Athens All The Way

A couple weekends back was the Annual Athens All The Way mountain bike ride.  It has taken a few years off but AATW is back and will hopefully be truly annual again.  

If you Ask Jeeves about local mountain bike trails he does not have a very good answer.  There are a few trails that pop up, one is right here in town but pretty short and caters towards beginners, the others are all a good bit out of town requiring a car or a pretty grueling fat tire road ride just to get your tires muddy.  Soooooo... Athens does not stand out as mountain biking town to the general PUBLIC.

The truth is that there is a core group of dudes that have some pretty decent trails that you will not find any info about unless you ask one of the said core dudes.  These trails are all in town and if you live in town there is no reason why you could not ride every day and never get in your car.  Now, we are not talking about beautifully groomed single track.... more like in town rugged wilderness.... but the trails are beautiful in my eyes.  

Athens All The Way is a group ride that sets out on a pre planned day with the end goal of riding every known trail in town one after the other after the other....

This is no easy task.  I think the guys and gals who completed the ride this year logged somewhere between 40 and 50 miles.... most of which is single track with small amounts of pavement to connect sections of trail.  

I was unable to ride in the morning due to some other obligations so I met the ride at the halfway point... I will call the ride Athens All Half the Way.  The halfway point greeted the group of beat morning riders with a SAG  car complete with a change of cloths, food, water, pizza and a resupply of other necessary beverages.  After ridding the last half of the ride I was kind of happy I did not start with the early crew....Everyone was DESTROYED near the end of the 40+ mile ride.  

 All said and done 29 riders participated in this gruel fest and 17 completed the ride in it's entirety (major props).  We all decided that this will again become an annual event but maybe it should not take place during the dead heat of summer..... To be continued in Fall or Spring 2015.... Not summer!

Necessary Beverages!

 

"Ballers Hill"

Attention All Trail Users............

The trails we all use and love do not maintain or build themselves....

That is all....

Bucky the Tube Slayer!

Hmmmmmmmm... What is the most productive use of my time today.... Seeing how I am midish way through a pretty major home renovation I ask myself this most days..... should I start to tare out that wall, studd in the new closet, relocate the kitchen plumbing, remove/move electrical, start laying new wood floor, relocate lighting, build new cabinet doors, refinish cabinets, etc, etc, etc.  I know.... I'll clean off the deck first because it is getting cluttered with building trash, kitchen sink, wood, old cabinet doors...etc.  While carrying said cabinet doors to back of truck I thought... "these are pretty crappy doors... but this is good quality plywood (12 ply birch, no core voids)".... the mind ran wild and after a couple hours of work, none of which was productive toward home renovation.... VOILA

8 inch radius 

A little jig saw action

A bunch of screws

First test bend.... Turned out pretty darn good!

Crappy Bikes

To preface this post: This post was composed entirely on my phone while waiting for hours in San Jose’s International airport, while waiting on a 1:30 AM flight home…. I might have been delirious but after reading over the post (written on the notepad of my phone) I have decided to fix nothing and publish as is… enjoy any errors you might find and my late night red eye babbling.

Crappy bikes 

Man... There are a ton of CRAPPY bikes in Costa Rica. Well, I'll take that back here are a ton of decent frames with crap parts all over them. All the bike shops.... If you want to call them that, sell bright shiny new frames... Name brand frames... Think big box, Trek, Giant, Cannondale, etc. But then they cover them up with junk parts. ALL bikes (except the few actually nicely built modern road bikes) have front suspension and ALL of these suspension forks are.... Ready for it.... RST???????? I went to a few shops to further investigate and what I found was very subpar shops with a back stock of no lie 200 brand new RST forks on the shelves????? In different colors of course. The end purpose of the bike does not seem to matter they all had suspension forks. Turns out even the "nice" mountain bikes were actually just being used by the Ticos’ (the general name that native Costa Ricans go by) commuters (I guess the suspension is for all the huge pot holes). I saw tons of dudes fully kitted out just cruising on the highway on their "nice mountain bike". The first night in San Jose we were at this place that had their version a Sports Center playing and they were showing a Costa Rican National Championship Mtn Bike race. Maybe all the riders were just pissed about their RST shocks and their Acera derailleurs because the riders were terrible. Don't get me wrong, I am sure most of them would beat the pants off me in a road race or any other endurance heavy, timed event, but these dudes couldn't cross a creek! I'm not talkin’ that manky entrance, a bit too deep, a bit too long with an almost impossible exit creek, I am talkin’ a little piddly nothing creek... Some would have called it refreshing. All the dudes in the race dismounted and carried.... It was embarrassing to watch but after two weeks in the country and TRYING to find mountain biking… ZERO LUCK and seeing where they ride… ON THE HIGHWAY it’s clear.... These dudes need to come to the Southeast USA for a training sesh.... Oh yeah, we surfed the Caribbean, ate coconuts, drank crappy beer, drank ONE good beer, peered into the crater of two active volcanoes, avoided about a bazillion auto accidents, almost killed 5000 dudes on motorcycles, ate more beans and rice and plantains than I care to think about, and got stranded at one international shopping mall.

The only cool bike I saw the entire time

             

The other only cool bike 

The local truck driver... I have friends who would excel at this job

The typical "BIke Shop"

I want one

Where the jungle meets the surf

San Jose Skyline

Hat Trick..... Work, Ride, Paddle....

 I had this idea the other day and ran it past my usual partner in crime.  We agreed this would be a great mini epic if we did it after a full day of work.  I worked my day job, he worked his day jobs, then we met up, set the shuttle and got on the bikes.  The pictures will tell the rest of the story.

Shuttle set... ready to roll!

In town mountain bike trails proved to be a viable shuttle route...

The trail needs a good bit of TLC thanks to this week's multiple big wind storms.  

                                   

Look what we found stashed in the woods.......

Two of my favorite things....

Don't mind if I do!

This set up is actually pretty darn stable

   

Loaded up and truckin'

We took a quick break at a friends house.... Thanks for the picture Jess!

Take Out

   

Getting that up there was terrible 

 A li'l bushwhacking 

Might have been easier to unload at the bottom of the hill... maybe next time...

Lets go home 

Twilight: The Saga Continues... Continued again?

So my sculpture/blob/trophy/ was chosen as a finalist for the Twilight Criterium trophy competition.  Yay!  Now it is in a store window in down town Athens to be voted on by the unedumucated and easily influenced (by meaningless influences) PUBLIC.  My trophy/sculpture/blob is in.... a.... consignment, I mean thrift, I mean vintage, I mean second hand, there it is Boutique.  The window is so filled with stuff it would be nearly impossible for the above mentioned PUBLIC to discern what they would be voting for, and that is only  if they could figure out how to work their phones.  Other trophies received much more visible store frontage, for example, the only cool record store, one of the nicest restaurants in town, a late night eatery, a pretty rad burrito spot, another (slightly less cluttered window) JUNK store, a college sports enthusiast shop and last but probably best a really sweet in town trendy hotel.  Mine is not in the best spot to be noticed by the masses, but all is good because the PUBLIC vote really doesn't matter in the grand scheme... as far as money in my pocket and clout for my ego goes.  The PUBLIC vote just decides what order the trophies are handed out to race winners... Big Whoop.  After the PUBLIC vote the top 3 or 5 or maybe all 8 go to a VIP silent auction/gallery showing.  The three sculptures that receive the highest bid/make the most moola will receive a cash prize, and the highest earning sculpture will become the Twilight trophy for years to come... I hope my brazes hold.....
Trophy entries can be seen HERE

You can vote if ya want too.... oh yeah
 sand blasted and powder coated a sweet metallic bronze/gold flake!

Yo PUBLIC... I am on the left and the trophy/sculpture/blob is on the right...

Twilight: The Saga Continues

Y'all know how I love mainstream teenybopper pop movies....

There is this race that happens every year here in Athens called the Twilight Criterium.  This day just so happens to be one of my favorite days of the year.  For the past several years I have shown my love for this fabulous day starting early and ending sometimes late, but most often early... real early, those are all good stories on there own, ask me later.  This year I entered a sculpture competition to build the winners trophy for the main event.  The only stipulations were height (20 inches), incorporating bike parts, and that you use the provided "custom (4 2x4's and a piece of plywood) base".  The artsy seeming guy who was at the "custom sculpture base" pick up spot proclaimed that he thought "using gears was too cliche", said guy is planing on incorporating a bunch of used inner tubes in his "sculpture"............... we will see.  I on the other hand/cliche side am thinking on a different plane....My thoughts are bike people like bike parts, and gears are integral to bicycles, so........ I went totally "cliche" and built my sculpture/trophy/blob totally out of gears.... It is not finished yet but will be real soon....

Next step will be a gold flake powder coat

Rising that dirty dirty flux off

The brain child being born