Riding high

I took the longest 12-mile ride of my life the other day.

The ride starts as a forest service road that peak's the ski resort that I live near. We had only gone up about two and a half miles when we hit snow. That meant dragging our bikes through it, getting back on, riding ten feet, then dragging the bikes again. At one point, I took a really stupid fall, which was just the beginning of my lackluster performance on this entire trip.

We decided to skip the rest of the road and just push our bikes up one of the ski runs to the top.

But just because we got there, didn't mean things got any easier. To say there was a trail that launched off the other side required a little bit of imagination. A lot of it was ducking under low tree limbs and stopping to lift our bikes over fallen logs or through steep sections riddled with rocks.

Three hours in, my arms were so tired it was all I could do to hold on to the handle bars.

We had just crested a ridge and were on the downhill to the truck when I think my tire caught a branch on a log. I'm not sure. I don't really remember.

Steve said I didn't make a sound. All he heard was a crash and he turned around to see me lying on my back, looking up at the sky.

In its entirety, it took us four and a half hours. We could have walked 12 miles faster than that.

Lesson learned: The milage says nothing of the ride.