Finding A Little Rhythm

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.