I love carrots, crave them. Couldn’t press on without ‘em. If I can’t envision a carrot in the distance, I’m hard pressed to roll out of bed and go for an early morning run or ride, let alone in 20-degree weather. So today, a few carrots to motivate you through the cold challenge of winter.
Category Archives: Competition
News from your neighborhood statewide trail
The emailroom here at GGNC gets inundated with enewsletters, and frankly, most are enews in ename only: most are eblabla. The staff is instructed to throw most in the circular efile.
The January 2010 enewsletter from the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail is an exception, chock full of news on several fronts. We’ll get to those fronts in a moment, but for the benefit of those of you not familiar with the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, a quick introduction is in order. The MST is a work-in-progress trail that will one day span the state, running from Clingman’s Dome on the Tennessee border to Jockey’s Ridge State Park, where North Carolina gives it up to the Atlantic. The trail is estimated to run about 1,000 miles when done. About half of it is finished, volunteer work crews are adding more monthly, which is enewsnugget No. 1 from this months Friends newsletter:
A wily sales pitch
It was billed as a mountain bike race. It was actually a shrewd bit of marketing.
Officially, Saturday’s 6 BC was billed as the second in a series of four, 6-hour endurance mountain bike races sponsored by the Triangle Off-Road Cyclists. And while there was indeed a race (these results prove it), it was also a cleverly crafted sales pitch by the venue host: C’mon out and race — and see what kind of trail you could be riding every day of your life for the rest of your life without ever throwing your bike on the roof rack.
6 BC by the numbers
Here’s a numerical look at yesterday’s 6 BC endurance mountain bike race sponsored by the Triangle Off-Road Cyclists.
First, the basics:
6 — Course length, in miles.
6:00:00 — Number of hours to complete as many laps as possible
73 — Number of racers.
8 — Age of the youngest rider, Cedric Clyburn.
5 / 5:09:46 — Number of laps and the elapsed time for Cedric, who was riding a bike with 24-inch wheels. The last time I saw Cedric on the course, a female racer (sorry, I didn’t catch her bib number) was helping extract Cedric from a tree he had flipped into. After the race, while everyone else was celebrating in the beer garden, Cedric was hanging at a nearby playground.
14 — Age of the youngest female rider, Sophia Clyburn.
6 / 6:21:53 — Number of laps and elapsed time for Sophia, who took third in the Female Solo category.
47 — Age of the second oldest racer, Anne Bringuier, who won the Female Solo Open category, completing 8 laps in 5 hours, 52 minutes and 4 seconds.
53 — Age of the oldest racer, me.
11 — Most laps put in by a racer, tied by six individuals: Matthew Lee, Alex Hawkins, Kip Clyburn, Alex Harrill, Saputra De and John Hinson.
5:41:08 — Fastest overall time, by 39-year-old Matthew Lee, winner of the Open Men’s Solo Division.
28:33 — Fastest lap time, recorded by Justin Kingon.
1 — Number of gears used by the 11 racers in the Single Speed Solo category.
11 / 6:04:07 — No. of laps completed and elapsed time by the Single Speed winner, Saputra De. His was the fifth best performance overall.
66 — Number of miles ridden by the 8 racers who completed 11 laps.
Sweet. Innocent. Disturbed.
One of the many things I like about taking a long ride, run or hike is that it purges my mind of life’s daily distractions — bills, deadlines, squirrels. The resulting void clears vital space for creative thinking, for random thoughts, ideas and whatnot to bubble up from the subconscious and get some air time. Usually, this is good thing. Sometimes it is not.