Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me

Here in the England of New, we don’t really get to see the trails to much during the winter. There’s typically six or more inches of crunchy/slushy snow just soft enough to let your wheels sink deep enough to keep your pace below that required for the bike to stay upright. So what happened today was like winning the lottery, twice. After Wednesday’s ride from hell, things made a complete one-eighty overnight. That fresh six inches combined with twelve hours of thirty two degree rain froze overnight and left the trails solid as a rock. A pair of good studded nobbies and it was like a gift from heaven. Conditions like this can easily go wrong if the foot soldiers get to it first and leave their mark, roughing up the riding surface. Fortunately, no one had time to get out before things froze over. It was the perfect combination of concrete hard ice topped with the slightest dusting of powder to give you that little extra bite in the corners. Screw trails at this point; every square inch of ground around was ripping fast and just asking to be shredded all-day-long. Things are suppose to break freezing this weekend, so it looks like the only thing to do is man-up and get out there right at the crack of dawn before it has a chance to turn to that same old slushy/soggy bullshit. Next week is the last purely “base” week this winter, and the highest volume of my short stint as a cyclist. Sorry to keep things so lame; I keep getting asked to post about things other then the mundane-ness of the bike-geek lifestyle. Not that these 30 hours a week are all that’s going on- I just highly doubt any of you want to waist your time with the rest. Girls, bikes, school. You were all 19 once, I’m sure you get the picture. Still, I’ll try and throw in some off the bike antics this week to change it up a bit. In other news: no more Sonoma NORBA. As much as I never want to see those lousy excuses for trails ever again, as the place where I won my first stars and stripes, it holds a special place with me. And god knows I’d rather race that crap while spending a week in wine country than live an extra five days in SMOG capital USA (LA). There’s a compu-trainer down stairs waiting for an hour and a half of easy spinning…