As we all know after reading my previous post, sleep is important, but there are things that are preventing sleep. Mainly technology. I admit to reading my emails before I get out of bed in the morning. Which are you guilty of?
Archives For Thinking
Yesterday, a few friends and I and took the forty minute drive to Squamish to do some shuttling. They had been there before, but my brother and I never have. We met up with some other people from Whistler and started driving up the road past Quest University.
It was about 10 minutes to the top of the our warm up run called Cake Walk. It was a nice easy technical run with a couple drops and jumps. Some parts of the trail didn’t drain well and there was quite a lot of water, but for the most part, the conditions were good.
After dumping out of Cake Walk, we made the 8-10 minute hike to Full Nelson, a trail used in the film Strength In Numbers. That was probably my favorite overall run of the day, even though we only did it once. It was smooth and had lots of good berms and jumps. I did find that you really had to keep your speed up or you’d have to pedal to keep a good flow, which didn’t happen because there were four people ahead of me and only one of them had ever ridden that trail. Full Nelson dumped right into Half Nelson which was pretty much just a smaller version of Full Nelson, hence the name. That dumped us out onto a parking lot about a third up the mountain.
We shuttled the bumpy road all the way to the top to get to a trail called Grin and Holler. About 500 Meters from the trailhead, we hit snow. I had never ridden in the snow on my DH bike so I was kind of excited. We pushed up to the trail and found that it had been ridden a little bit so at least we could see where we were suppose to go. It was quite steep and technical and me being new to clipless shoes didn’t help much. The trail had two mandatory high skinnies that you couldn’t ride around, one of which I fell off (walking it). After that, the trail seemed to get easier and less steep.
Right at the end of the trail was the best part of my day. Big manmade jumps. There were four wooden lipped gaps that I couldn’t wait to put my tires on them. After walking down and looking at all of them, the only one I was really worried about was the first one because it had a wood landing which was almost as high as the take off. First jump was about 15-18 feet, second was about 22′ third was at least 27′ and the last one, depending where you landed was 35+. I dropped in, hitting all of them the first go, which I didn’t think I’d do, but the jumps were built perfectly and judging the speed was easy. I overshot the last one by quite a bit, but It wasn’t a big deal because the landing was so long. Only three out of the six of us did them and we pushed back up three more times because they were so much fun.
The last trail of the day we decided to do all of Half Nelson because we had only done half of it when we did Full Nelson. The top half of the trail is pretty much the same as the bottom. The top was a little more technical, but it turned into smooth flowy goodness real fast. Again, I was behind two people, so I couldn’t go as fast and keep a good flow going. You’d think I would have learned by now, eh? Everybody was too tired to do another run, so we rode down the road back to Squamish. It wasn’t as steep as we had thought so we actually did a lot of pedaling (oops).
The thing I learned about riding Squamish is that you’re going to have to hike up no matter what trail you do, so if you’re used to riding park, you’re not gonna like it. It is DEFINITELY worth the hike, though. Just make sure to bring lots of water.
Last jump on Grin And Holler. It’s a biggie!
A little while ago, I ran across a post on a website that had a height-to-size chart of the 2012 Demo 8 and I saw that the size of bike that I was riding was way too small. A medium frame is suppose to work for a rider who was up to 5’11” and not me who’s around 6’2″. I thought about this for a while and realized that a longer bike would help with stability at high speeds and help me not be so “over the bars”. I sort of started looking for a larger bike on the Buy and Sell page of Pinkbike. My brother actually sent me a link to a Commencal race bike which I had researched a little bit. I messaged the owner asking about sizes and when I could possibly take a look at the bike.
Kyle Sangers
On Friday, I went to look at it. A Commencal Supreme DH World Cup. Pretty long name, eh? The person selling it and he told me he was the owner/manager of Perform X Racing. Little did I know that the bike that I would be looking at would be used by Kyle Sanger on two UCI Downhill World Cup races.
I went to parking lot 4 here in Whistler on a rainy and cold friday and connected with Todd Schumlick, who I had previously read about in an article on Pinkbike. I didn’t recognize him at first and only did because he talked about that article. He pulled the beautiful looking bike out of his van and proceeded to tell me pretty much EVERYTHING about it, which was good. I asked some questions about the bike and about his team and I told him I’d talk to my dad about the bike when he came up from Vancouver that night. Surprisingly when I talked with my Dad, he said we should go for it (which made me very happy and unable to sleep that night). We stopped by the bank on the way to Pemberton early Saturday morning to go and meet Todd at his house. After a couple hours of very helpful advise and conversation (enough to fill an entire blog post), we walked away with the bike, as well as extra parts.
We made the drive back to Whistler and started to move all of the parts off of my brother’s bike to my Demo which he is now using. The process, I thought, would only take a couple of hours. We ended up being in the underground parking garage for over 6 hours swapping parts, bleeding brakes, and setting up the bikes. We had a small collection of tools in our apartment that we used, but my Dad had to make around 7 or 8 trips to the trailer on the other side of the village for parts and tools that we needed. Luckily, he saw this as exercise and didn’t mind it. After bleeding the new Saint Brakes and changing out the expensive and super tacky Schwalbe race tires with Maxxis Minions, the new bike was finished.
After the BC cup race in Golden which I was unable to do because my head wasn’t feeling up to it, we went to Whistler for the week before Crankworx. It was really dry and dusty and the trails were pretty blown out, but we still had a good time. We also got to do the Air Dome twice and I landed my first backflip! I think it’s always a kids dream as a mountain biker to do a backflip and I had a pretty cool feeling after I landed it first try. If someone told me last year that I would be able to do a backflip, I probably wouldn’t believe them!
Over the last 3 weekends, I’ve been taking an NSL course so I can be a lifeguard. I took it at the university and the guy who taught it was the pool director there. The first two days were a lot of swimming and some first aid. It wasn’t too hard, but definitely challenging. The second weekend was all first aid and learning how the pool works with all the chemicals and the behind the scene functions at the pool. We didn’t even get in the pool. The third weekend was pretty much all swimming. We did fitness tests, scenarios and some more first aid. In the end, I thought it was easy. I knew my first aid and knew what I had to do, so I passed without a problem.
Under law, the photographer who will own copyright on any photos he/she has taken unless the photographer is an employee of the company the pictures are taken for, or is an employee of a company told or hired to take the photos, or if there’s an agreement with another person to let him/her use the pictures.
In all other situations, the photographer will own the copyright. If the photographer is paid for his/her work, the payment will be for the photographer’s time. The copyright to the photos will be the photographers, and any copys without permission would be an infringement of copyright.
When Preston was here, we took a 2 and a half hour drive south to the Sonora Caves. There were tours every half an hour and we got there just as one was about to start. We got the the entrance of the cave and the tour guide explained to use that it was a felony to ever touch any of the cave. I soon learned that it was very hard to not touch the cave! When we started to go into it, it was very humid. We weren’t allowed to take anything down there except our cameras; not the cases, sunglasses, flashlights, anything, Not even water. It wasn’t that hot, but around half-way, we got very thirsty.
We started going through the cave, and it was really neat. Some rooms of the cave were really big and some were really small. Sometimes we had to duck under stuff to not touch any of the cave. Some places were not very wide. It was really amazing to see all the stuff that goes on 155 feet under us. There wasn’t any wild life in the cave: No bugs, no rabbits, no birds, because it’s all pitch black! The tour guide turned off all the lights once we were all sitting down and you could not see a thing. Most of the pictures didn’t turn out because it was quite dark, even with the lights on. Here are some of the better ones.
We went windsurfing for the first time this year. The water wasn’t that cold so we didn’t have to wear a wet suit. We got everything out and ready and started going.
The wind was blowing a different direction than what I was used to, but I ended up going pretty fast out to the other side of the lake. It’s when I turned around it got… a little freaky. I wanted to go back to get some water so I tried to go to the shore. The wind was going a different way than what I wanted it to and it was really hard. I had to zig zag back a few times and I was really tired.
When I finally did get back one of the guys that was there said, “Come on, the wind is great!”, so I ended up going out again, which was my first mistake. My second mistake was that I should have gone with a smaller sail. Caleb down-sized when he came in so I could have used his, which is smaller. The wind had picked up and I started sailing. It was great going out, but I had the same problem coming back in. Except this time I was REALLY tired. I wasn’t even half way back when I dropped the sail and had to sit down on the board to rest. I did that a few more times and had to swim the rest of the way back to the shore, where I carried the sail and board back to the shacks to put them away. Here are some pic…
Oh BTW… It was 36C.
I have a new addiction. Getting high. heh heh Here are some pics of the tramp bike. More to come as we take em. 🙂
