Fall

Got out for a couple great fall bike rides the past week or so. I hit up Percy Warner last week to try out my new handlebars and did a loop and enjoyed the amazing colors of the changing leaves. I met up with Adam and Keith this morning for a jaunt around Montgomery Bell. The trail was completely dry but also completely covered in leaves. Surprisingly we only had a couple explorations outside the trail boundaries.

Monty Bell has been my go to trail this year so truthfully it's been getting a bit mundane to ride there. I've been neglecting many of the other great trails we have here like Lock4, Hamilton Creek and Chickasaw but also in my defense, we have had an incredibly wet riding season and Monty Bell has been the only dry play to ride. All that to say that we tried to change it up today and after heading into the trail and immediately taking the less-often rode Blue trail off to the right, we thought we'd try to ride every trail in the "less-often" ridden direction, or backwards. We rode almost the entire blue trail in reverse up til the 4 way Green Downhill entrance and then got the crazy idea to ride the Green Downhill (which it seems most Tennesseans skip nowadays) and then turn right around and ride it backwards (against the rules and almost entirely uphill.) Wow, that was fun in a "I feel very accomplished that I made it up all the climbs" but CRAP that was hard! Keith thinks maybe that's the hardest of the longer climbs out at Monty Bell. Thankfully the trail was totally empty on this fine Thurs morning so we had no downhill traffic to contend with as we rode the wrong direction on the only One Way trail at Monty Bell.

We continued on to ride Blue forwards (breaking our own rule) and connect up with the Yellow trail to ride a good chunk of that backwards. I know that if I were by myself I would not of done this and would of wussed into riding a few miles out to my car and heading home. My fitness isn't where I wish it was and riding to two people in better shape than me is exactly what I need to keep at it and ride longer. Yellow is hard forwards or backwards but we had a great time today riding it. I finally threw in the towel after about 12 miles and Adam wanted to stay somewhat fresh for his upcoming Swank65 race this weekend. We rode the few miles back to the car and called it a day of good hard, slow riding. :) We ended up with around 14 miles at an average of 7.8 mph.

Contrary to the norm, I'm hoping that I can up my saddle time this fall and winter. I've had a lot of distractions and good (and bad) reasons to be off the bike a lot lately & I'm hoping to remedy that. Halloween has come and gone (our first in our new house) and the temperature is continuing to fall. Great time for some long gravel rides, night riding and some fun urban rides. I just need to act on the motivation!

Here are some fun things that kept me off the bike