Level Up

Every once in a while its nice to relish in the fact that I'm improving as a cyclist and athlete every day. I was checking my records. I have only been mountain biking seriously for just under 2 years now. I got the Karate Monkey in June of 2008. I plan on taking it on a 2 year anniversary ride sometime that month someplace fun.

I'll never forget that first ride on that thing. I had been mountain biking twice before then. I owned a crappy GT bike and tried to make it rideable but it just wasn't working out. I didn't have the know how I have now in bike repairs or part placement. Anyways it was stolen and I figured it was a good reason to buy a nicer bike. So after lots of research I figured my reason with why I was so bad at mountain biking was the design of the smaller 26" wheels. The 29" wheel allowed for easier rollover on roots and rocks, which always seemed like a hindrance to me. I tried to find a good low price frame that wouldn't break or fall apart or be flexy like a noodle. I had read a lot of good things about Surly had a few friends who rode steamrollers who loved em. Why not? It's an American company who outsources their frame building, but at least it wasn't a Next or Schwinn. I decided on keeping it simple as I didn't know what kind of gears to get or how well I'd be at shifting gears and just go single speed. What a great way to start riding a mountain bike. It's like learning to drive in an manual as opposed to an automatic. However I did learn a few habits that have been hard to break, but overhall haven't hurt me that bad. So for the first 7 months of the Karate Monkey's life it was a Rigid Single Speed geared at 52".

The first ride on that tank was epic. I went to Blankets Creek in Woodstock and proceeded to make it about a mile down the trail before I hit a log ramp without under weighting the front and went over the bars, hard. I hit my knee on a bolt that was hanging off my brake clamp and split it open pretty good. I was about 1.5 miles into mountain biking and had already gone over the bars once (a feat I've only ever done once since kind of). I got up from my fall and was beat up, tired, hungover, hot and miserable. "Welcome to Mountain biking" my friend says to me. Jerk. I really began to wonder if I had wasted my money on such a contraption. What had I done? This wasn't fun. We trudged on through the day and did Dwelling loop in over an hour and more or less the same on South Loop. I hurt bad. Everything was sore. I hadn't even gone 10 miles and I was thinking, this is a lot harder than riding around on a fixed gear in the city.

I look back on that ride and its nice to see how far I've come in just under 2 years of mountain biking. It's really kind of neat. I hope I get to ride some silly awesome trails for a long time.

Oh I also had a kickass road ride last night. 17.6mph avg over 1800ft of climbing in 25 miles of roads. Wahoo!