Old Nicholson blog: Recent Rides

A few words about some recent rides:

PMBAR (Pisgah Mountain Bike Adventure Race)

This is a race outside of Brevard, NC and is just about the most fun day on a bike one can imagine. It’s a great format with checkpoints throughout the forest that nobody knows where they are until the start of the race you have to go to a minimum number of the possible checkpoints to finish (or more to win) in any order you deem best. It’s great because you’re seeing other people doing the same race as you going different directions all day but you have little idea whether they are doing better or worse than you. It has a total party atmosphere. For safety you compete as a team of two, Jeff was my partner this year. We had a great day and met out #1 goal of finishing, it took us a little over 9 hours. I road briefly with a bunch of old paddling friends, that was cool to see how so many people of similar interest have had those interest evolve in the same way. Knoxville was well represented at the event with about 10 folks coming out, all clad in the Union Jack.
I bought a couple of raffle tickets at the event and won a new mountain bike frame that happens to be Tara’s size. It’s a Vessago “Bandersnatch” in traffic safety green/yellow, where going to build it up with leftover parts and stuff to make her a nice neighborhood/greenway/grocery bike. I’m looking for a cheap 29er wheelset for it if anybody has one.

Fired up and ready to go, It seemed Jeff and I had some of the burliest bikes out that day:

Rider Meeting Harper's Crew in full force:

Me sketching out on the bridge, notice how the bridge is bowing up:

Jeff on the bridge, notice how the bridge is bowing down:

End of the day collecting my raffle prize, Tara's new town bike:

Cyclocross Adventure:

This past weekend Jeff and I couldn’t decide on what to do so we went with something completely new and went cyclocross exploring/adventuring. We went up to the Citico Creek area riding some fire roads and some single track that ties some fire road sections together. We did about 20 stream crossings, 200 log hops, 3 miles of horse chewed mud, and 4,000 feet of climbing in some of the most beautiful mountains of Tennessee.