Lake Bistineau Group Ride

So, now that I've been biking a while, it was time to use my bike for what it was built for, off road, mountain biking. Since we don't have mountains, how bad could it be, right?

Wrong.

Them woods have hills, ya'll! And trees you can smash into, as my bike and I soon found out.

I met up with a local mountain biking group, appropriatly named LOCO, Louisiana off-road cycling organization. Great and very supportive group of people. In particular, a guy named Brady who has been helping me find road trek's in Shreveport for my early morning rides. When I pulled into the state park, and met up with the dozen or so other riders, I soon knew I was going to be way in the back alone. But, Brady, who is known to be super fast, stayed back and blew his riding day off, to help me. I layed my bike over at least two major times that I can think of, and discovered that my seat was not my friend. One time, I laughed the whole way to the ground, as my fellow rider shouted "Get up and quite laughing, there's redbugs everywhere out here!". The other time was pretty bad, I cliped a sapling with my handlebars, turning me funny and slamming my shin and crankset (front gear teeth) into a bruised and dented mess. No worries, I wasn't using that gear anyway.

The course was very technical, with alot of back and forth path movements. My biggest enemy was going slow actually. I crashed way less when moving quickly. The roots and things wern't too big of a problem, but having to get going on an uphill climb is something I'll have to work on. Oh, and those damn trees. We pulled out about 2 miles to the end, because we were running short on time, and honestly Brady probably was worried about an unintentional manslaughter conviction. After about 7.3 miles, I was toast. And this is after me doing all the miles in the city, thinking I'd built up some endurance. Yeah, going 20 mph on pavement isn't too hard, when you consider going 5 mph in the woods.

At the end of the day, I had a great time, and learned alot (often by necessity of the moment). I also now know how to tailor my rides in the city to build me up for riding on the woods.

Bottom line, get a bike! I'm having a blast!

Charlie Vman