Flying February!

Riding with Bob on Buckhorn Rd.

Wowzers! February has come and gone already! I guess when you're busy and having fun, the days tend to fly by!

This month was chock full of quality training and wrapping up pre-season Trinity Bikes Cycling Team tasks, which kept me quite occupied. It was crazy, but there was lots of fun had!

The first couple weeks this month, handed those of us here in Central Oregon, some amazing riding weather. No precipitation, light clouds, with temps rising into the 50's, it was unreal!!

Climbing out of the valley up Buckhorn Rd.

Hey, my address! Now you can become a stalk....er.....super fan! Haha.

I began to get spoiled with all the warm temps, I actually got to ride with just leg warmers, a long sleeve jersey and my regular shoes!! It was so incredibly nice! We even ate breakfast out in front of the house, which was awesome. Since we are on the main drag through town, we got lots of people rubber necking! Haha.

Bob cleaning a section in the canyon.

With the last little bit of sunshiney warmth, I finally got to ride the infamous Horse Ridge. 8 years living here and I hadn't ridden it! Sad, but hey s'all good, I got out there! It was super fun, the trails were ridiculously tacky and made for some great shredding. It's a fun mellow climb up and then on the way back down....oh boy, it's FUN!!

On one portion of some technical descents, I decided it would be fun to ditch my bike and swing from a tree branch so I wouldn't fly over the edge of a small cliff down to boulders. Sean and Bob thought it was rather hilarious when they got down there and saw my ghost white face as I was pulling my bike back and away from the rocky edge. I called it a day on that particular section. After that, we went across the Hwy to play in the Dry Canyon, which is a really good way to work on your technical riding along with smoothing off all those sharp teeth on your big chainring. Haha.

Wait, it was sunny yesterday.....

Near the end of the Horse Ridge ride, the weather said "Just Kidding!!" and got cold again! I think we got six inches or so of snow in town so it was back to the bundled up rides, thank goodness for all my Pearl winter gear, it's so amazing to be able to ride for three hours in the cold snow and still be comfy and warm!! 

Riding in the cold snow!

Overlooking the Crooked River Gorge.

I got some good snowy rides in and between them I worked with Heather Clark from the Bend Bulletin for a small tidbit of info on the team for an article in the newspaper! That had me scrambling to have the team website finished up a bit sooner than planned. But that was a good thing because I was able to crank it out and launch the "New and Improved" Trinity Bikes Cycling Team site!

Chocolate cake, vanilla buttercream icing covered in ganache!

During the last week of February, our house turned into a small bakery, as Bob and I cranked out two delicious cakes for some of the departing employees at work. It's nice to 

be able to bake something super delicious and then give it away so I don't end up sitting at home and eating it all. Haha. 

Riding the canyon trails/tundra!

This past weekend one of my new teammates, Brian Buskirk, came over from Portland to hang out, get some riding in and take care of some team stuff! Since he came to ride I figured, why not show him what our weather was all about?! Well, he got a great introduction to sub-freezing conditions, as our ride had an average temperature of 19 degrees! It was fun though, cause the snow in the Canyon had been packed in on the trail so we were able to shred some snow/frozen tundra singletrack, and that was an absolute blast. It was extra sweet, as for the prior two weeks, trail riding wasn't happening!! After dropping him off at the house before he froze solid, I finished up the ride and the temp continued dropping to a low of 14 degrees for the last half hour, setting a new record low temperature for me on a ride! Sweet!

I decided to keep up the bakery theme and with help from Bob and Brian, shot our blood sugar  levels through the roof with a batch of the finest cinnamon rolls I have ever made! Oh, wonderful gooey, cinnamon goodness!! YUM!!

Mmmm!

The team waiting to to have photos done.

Along with the sugar high and cold riding I also went to the team photoshoot by Fletcher of FJackson Photo. He got some cool studio shots for us that will be getting used on the team site and possibly some of those full-size wall graphics.........Haha. Man, if I had more chiseled cheekbones, I could be a model, and that would be such a cool thing! It was so much fun to stand there and just look pretty while getting my picture taken....hmmm maybe my next career goal! Haha.

Sean living it up in the limelight!

The sun decided to poke out again during the weekend too, which was great, cause I was truly able to test out my new PivLock V90 Max sunglasses that were just sent out from Smith Optics! They are so comfortable and I must say, look friggin amazing!! 

This here is MY buggy! :)

My ride was awesome, I got to do some muddin' which was fun, and the "Take Me On Your Buggy" song kept replaying in my head...haha. You can get it stuck in yours too, check it out:

Sweet shades!

Well, that about wraps it up for the month! I'm super excited because the first race of the year is now less than two weeks away!! I'll be heading up to Echo for some awesome racing at the Red to Red XC. It's going to be a nice, long weekend with some good camping in there as well! I'll be sure to have a great race report with lots of neato pictures!

Until next time!