roads are clearing up

Got out for a quick 50k ride out to St. Adolphe and met a nice guy named Dan, he's a teacher. We did pretty much the whole ride together. Just chatting about bikes, school, work, weather etc. It was good, I haven't been able to get in many rides with other people (let alone rides period). It was a nice brisk pace of around 32-34 km/h. enough to get the lungs working and heart pumping, which was all I was after since I'm still getting over a nasty little cold.

The roads were finally all opened up from the flood waters (the pic below is from the week before when a section of road was still under water). There was quite a large amount of debris scattered all over lawns, which showed just how high the water was at one point (picture 2).

I apologize for the crappy quality, my new cell phone has a terrible camera. My last one actually worked pretty well. I don't really like taking my real camera on the bike since I could drop it and it would be done.... then again, if that happened I'd have to go camera shopping ;)

I have another MTB race next Wednesday, should be fun again.

Birds Hill MTB race #1

Had my first mountain bike race back on the 29th, had a great time, lots of nice people there (all the more souls to crush). It was kinda chilly and threatening to rain so I was questioning my tire choice (I went with fast rolling lower grip tires as it's a pretty fast course). My group started last, and I was able to get into a pretty good position going into the first turn and passed the other 3 riders within the first 1/4 of the course, I then passed a couple of people from the class ahead of me (had 1 minute advantage) and was able to hold everyone off for 2 laps...

Which is where it gets interesting. I thought I was supposed to do 2 laps of the Bur Oak trail, but my category was only supposed to do 1. So when I checked the results after, they said it took me 46:21 (follow the link for official times, I'm at the bottom)for 1 lap... that's slow. So I contacted them and asked if they could add a note saying that I did 2 laps. So they did. I feel better.

Looking at the times, I would have been about 10th out of 14 in the sport category (where I'd like to be racing, but I bought the cheap license so I'm in the citizen class). Not too bad. I'm looking forward to the next one on June 3rd.



Oh, and I've fixed my wheel on my road bike so it's all ready to go again.