October 14th (Morning)

The good news is that I received an email today notifying me that my light has been shipped, and the postal office has received the package and is sending it on today… Thank goodness! Hopefully it won’t take too long to cross the border and will be here very soon. However, I left about 5 minutes later today and the skies were mostly clear. That combination made a huge difference in light! Check out this morning’s picture as compared to yesterday morning’s:

Obviously, with the dim light it’s still blurry (hence why I have stopped taking any pictures in the morning any more). But you can see the difference is literally night and day! This is at Frolek’s gate, looking north to Mount Paul. It is also about 5-7 minutes later in the morning. Crazy! No light needed this morning…

The ride was great. I saw another coyote as he meandered across the trail in front of me about 1/2 across the Juniper section. There is a tree across the trail here as well that no one has cleared yet, so maybe another hike is in order this Saturday? At least this one would be a lot shorter!!!

I finally made the dip/corner section of single-track again. There’s just something about slow, right-hand turns when the hillside slopes down on the right that I seem to struggle with a bit. I guess left is the same way, but just the combination of slow speeds, and having to lean the bike over the down-slope gets me each time! But, alas, this morning I managed through it again finally! Going down into Peterson’s Creek was excellent, well controlled. And the creek crossing and climb up the other side was smooth and meant that I had a chance today at another 0 stop ride! However, as I started the steep climb out of the valley, I thought maybe I was going to have a stop on a section I always make… At the beginning (my apologies for being crude here), I had to spit… So, not daring to do so in front and risk hitting me or the bike, I turned my head… Doing so meant my arms tried to follow the direction of my head, swerving the bike wildly to the right and just about over the edge… I harshly overcorrected this and immediately found the front tire trying to climb up the steep bank on the left… Sheesh!!! I did, however, manage to get the bike back on a straight line and completed the climb without stopping… Hah!!! So, chalk up another 0 stop ride for my records!

Nearing about 1/2 way up the Tom Moore trail I came up on the biggest pile of bear scat (again, sorry for the crudeness) I have seen yet. And I mean huge! Like 3 or 4 times bigger than anything I’ve seen to date (about the size of a healthy cow pie or more, but this was no cow, trust me!) I mean, I hardly had room on the trail to go around it, and probably would’ve endo’d had I gone through it… Ok, so I’m exaggerating a tiny bit here… It was also very brown/yellow rather than the typical black/dark blue colour. I know we don’t have Grizzlies here, but if we did I would be sure this was Grizzly scat. As such, this would be one bear I do NOT want to see… My colleague at work said maybe it was 3 or 4 black bears taking a dump all in the same spot and that they were waiting in the bushes waiting for me to stop so they could ambush me… Hah! But, seriously, what on earth could leave something that freaking huge???

Ok, onto a more pleasant subject… The rest of the ride on the streets went well. I did a lot of sprinting/standing efforts this morning. On the first section up Summit drive (I have never tried that here). Mainly because my rear-end and thighs were tired and sore from sitting and climbing for so long, I needed a change of position. I did the usual sprint at the end of Summit, and then up the beginning of Howe. I also stood and pedalled through the trailer park at the end (can’t really call this “sprinting”), again mainly for the change of position and muscles. It was good, and a great time of 57.5 minutes (my record, set last Thursday morning, is 56.5 minutes). Awesome!!!