'nother day, 'nother epic.

got-up to western cycle on friday to pick-up the steel deluxe. When i scooped-up the rig Mark explained the intense process to rebuild the sid team fork. He also got my ancient XT rear hub on my training wheelset (mavic 3.1 UST's) running smooth again, that dude's been hookin' me up - need all the help i can get when it comes to maintenance. rolled home and hit the Fells for a short shake-down ride, make sure everything was mint for today's epic. 2mins into the ride, the skies opened-up and a nice warm rain began making its way through the fresh canopy. Instead of turning back, continued on the loop and enjoyed having the trails to myself, even stopped and just listened to the rain for a minute... at the end of the ride was confident that everything was ready for today's epic.

got a late start this morning, head little fuzzy from thom's b-day soiree. wheels rollin' at 10a. hammered 12m of road, andy doing a lot of pulling, he'd continue doing that all day. first section of trail (mill st) was super burly. hadn't been on the mtb in a while, took some pretty decent falls and quickly realized that my front fork wasn't un-locking. whoa. mark mentioned that he called RockShox tech support 2-3 times while doing warranty replacement and there was some confusion on amounts of oil, etc - something in that process must have gone awry. but, as usual, when something like this occurs, you got 2 choices. freak-out and bail, or go buddha on that shit, accept the situation and roll. Mill Street singletrack kicked my ass, but 2hours later was in a groove, really enjoying the almost-fully rigid ride (had about 20-30mm of travel). as the ride continued, developed a loose feel on the bars and my arms became the suspension and chased some real nice lines. andy was always waiting-up for me, but that's pretty standard on the uber-technical stuff, that dude rips.

ended-up cruising all the way to Cape Anne in Gloucester, rode a loop in Dogtown for the first time, real nice mix of smooth singletrack and technical rock gardens. on the way back, hit-up Ancient line, a trail that lives in infamy on the north shore, among a cpl other real nice pieces of trail. andy laid-down the power all the way back while i struggled to keep it going, but with andy taking long pulls on the road it was all about the 44-11 and we were rippin'! finished-up 7hrs after pulling-outta andy's driveway, great ride. 7 days of taper till Mohican. looking fwd to that! just need to stay off the sauce and not gain 2-3lbs in beer weight before...