The Long and Lonely Road

Most of my riding partners were too busy partying down in Brazil this weekend and they left me all alone to do my workouts.

I went out to the San Gabriel River Trail and did a 60-mile ride today. It was a little unusual. We've had some stormy and windy weather here in L.A. this weekend, and I got to see the aftermath. For starters, there were these giant cables thrown right across the path. I don't know if they were phone lines or power lines. I just knew not to mess with them.



Then I had to deal with mini-landslides covering sections of the road and some badly flooded tunnels as well.



Some of you are familiar with the steep climb up the dam along the SGRT. Well imagine how fun it is to climb when it's covered with rocks. This picture is just one small section of the coverage. I had rocks shooting off my rear wheel all over the place. As far as I know I may have killed someone with one, but it's not like I was about to stop and check once I started climbing. (Did I snap a photo while riding? Absolutely not. I climbed back down on foot a bit once I reached the top.)



As usual, it got a bit windy along the southern part of the trail but all-in-all it wasn't a bad ride. Turns out, I'm excellent company.

My original plan was to do a 14-mile run Sunday morning. But I got completely caught up trying to refresh the Ironman Brazil pages (which were hardly updated anyway) so I skipped the run. Which meant I had to do it today. I came home from the bike, had a 3 hour transition, then went back out. It's not exactly the ideal way to do a brick, but at least I got my Bike and Run miles in for the weekend.