Awesome @revchuck, I totally get what you’re saying about how satisfying it is set a hard goal and then achieve it. The training process ain’t half bad either!

That particular trail is pretty straightforward. The upper section is pretty loose, with washed out sections, loose dirt-over-rock sections (but all rideable even for me except two giant logs across the trail, with piles of smaller logs to make a ramp, I walk those). The middle section is awesome, gets rocky towards the end but easily rideable rocks. The lower third has some steep, tight, loose switchbacks. One of em is rocky but last time I walked back a figured out my line and rode it easily this time. The toughest part about the lower section is that parts of it is narrow, off camber, loose and exposed. If you ride too far from the edge (as your instincts tell you) and get into the loose stuff, you start to slide and yikes.

But all of that is skills stuff, not really fitness stuff. If you climb the paved road (as we did), the trail is pretty easy from a fitness perspective.

In town, I don’t have a lot of great mtb options. But I mtb lots of other places.

Today, I rode a trail called Golden Eagle. It’s big challenges are very narrow, over grown, very loose in summer, lots of exposed off camber stuff, remoteness etc. But almost no rocks.

Big Bear (where I ride frequently) is much more rocky. Some of the stuff I just look at and wonder how people ride it. I walk over that stuff. Here’s a pic I sent Ex from last weekend. I want him to come ride Big Bear with me cause I want to see him ride up this. The trail goes to the right of the tree btw. This section is on a blue/intermediate trail called Skyline. So I think there’s decently hard stuff around here, but I’m mostly not on those trails and when I am I’m not drawn to taking pics of stuff I can’t ride for the most part.

Come out to California and we’ll hit up some non-discouraging trails.

MTB ride for me today, the singletrack stuff was super fun but then we went “exploring” and headed down down down a new-to-us trail. Figured we’d return by the fireroad but that was shadeless and miles (maybe 3?) of mostly 15-18% uphill grades in 100F temps. Exploring this area was not my idea or something I knew was on the agenda, so I only had two bottles of water. Got dehydrated and a little bit of heat exhaustion, had to walk a bunch of the fireroad stuff. But the singletrack stuff was really fun, almost made up for it. We wound up riding 27 miles/4000 ft of climbing and amazing despite the heat stress it was still almost all HR zone 2/3 for me. 250ish TSS for this ride, bringing me to 120 miles (40 of em mtb miles which count at least 2x lol)/700 TSS/10000 ft climbing for the week. I am tired and sitting on a -40 TSB right now. Rest day tomorrow, I am so tired.

We saw zero other cyclists or hikers. Four deer. And lots of tracks: Bear, bobcat, deer, and snake. Blows my mind to go to this trail just 35 min north of a pretty big population center and see zero people out there.

Bear track:

@TMonk, Tahoe/Truckee is awesome riding. Especially on the mtb.

I think I can do anything for five minutes. Then when I get to two minutes, I repeat the 5 minute mantra substituting two minutes. When I get to one minute, I remind myself I was a 400 meter runner. All is good.

Does that always work? No but if it does not, I will switch from time control to distance control and look ahead and say, I know I can make it at this level of effort to that distance goal. Does that always work? No, then I go into my rabid dog mode and hope.