Month: November 2012

  • Thanksgiving weekend training

    Jaggy the bunny was sound asleep, but if she was trying to play dead then she did an emmy award winning performance for a good 30 seconds … enough to scare me into thinking maybe she was dead! With Kristine taking the kids early in the week up to a big family Thanksgiving gettogether in…

  • Strava Shootout plus Red Mountain 1200s

    It seems it has become an annual Thanksgiving Day tradition for me to head on over to Red Mountain and Ruffner Mountain to climb to the 1200ft summits. This year I did the route in the reverse direction so that I could put in my Strava Shoot-out effort on the Grants Mill – Karl Daly…

  • Clingman’s Dome 2x plus Waterrock Knob

    Today’s ride may very well have been my toughest road ride ever (last week’s 9 hour mountain bike race at Oak Mountain may have been a smidge tougher). I’ve done rides that were much longer with twice the total climbing, but this one was particularly difficult because I was trying to go for some really…

  • Gatlinburg Day 1

    Do you know how much I love riding in the true mountains? We got in last night at 11:45PM, and I knew that my 700x23c racing tires would be no match for potentially slick icy roads up here so I spent another 30 minutes changing both tires and putting on some good 700x25c all-weather tires…

  • Palmarés Updated, 1993-2006

    1993 – After my first mountain bike race – the 1993 Cumberland Classic at Sewanee, TN. 6th in the juniors and 25th in the beginners (there were 100 people in the race!) I started this post earlier in the year when I decided to update my racing results dating all the way back to my…

  • Oak Mountain Chainbuster MTB Race

    The Report My first experience in timed endurance mountain bike racing went really well – I came away with a win in the solo expert class. But more importantly I think the switch flipped on during the first lap of the race, and I discovered how to ride a mountain bike over technical terrain. I…

  • Lover’s Leap, Bluff Park, Alabama

    Beautiful overcast fall day today for my commute home from work. I wanted to head up to Bluff Park instead of my normal commute through Vestavia Hills. A little more than an hour into my ride, I found myself exploring the Lover’s Leap rocks up in Bluff Park with the cool inscription shown below (and…

  • Strava Shootout Week 3 – Smyer KOM

    We are nearing the end of Week 3 of the second annual Birmingham Strava Shootout. Basically, we pick a different climb each week and then see who can get the fastest time up the climb. Mark Fisher has been crushing it (and crushing a lot of my KOMs along the way) so when he laid…