Tuesday night mountain bike race series: 08/28/2012

Sometimes things go wrong in a race, and I had my share of escalating mishaps in Tuesday evening’s Schenectady Central Park mountain bike race, the fourth and final race in the HRRT Hot August Nights series.

Another rider zipping down switchbacks Tuesday evening

Blue Ledges: 08/26/2012

I've done the hike to Blue Ledges many times over the years, but today was the first time as a family hike. You could make the case that autumn is the best season to visit, but I wanted to bring our kids here on a warm summer day like today, when they could splash in the Hudson when we reached our destination.

Camp Saratoga 5K trail series 2012 wrap-up

Monday night was the final race in the Camp Saratoga 5K trail series. My primary personal goal for the series this year was to shave a couple minutes off last year’s cumulative time for the 5 races. I improved by 3 minutes, a result I'm pretty happy with. The comparison to 2010 - my first year back running after 6 or 7 years off - really shows the value of cumulative training miles over time:

A tougher goal was to see if I could be the “fastest old guy” – in other words, nobody older than me finishing ahead of me. While I hit that in one or two of the races, there’s an awful lot of fit and fast runners out there in the 50+ age bracket.

Paddling Cape Cod: two quick tours

Cape Cod may be best known for its expansive ocean beaches, but there's a surprising diversity of paddling options as well. During our family vacation there this week we squeezed in two short kayak tours.

Wellfleet Kettle Ponds
Yes, there's freshwater paddling on Cape Cod. The Cape is full of freshwater kettle ponds, formed when retreating glaciers left behind huge chunks of ice at the end of the last ice age. When the remnant ice blocks melted, they left depressions in the Cape's sandy soil that eventually filled with freshwater.

MTB race report: HRRT Tuesday night series

I guess it's officially more than just cross-training now, since I rode in my first mountain bike race last night.

Last night’s HRRT Hot August Nights Mountain Bike Race, the first in a 4-race series, was just the sort of fun, low key, local race I was looking for. Not quite 3 dozen riders assembled for the 6pm start at Schenectady’s Central Park mountain bike trails. 19 of us were entered in the “Sport” category (two 5-mile laps), with 15 others in the “Expert” category (three 5-mile laps). Since I’ve never ridden the Schenectady trails before, I got there early and rode for 10 or 15 minutes to get a feel for the terrain.

Pre-race registration at the trailhead

Mountain biking at SMBA: when is riding no longer “just” cross-training?

I haven't posted much about mountain biking this summer, but I’ve been riding once or twice a week since April. Recently – since June - I've been splitting my time between SMBA and the trails on the Saratoga County forestland (the Kalabus-Perry parcel) out my back door. The two are only about 5 miles apart as the crow flies, yet the terrain and trails couldn't be more different. The K-P county forest parcel is part of the Saratoga Sandplains and the trails are smooth and fast, not a rock or a root in sight. SMBA’s terrain, on the other hand, is what you’d expect from the foothills of the Adirondacks: bedrock is close to the surface, there are beaver flows and wetlands, rocks and roots are everywhere, the trails are technical and challenging.