woa. kenny. you missed a spankin' good time brah. we were thinking positive thoughts of you though on today's ride. when i mapquested grant's address, it's officially 97 miles door to door. that's all right though, it was my turn to go his haunts. here's the dealio with grant: i've known grant since the late 80's from our hometown of plano, tx. plano, is a story in and of itself really. anyhoo, we were roommates in college (hook 'em horns muhfuh!), lived in north austin (across the street from the state parole board), on a street called shoal creek, teammates on the plano schwinn cycling team and at the university of texas (hook 'em horns again muhfuh!-dats right), and even taught at the same school in plano. he, social studies; me, science. quite a long and storied past, but i digress...
right outside his door there's a whole series of trails were we can dump ourselves into and ride to some pretty spectacular topography with picture postcard vistas all around us. so we climb up to buckhorn, and he shows me some exceptional views like helen hunt waterfall and rampart range. buckhorn's scarily like the the scree fields at the top of the firecracker 50 singletrack. it's like a tightroping act, here's why. grant says the trail is pulverized granite and it's very scree-like, so any little bobble can lead your tire to some traction breaking rough which can take you over the edge if there're drop offs. the key is to go fast uphill and look where you want to go because if you slow down, you increase your chance to vacillate your handlebars where it can place your front tire in very loose gravel. grant's flying uphill (he's getting fit to race the leadville 100) and i'm working pretty hard just to stay in contact with him. i rarely put it in my granny, mostly my middle. once we get to the top of buckhorn we take some pix of this amazing vista. at the top are some cyclists who complain of motocrossers ehfing up the singletrack. grant's a pretty non-confrontational guy except when it comes to cycling. so he tell's the guy to pipe down because it's the moto-xers that maintain the trails in this here parts. grant warns me the downhill's pretty loose at some places, so we hit it pointing down. sure enough we're flying and any deviation off the packed gravel and my front tire's washing with it's own agenda. this is dangerous because there's a cliff off to my left. i spy grant's line and copy him to a tee. my skiing background gives me a tendency to g.s. turn it to scrape off speed with a natural turn without hitting the brakes. in this loose stuff, it just makes the front tire go squirrely. i lose it a couple of times and i throw out my inside leg to avoid smacking the ground. i hit some woop-de-doos and i get the giggles because on the apexes my stomach gets weightless and it makes me laugh in fits. nutty funny.
grant says this downhill's called jacks (upper or lower or something close to that). again it's like the firecracker without the babyheads.
our next singletrack's up palmer. incidentally grant climbs like a billy goat and we know the physiological, background reason why. insert harp-type music here, reminiscent of earlier times...
the summers in austin were spent scrounging for money to pay our apartment's rent. since we were cat a racers-grant thinks i sandbagged the cat b's-the graduate student friends we knew in the human physiology dept. were always asking the cyclists to be their guinea pigs in figuring out physiological triggers. we participated in a tour de france study where shaklee (a sports specific, dietetically nutritional l.l.c) was testing their energy drink. we had to ride a total of three hours (one day a week for a month) in various levels of intensity relative to our vo2 max (the way our body utilizes oxygen per kilogram body mass). the science behind it was, to see how our slow-twitch muscles retained glucose (clear=no glucose, dark-ish means glucose retention), during aerobic/anaerobic events (hence the 'tour' study). so, you ask, how do they sample our fast and slow twitch muscles? well, they biopsy a pea-six amount from our vastus lateralis during the ride and physically count, under a microscope (then we hop on the bike and finish the regimen). witnessing our own biopsy was more unbelievable than someone telling us we were getting a biopsy. they paid us for this. the nutty part was the scalpel they used to tease/cut our faschia in front of the lateralis was the same one in my dissection kit (i bought a nice one for my a and p classes). grant has the distinction of having mostly slow-twitch muscles; me, split fairly even between fast and slow-twitch. this translates-on rides-to grant is essentially a lung with the metabolism of a kangaroo rat. on endurance rides with him, i have to eat and eat and eat (and drink) in order to match his intensity (which on this day i couldn't). fast forward...now!...
he rides away from me at palmer and i ride at tempo so as not to be too far back. we bust a u-turn and shred it on the downs to keep it at three hours and for me to stave off mr. bonks. we hit this place called the "chutes" where it's a burmed, somewhat technical at speed, singletrack-like a luge course. the centrifugal force on the berms made the bikes, if you were crankin' it, ride the singletrack at some pretty obtuse angles. fast and nutty it was, thrilling mostly. total ride time was three and a quarter hours. for me that was good, because there were almost no rests and i was drilling it in the middle ring trying to keep up with him on the ups. wow. what a great ride. i showered, said my goodbyes to their largess' and headed back home to celebrate my mother in-law's birthday.
thanks grant and christina and next time kenny....
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