What is that Nicole up to?

8 clean monkeys set out on the dusty single-track trails of Santa Cruz with the goals of (1) mountain biking all the epic, awesome, primary trails in UCSC/Henry Cowell, Wilder, and Bear Mountain (2) having a fun-filled day of pedaling our hearts out, and (3) covering (at least) a distance of 62 Km (a metric century). 8 dirty monkeys came back from these trails with grit-eating grins and most of these goals accomplished (at least the important goals, #1 and #2)! Five of us even managed to exceed all three goals by biking 72 miles and climbing 10,500 feet of vertical, technical single-track. You may wanna hold your breath if you view pictures of us after many miles of playing in the dirt.


Alex, the primary creator of the epic loops(es) we rode, summarized it nicely in a letter to the peeps:

"Nerds,

The first Santa Cruz Off-Road Metric Century was a complete success!
Thanks so much to everyone who came out and made it awesome.
We started off with 8 riders (Me, Jun, Nicole, Jordan, DJ, Erin,
Carlos, Matt). Everyone rode the first loop all together which was a
great experience. That first loop was 30 miles and almost 5000ft
ascent and involved riding up magic carpet which was fun! The 2nd loop
was mostly wilder and also a blast, the group split into two at that
point, Jun and I and Nicole, Jordan and DJ. Carlos and finally Erin
peeled off at various stages. after loop two we'd done 57 miles (only
5 to go!) but everyone rallied and pitched in the extra effort and we
did a full bear mountain loop (including el chup!) for a total of 71
miles, 10,450ft of ascent. We started at 8am and finished at 8pm but
had some good breaks for lunch and afternoon tea.

Afterwards everyone who finished got a very limited edition frickin'
laser etched stem cap. Nicole organized a raffle and everyone won a
*valuable* prize from her shed. DJ and Jun worked the grills and we
showered 10 tons of dirt down Jun's drain.

This was by far my single greatest experience on a bike. I've ridden
that distance once before off road on a bike at Boggs but never such
an awesome flowy never the same trail kind of huge epic loop that was
our route. Truly Epic!"

You can also see the velonerds blog here. I am obviously too tired and lazy to write much more at the moment.

I never thought I could bike such a distance and so much vertical on single track, especially after already doing a 100 miler (with only about 200 more feet of climbing) on road four days prior, but it felt awesome, great, epic, and I loved every minute of it (even that section of Boundary Trail that I loathe!).