MTB people

My 12-year-old daughter wanted to get into mt biking, of course I was very happy to hear this. So I bought her a Trek, WSD 4300.

She immediately got into it, showing no signs of slowing down when it came to climbing and she had natural skills that amazed me. She is very athletic, but I had no idea how quickly she would catch on.

After a few small rides, I decided to take her to a local riding area for some single track fun. I was nervous as I rode behind her and could see a small embankment to her right. My daughter kept riding faster and faster and showed no signs of fear as she came upon obstacles that I thought she would dismount and walk her bike around. Although it wasn't pretty, she made it. When we came to a down hill with some sharp turns. I told her to go ahead of me, look through the corners, take her time, and keep her but over the rear tire.

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I was sitting here today thinking(I do that every couple weeks)and had to share this. 3 years ago this coming January, I was involved in a car/bike accident.(guess who was on the bike) I sustained cervical, and lumbar vertibray damage,and pretty much permanently damaged my right ciatic ( hope thats spelled right) nerve. I was off work for an extended period of time and recovery was slow. During this time, our oldest son graduated,and his sister became a senior. Things got very lean around our home, and it was not the best of times. During it all though, my wife Jude was always optimistic and helped me (all of us) through that bad time.

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When single-speeds pass me on the trails I'm impressed. But even that's probably wimpy compared to mountain biking on a unicycle. The Aspen Times has a story about unicyclist Mike Tierney, who recently completed a unicycle ride of the La Sal Mountain Loop Road outside of Moab, Utah, which is 62 miles with 7,000 vertical feet of climbing.

It looks like he mostly sticks to paved and dirt roads rather than technical singletrack.

Here's the story from the Aspen Times.

Tuesday night (4/11/06) in Boulder, I went to a presentation by Olympic mountain bikers (2000 Sydney Games) Travis Brown of Durango and Ann Trombley of Boulder: "Training Tips From the Pros."

Oddly, host of the event was the Boulder History Museum. Turns out that it has an exhibit on the history of Boulder as an outdoor/adventure sports mecca. So the organizer got Travis and Ann to talk a bit about the history of mountain biking.

I scribbled a few notes during the talk that I thought I'd share here:

- Travis has slowed down, now only doing 25-30 races a year (half that of earlier in his career), and otherwise doing product development and testing for Trek. Ann does lots of coaching these days.

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