Ckucke didn’t have golf plans for Wednesday afternoon, so we put a Tantalus pau hana ride together. Jeff and Sara were taking a doctor paddle boarding, and Scat was out recovering from his surgery, so they were out. Root was supposed to be in, but backed out when we called him after waiting until a quarter hour past the start time. I popped a gel before we started for a bit of extra “go†for the climb, but it was really to no avail. At the first left hairpin at the State base yard road, the torment began. The weather was nice and clear, and a cool wind blew in along the shaded road up, but I immediately felt the drag pulling me back. A heavy hamburger steak plate lunch from The Alley Restaurant at Aiea Bowl and several weeks of missing afternoon secret training had made me weak. Continue reading ‘Ronery Road Ride’
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Page 71 of 95
“Deth March†was the subject line of the e-mail that went around for this Saturday’s ride, so it went without question that a certain amount of suffering would be involved. The plan was to do the complete Demon trail loop, but heavy rain on Friday made us switch to our backup plan of a long ride at Wailuna. I had it set in my mind to link the Wailuna ascent, Waimano Ridge trail, and Waimano Mystery hills into a loop. We have ridden all of the pieces, but never together as a complete circuit. Jeff, Sara, Root, and I have been up Waimano Ridge from Waimano Home Road all the way to the Wailuna trail. Chris and I have been up Mystery Hills to Waimano Ridge, but we went down the trail to Waimano Loop Trail and sortied that way. Continue reading ‘Mystery Hills Upper Loop’
Saw a messenger-type guy trying to draft a bus down Nimitz this morning. He had no understanding of spin as he was bouncing in his seat as he piston-pumped his pedals. I was about to make a snide “fixie” comment when he started coasting – he was a “fixie wannabe”!
(0)Does Kid Rock not see the irony about invoking CCR’s “Sweet Home Alabama” in a song about growing up in “Northern Michigan”? WTF?!
(0)Saw a white Nissan GT-R this morning headed freeway-bound on Punchbowl. Didn’t see the plates, so I couldn’t tell if it was from a dealer here or brought in from the contiguous 48. Big. Rather ugly.
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I hit the jumps up on St. Louis with the boys on Monday. My stomach wasn’t feeling right since lunchtime, and I was still on the weird funk I had all weekend. Saturated with fumes from painting all day at work, Scat was a little out of sorts, hitting the jumps a little off and landing at the edge of control. Ckucke managed to break something in his rear hub, possibly the axle or bearing cup – his rear hub got loose and the back-end felt all floppy. I tried cranking down on his Q/R, but it still seemed the same. Everything seemed relatively normal with Root. Like last week, a hint of a drizzle drifted down the ridgetop at one point, but didn’t get anything wet or sticky. Scat said it had been socked-in at mid-day, but if any precipitation fell, it was all soaked in and dried up by the time we arrived. At the end of the jump session, Scat and I had more-or-less managed to get back onto a somewhat normal footing. Continue reading ‘Jump Until Failure’
I’ve seen some other iterations of this glove design sold by other vendors before, but those have shiny carbon-patterned armor plates instead of the Kevlar-look cloth laminated plates that the Dakine Defenders have. Since I’ve been unable to find armored, box-fingered motocross gloves, when I saw these hanging in the back of McBike, I thought that they might be a possibility. There were only tiny sizes, so I waited a month until the backorder came in and Jarrel left a note on my toolbox that they had arrived! I snapped up a large pair that day. I tried on the XL’s, but the fingers were too long. Initially, the large felt tight for some reason. This was odd, since there was enough space at the knuckles as I could move the armor plates even while making a fist. The fingers weren’t too small in girth, since I could pinch the fabric. Odd. Maybe it was the way the fabric folded when the fingers were bent. In any case, the tight sensation went away after wearing them for a half hour, and it didn’t come back on subsequent wearings. Continue reading ‘Dakine Defender MTB Gloves’
Good Job! Saw a Robert’s Hawaii driver weaving through traffic on Likelike in Kalihi in his “short bus” with kids onboard because he was too busy playing with his smartphone/iPhone to hold the wheel with two hands. He couldn’t stay in his own lane or out of the gutter.
(0)I was at Kuakini Medical Center the other day, and passed the bulletin board where they have rotating displays. It was employee photo contest time, so I slowed down to take a look. This was the second round of pictures. There are often some interesting travel shots, and on rare occasion, a fascinating composition or impressive technical work. This time around, the picture of an older, rounder fellow riding an Ellsworth Truth down a rock face caught my attention. I immediately recognized the location as the angled boulder face along the climb-out after the boulder garden on the Ditch inner loop. It was an unremarkable shot, and the title was like some tagline straight out of the Ellsworth catalogue. The roll-in itself isn’t scary-technical (ride the mystery drop-in for scary), but I’m sure it was enjoyable for the rider. I momentarily thought, “WTF – it’s some old fat guy on an Ellsworth at Ditch,” before realizing, that’s like a third of our riding group including myself! Okay, Root’s not fat. Well, glad to see yet another Ellsworth out at Ditch, in addition to the Toyota truck guy and us three.
A faint drizzle drifted down from the wall of dark clouds hanging above the back of Manoa valley. Unlike last week, the clouds looked settled in their pockets near the mountaintops, so it was unlikely that rain would follow us down the trail. We passed Kevyn and his white Santa Cruz finishing his day in the parking lot on the ride up. After gearing up, we headed off down the mainline. There was a little more light out since it wasn’t as overcast, so I was able to pick out my line better. Root was tardy arriving at Ckucke’s, making our start time a later than last week. To avoid riding down in the dark with only LED blinky lights, we limited our jump session to a few runs, then headed off down the hill before the light began to fade. Dropping the taco jumps then backtracking uphill to do the first left, we essentially retraced last week’s ride. Continue reading ‘Crowded House’