SCruzin’

Our Nepal training took us down to Santa Cruz for an an overnighter this weekend. We rode Soquel Demo Forest on Saturday and Michelle’s Rob’s Ride on Sunday.

Demo Forest was pretty amazing; we had seven riders there who are going to be in Nepal (me, Chris, Ashley, Nathan, Michelle, Stefan, and Corbin). That’s 25% of the tour! We climbed up Buzzard Lagoon, which I’d never done before, and then took the still-under-construction flow trail down, although a couple of folks split off to do Braille Trail instead. Unfortunately the flow trail there isn’t as uni-friendly as the one in Tamarancho, so next time we’re all doing Braille Trail. But it was a great workout, capped off by that soul-sucking climb back to the parking lot at the end.

After a party at Michelle’s place, we crashed down there and then headed to Rob’s in the morning for Rob’s Ride. We went up the newish EMC trail, which adds a whole bunch more dirt to the ride, and looped around in Pogonip to work on our braking skills. Ricardo won Most Broken Unicycle as he taco’ed his Coker wheel, but we kicked it back into shape enough to finish the ride. Dragon won the top 10 biffs, as most of the crew was in don’t-get-[re]-injured mode.

And then, a round of disc golf at the brand new San Jose course to top off the weekend, thanks to Daylight Saving Time. [Verdict: Not bad, but not as dynamic as some of the other South Bay courses, and somewhat punitive in their pin placements.]

Two more training weeks!

Bill on the skinny (he got it)

Nathan and Michelle