On the radio & mountain biking nostalgia

First, if you can't get enough of us on our poorly written blog, several beat bloggers and our friends are going to be on the Colin McEnroe Show from 1-2pm. Listen to the story about the time Salem had to boot a tire with his own skin! Marvel at how Chris turned cottered cranks into a Play Station 2! Cower in fear as Ben recounts a nine hour CCBA board meeting! Drift into a deep sleep as Brendan describes mountain biking at the reservoir for the 600th time! ...other people are going to be on the show who may actually be interesting.

UPDATE! In case you thought I was making stuff up, Ghostship Matt corroborates over on his blog. TJ'll be on, too.


Regarding the other side of the ampersand, I was over at my parents' house yesterday with a bike. Leaving from their house, you can make a nice loop of Avon with several miles of rolling singletrack. These are the trails of my youth (I never figured out why bikerag thinks Winding Trails is so terrible, if you know where the singletrack is, it's not that bad. People seem to rate trails by how much stuff there is to huck. My philosophy is not as such.), though there have been some pleasant additions. Sometimes, I would climb over Avon Mountain with my bike on my shoulder to ride at the Reservoir, but that was a lot of work.

I added something to the loop yesterday that I usually don't: Huckleberry Hill, which is on the other side of town. It's probably Avon's most technical riding by a significant margin, because it has rocks and hills. Huckleberry Hill is almost the site of my first bike race ever. In sixth grade I entered the Sam Collins Day Mountain Bike Race. It was a really big deal to me and I got all nostalgic about it yesterday.

In true Brendan-style, I had excellent start astride my Nishiki Pueblo until I hit the climb up Huckleberry Hill Rd. It's a legitimately steep climb, I think it averages about 10% for a third of a mile or so. But, I was destroyed from my sprint start and dropped to the granny gear and lost almost all my positions by the time I got to the top. We entered the woods at Huckleberry Hill School. About twenty feet into the woods, I went around a corner, hit a log, went over the bars, landed on my head and blacked out. I only blacked out for a few second and a very nice fellow stopped to help me. I got back on my bike, caught back up to a few people and finished in second to last place with a flat tire. It was like the coolest day ever. I even got a water bottle as schwag. I subsequently lost the water bottle the last time I rode at Nepaug (like five years ago, I don't ride there much).

Yesterday's ride was not nearly as exciting, though I had a relatively funny crash when my front wheel washed out.