July 22nd (Morning)

Today we’re supposed to get some showers, so I wasn’t surprised to wake up to a cloudy and dreary day. I was surprised, however, to bike down Qu’Appelle heading out of Juniper in almost darkness! The clouds were so thick, that even the street lights were on. People were driving with their headlights on, and it was 6:30am in the middle of summer. Kind of crazy…

Anyways, the ride was really good. I felt pretty tired today, but kept pushing a decent pace nonetheless. I made all the hills at Rose Hill and practiced more on my high speed cornering through Frolek’s land. I even made one corner fast enough that I was able to carry my momentum up and rode up a piece of single-track I have always only taken down (it cuts the road’s corner by about 20-30 feet). That was cool! The hill up from Frolek’s lower road was painful again, but not too bad. I read a piece of advice on climbing yesterday that seems to be doing wonders for me. It said while climbing steep hills, pull back and down on the handlebar. This is supposed to help weight both the front and back tires to the ground. Well, this morning I did that and had some really good, stable climbs so I’m a believer!

Coming down into Peterson’s Creek was awesome. I made the long steep hill down, made the technical section down the creek bank, crossed the creek and then even made the technical section back up the bank on the other side! It was awesome, first time and I was pumped!

And then, heading back up the Billy Minor South trail out of the valley, using the pull-back-and-down technique, I even made the climb out for the first time as well. Sweet! Unfortunately, I ended up bogging down in the sandy sections so I wasn’t 100% to the top… Oh well, I was still pretty excited about the effort today. The new technique obviously has some merit to it!

As I was riding along Summit, a BMX’er pulled out onto the road about a block and a half in front of me and it was great entertainment to watch this 20 something year old biker hunched on this little bike. Obviously, standing to pedal (you aren’t really meant to sit on those little things) he had a hilarious rhythm going up the hills as he pumped his bike side to side. Left --- Right --- Leeeeeeeeeeft --- Left --- Right --- Leeeeeeeeft. But, anyways, I’m all for commuting by bike regardless of what bike you’re on, at least he was riding! Plus, it took me the entire stretch of Summit drive (about 3 minutes of riding) ‘till I finally caught him, so that’s pretty impressive really. And I really only caught him because of the final down hill where I had the bigger gears to mash for speed and he just coasted.

I cut through the trailer park today instead of taking the trail as I felt a bit tired and I wanted to see what my time was (it seemed like another quick one this morning), and it was a record 59 minutes! Sweet!