This morning I decided to get out the dog shoes so the Boys could run awhile and not tear up their feet. And boy did they run. They weren’t slowing down, so Bill and I took the mountain bikes for a quick spin back the gravel roads and let the Boys come with. Merlin just LOVES to go riding with us. He’s so funny and he’s so stinking fast. It still shocks us how fast he still is. He’s not a young dog either. I think he’s actually beyond “senior” and into the “elderly” stage at this point. :) Wouldn’t know it to watch him run though.
We headed back to the trailer and discussed some potential activities. We decided on a mountain bike ride that I found in our Idaho Mt. Biking book. It’s a 20 mile loop but is supposed to be a pretty low key ride. I thought this would be a good reintroduction to see how my ribs would hold up. For the most part, I’m pretty well healed up. There are times however that I still get some twinges that remind me I’m not 100%.
We changed into our biking gear, jumped in the truck and headed down the road. I pulled out the map so I could tell Bill which forest road to take and somehow Fisher Creek came up. I think it was something like Bill saying “or, we could do Fisher Creek and we’d know exactly where we’re going.” I gave it 2 seconds worth of thought and said “Okay”. He looked surprised, but I pointed out that if I’m going to do a ride and it’s likely going to hurt, I may as well enjoy it. Fist bump. Woooohoooo.
We got to the trailhead and started the ride at 1:31. The first few miles were icky…which we knew would be….and then we started gradually climbing. Funny thing about rib injuries…you use those muscles when climbing. I was not having a good ride. Truthfully, at this stage in the ride, I wasn’t enjoying it much last time either, but now you throw in an injury and the fact that I’ve been off the bike for 5 weeks, and I was sucking wind big time. Actually, I wasn’t – cuz, after only being at higher altitudes for 36 hours, I hadn’t acclimated to the thin air. Ugh. This trail starts out at about 6300 ft. elevation and climbs to over 8,000 ft. That’s a lot of climbing in thin air. I really don’t know how people ride in high elevation areas – Colorado is going to kill us.
Anyway, I ended up walking almost all of the climbs. It sucked. I had to stop and lie down for 20 minutes at the top of one particularly gnarly climb. I felt weak, my legs were on fire, I couldn’t breathe and it felt like I had a golf ball jammed under my rib cage. I really needed to not be bent over and scrunching up my torso. Why, oh why, did I think this was a good idea? There were several occasions when I just wanted to quit, but quitting isn’t an option (for more reasons than 1) so I continued on.
We finally got to the top and prepared to enjoy our downhill. The trail is very sandy and I’m not a huge fan of sand. Give me some hard packed dirt with some rocky catheads any day. I didn’t go slow, but I didn’t go fast. I was a little gun shy and did not want to take even a minor fall and land on my ribs, so I was tentative during that whole descent. We had to climb a few hundred feet to the next downhill section and that sucked too. It was pretty though so I made a point of stopping to rest at areas where I could snap some pictures.
The fall colors are sporadic but nice. Keep in mind, evergreens are predominant out here, so the only color you see are from the stands of aspens and the ground cover plants.
We finally got to the fast downhill section. Earlier I told Bill that I was planning on taking it easy and asked him to wait for me at the bottom. I said if he had to wait longer than ten minutes, he needed to come back up and pick me up off the trail. :P His reply was “I’m not going to ride it fast.” I think I replied with something along the lines of “that’s crap – this is just like motorcycling and we always say we’re not going to ride fast, but then we do anyway.” It’s just how it is. So….we rode fast. Not as fast as last time – we were just below the “controlled crashing” level and I was only scared on one occasion. ;) Biffing would not be good.
We enjoyed the downhill, dragged ourselves up the last climb...
“Excuse us cows...uh, cows??? Please mooooove!”
...and did a quick descent down to the truck. We arrived at 4:28. It took just under 4 hours. Sad.
We were both tired but glad we did it. I was hurting and glad it was over. It wasn’t as much fun as last time. Not that I should have expected it to be. A) I was hurting and B) we’re spoiled by the downhill experience at Big Mountain.
We loaded the bikes and headed back to Stanley. Bill said something about the loop being 17.5 miles. For some reason, I was thinking it was 11.5. I checked the trail description. Yep, 17.5 miles. Much to my surprise, the time to completion ranged from 2-4 hours. HEY!! We finished in under 4 hours. Barely, but we did. Given my current state, I began to feel pretty proud of myself. Hmmmm…my first bike ride in 5 weeks post injury. I climbed over 1700 feet, hit over 8,000 ft. elevation and biked 17.5 miles. Not shabby for my first ride. Toot toot. That’s me blowing my own horn. ;)
We stopped at the Mountain Village grocery and grabbed a few items before heading back to the camper. We relaxed for a few minutes while the hot water tank heated up and then I showered and threw together a salad for dinner. We spent the rest of the evening relaxing – inside. Neither of us was up to sitting in the cold and staying up late with a campfire. Bill read while I updated the blog. Or will have updated it once I hit "Publish". We’re both pretty tired actually. I’m looking forward to sleeping hard tonight.
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