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I'm feeling like less of a Jerk with every ride on the new mountain bike. |
There is
a lot of stuff at Glacial Blue Hills that I either can’t ride at all or can’t ride well. Even the best mountain bikers in West Bend continue to find it challenging despite frequent visits. They tell me that if I can learn to ride well at “Blue” then I will be able to ride well anywhere, and I believe them. There’s almost no flow to the place, as if an insane giant had collected pieces of other trails and then carelessly dropped them. I don’t mean to disparage the efforts of the trailmakers—I know many of them as friends—but the physical geography of Glacial Blue Hills simply defies order.
Today I spent 90 minutes at the park, covering most of the trails at least once and some of them several times. And I finally found a little loop that I really like. It’s not long and it’s neither the easiest nor the hardest section in terms of technical difficulty. But it
flows. It makes sense to me. I can do it again and again, working hard all the while without huge peaks or valleys in the effort. It’s the loop highlighted in red in the map below.
I rode it only in a counter-clockwise direction today, but I’m sure it would work clockwise too. And on a future visit I will try to add an adjacent loop to form a 19-20-21 “Figure 8.”
Maybe that’s the only sensible way for me to approach these trails: shooting for mastery of one or two segments at a time, rather than trying to get my head around the whole thing.
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