave my talk on injury prevention. I focused on knee injuries- traumatic and overuse; had all the riders practice a simple single leg squat to screen for weaknesses and discussed how what happens at the hip and the foot can wreak havoc on the knees. I moved through the material pretty quickly since it was already 9:15, and despite the few heads nodding off (wouldn't you if you had to sit through class that late?!?!) I got good questions from the group and they seemed to appreciate it.
Tomorrow is the last official full day of camp. This is the big planned ride where most riders will get shuttled up to 10,200 feet and ride trails back into town. A few of us coaches and some of the fresh-feeling climbers of the group are actually heading out at 6:00 AM to ride up to where the shuttle will drop everybody off. So we'll climb over 4000 feet, anticipating it taking between 2.5 and 3 hours depending on how people feel. We'll finish up with a few skills we haven't gotten to yet, FINALLY get to Yoga, and then its on to packing bikes for those who leave early on Tuesday (myself included).
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| Ryan addressing the group about nutrition. |
Last full post tomorrow, probably have something random to write about from the airport on Tuesday.
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