Whereas Chris and Kevin were busy with a 5 hour seat racing practice*, I was left to solo Rosaryville State Park. Riding solo isn't that fun, but I found it very useful to not have anyone around when I faceplanted a log. It's surprisingly difficult to climb over a log when in the full drop position on a cyclocross bike, going 5 mph. The result was an endo and a face-first log dive.
Enough about the log, and on to biking ideology: It seems to me that mountain biking, as opposed to road, isn't about getting speed, but managing the speed you have. That's why it's such good training for cyclocross, because cyclocross is a combination of getting speed, and managing that speed. Depending on the course, it may be one or the other, but it's often both at the same time.
It's funny that as I was thinking about this, and catching up on Cyclocross Magazine's latest post, I happened upon this bike:
As far as velo porn goes, this pretty much does it for me. I don't have any sophisticated knowledge of components or brand names, so I don't know if bike snobs would scoff at the choice of shocks or whatever... All I know is that putting drop bars on a mountain bike is dead sexy. Add this bike to my repertoire of dream bikes. I would go with a different color scheme, of course. Red and black.
Now, the real reason I was writing this: The engineer's report on Rosaryville's main trail.
First, the elevation profile. I took my GPS along for the ride. The data has a 0.01 mile resolution. Click on the images to get a better look.
The elevation scale is exaggerated, so that the differences in elevation are actually 0.005 times as shown on the above plot. Without exaggeration, the profile looks approximately like this:
My tracks can be found here as an overlay on Google Maps. There's a portion of the tracks in which my GPS thought I was on 301--but this is not true.Generally, the Rosaryville trail has a great tempo. There are lots of quick ups and downs, and only a couple big climbs. There are a few logs in the course to make it fun, and a few good ravines, so be careful! The Rosaryville trail is relatively rootless.
Length: I clocked the trail at 8.9 miles.
*From Wikipedia: Seat Racing - A method to compare two rowers in fours or eights. Two boats race against each other once. One rower from each boat switch positions, and the two boats race again. Relative performance in the two races is used to compare the abilities of the two rowers.
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