$100 MTB Ride

Finally, after a crappy winter, I was able to get out and ride my beautiful MTB. Riding my MTB is a bit different than doing a road ride, since I have to get to a park that is outside the city via a car with my bike whereas with my cross bike I can just hop on it and head to the meeting point at the Art Museum for the ride or just head out on my own. Not that it's harder, it just takes more preparation from me, especially since I don't have a car.

I ride with people from Philadelphia Mountain Biking Meetup group. There have a good amount of rides for every skill level in the immediate area, except a lot of the meetups happen right after work, usually around 6pm. I would need to take SEPTA to the closest station to the meeting point, but those bastards don't let bikes on peak hour trains. Peak hours end around 7pm so it foils any plan to ride after work. One solution is to get a Zipcar for a few hours, but I can't do that every week due to cost.

I decided to skip my usual Saturday training ride in favor of a MTB ride at White Clay Creek State Park in Newark, DE. It was advertised as ridable for all levels, which was perfect since my MTB is a single speed and I don't need anything hyper challenging (remember my first ride at Wissahicken? Oy.). Me and my ride, Dan, get there early and get ready and take a quick spin while we wait for the others. It was FUN - smooth trails, not a ton of obstacles, loopy, twisty, fast, just a ton of fun. We regroup with the rest of the peeps and begin our ride. This is going to be great! We set off and things are going well for the first 15 minutes. The pace was perfect, the sun was shining and I was having a blast. It was around the 16th minute that things went to hell for me. Part of the trail was a sewer like metal tunnel that we had to go through. Not a problem, but it was running pretty full as I came around and entered it and I even heard someone remark on how full it was. I'm almost at the end and I'm slowing down (shit) and the water is getting deeper (SHIT) and my bike goes to the right slightly and I almost stop on the metal part of the tunnel, which leads me to have to unclip and plop my foot in the water to stay upright (DAMMIT). This is all well and good except I plop my foot on the metal tunnel where there is no dirt or silt and my foot slides right out from underneath me and I go SPLASH into the water (&*#$@*!). I am now sitting in high waist water, completely drenched. Great, now I have to ride for another two hours with soggy gloves, shorts, shoes and jersey.

After I catch up and the group remarks that I am now "initiated," I realize my Blackberry is in my back jersey pocket. The same pocket that was underwater a minute earlier. I quickly fish it out and it looks dead, but I place it in the mesh compartment on my Camelback (where I probably should have stashed it in the first place) and pray it dries out. Mutherfu... We continue on the ride and it was really, really fun and I even managed to dry out for the most part by the time we were done. I took a few other minor spills, but nothing crazy and I managed to shake it off, regain my confidence and have a good time. When I got home and showered my legs looked (and felt) like I played some rugby as the feel of falling on the ground is the same and smashing my legs on my frame feels eerily similar to getting booted by 16mm studded boots. Love it.

The downside? Even after an overnight sleep in a bag of rice, my Blackberry was dead and I had to file a claim to get a replacement. My deductable was $100 so this made it a $100 MTB ride!