The first REAL Ride....

We slept in a little. We were up and around by 8am. I think we were both still on DC time… It was 10am there. Today we were heading to the 18road area. That meant a lot of short, steep climbs.

We started the day at Village Inn pancake house. The waitress laughed at my stupid jokes. She got a big tip. I ate a huge, bad for me breakfast. It was perfect. Jason was healthy. Whatever works!

We hit the trails by 10:30. We started out by going up Prime Cut to Chutes and Ladders. Prime cut was really fun, but tough for a warm-up. It was much easier the second time around.

Jason didn’t like the two tough climbs on Chutes and Ladders much. He rode both very well, but wasn’t really feeling the love for these hills. The chutes were pretty fun. I cleaned a tight, rocky switchback that I hadn’t been able to do before. The Monkey just inspires confidence.

Jason’s favorite part of the loop was heading out into the cow fields. This place was much like a BMX track. Lots of dips, jumps and berms. Jason hit almost 27 mph in this section.

We finished out the loop, climbed prime cut again, then headed for Joe’s ridge. Jay was a little scared of ithe drops on Joe’s. He’d read a lot about them, but hadn’t really seen them in person. He trooped right don them.

Lower Zippity was fun. The drops are a little worse than on Chutes and Ladders, and definitely not walkable. We had fun with them though. It was a little riding clinic in the middle of the day.

The cool part about lower zippity, is that I made it up the short, but extremely steep section in the middle. That was one of the things I was most proud of.

At the bottom of Lower Zippity we headed for Zippity West to ride all the way back to the top. This trail started out as boring doubletrack. It later becajme a perfect ribbon of singletrack heding for the top of Zippity.

We rode zippity from top to bottom. One section was sketchier than I remember… by a long shot. We stepped over the rocks, lined up for the drop and then rode it. The other drops were scary, but not impossible.

The ride total came out to 24.3 miles and about 3000 feet of climbing.

The one last comment that I had about today refers to something that Jay said on today’s ride. The conversation went something like this:

Grumpy J.: I almost crapped myself on that downhill.

Pete: It’s a good thing we’re doing this trail at the end of the day.

Grumpy J.: Why is that?

Pete: Because if you crap yourself, your bike shorts will work like a diaper.

Grumpy J: I didn’t need to hear that.