Pretty Nice Day, Today

I had a pretty full day today, during which I functioned as three of my various personalities.  This morning, I was motorcyle-riding caffeine freak Jon, as I rode down to Kaladi and hung out with my coffee shop buds.

At noon, I was struggling musician Jon, as I met with a prospective drummer and gave him a copy of my demo cd and discussed my goals with the music.  (Please check out my Kickstarter project and throw your support my way, if it looks like your kind of thing...)

I finished the day up as mountain-biker Jon, as I drove over to Mt. Falcon and rode the ti bike up the east side of the mountain.

I was a bit curious about how I would do on the big climb.  I usually get to the picnic shelter in around 45 minutes, but I haven't done any mountain biking in a long time, so I wasn't sure how long it would take.  I was a bit shocked to look at my time on the clock and see that I had made the climb in a bit over 40 minutes!  I wonder if the lightweight Stan's Crow tires had anything to do with that.  It was my first ride on them, so I don't have any comparative data...

I took a picture of this fellow on a Yeti full suspension bike to give a sense of scale to the scene.  I packed up my camera, and took off uphill from the shelter.  I figured that I would ride up to the Castle Trail, then turn around and go down.  Suddenly, the Yeti rider caught up with me, and we started talking bikes.  Before I knew it, we had ridden up the Meadow Trail almost to the upper parking lot.

"I might as well ride Parmalee Gulch, while I'm up here," I said.

"That's what I'm doing," said my new riding partner.

So, we took off down the trail, and I managed to keep up with him, on his full-suspension rig, until we got to the cross-hill section on the south side of the mountain.  At that point, I backed off of the pace and cruised along for a while.  I wanted to recover, a bit, from the effort since I knew that the steep climb back up to the meadow was coming up.

I eventually made my way back down the mountain to my truck, which I had carefully locked up before I left the parking lot.

 Good thing I made sure the door was secure.  (That is my iPod Nano plugged into my stereo.  It, and everything else in the truck, was undisturbed, despite the open window.  Sometimes, people are good.)

I ended up with about 10.3 miles of trail riding in an hour and a half on the bike.  Six point something mph doesn't sound too impressive, unless you've ridden that damn hill a few times.  I am happy with my performance, today.

I stopped off for a hot fudge/strawberry sundae at Dairy Queen, on the way home, and I enjoyed every sticky bite.

I had a couple of invitations to go to Easter get-togethers, today, but I decided to let everyone enjoy their families and spare them from "orphan duty", this year.  I hope that everyone had as nice a day as I did.

Weather today was sunny, with light breezes and a temperature of 71 degrees here in Denver.  Not too shabby.

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