My Side Door

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m thinking about riding the Tour of the White Mountains on October 6.  Actually, I’m more than thinking about it, I’m fairly committed to it.  The next big question is what distance to go?  The choices are 41, 52, and 66 miles.  The 41 and 52 ride routes I have ridden much of, just not all at once.  The 66 adds a section I’m not familiar with.

As a single day’s ride, I’ve done 35 miles a number of times.  I’ve also done the 24 Hrs in the Old Pueblo twice, and in so doing logged 87 & 122 miles in a 24 hour period.  What I’m having a bit of trouble gauging is my current fitness level.  I feel about as in shape as I was when I did the 122 miles as part of a duo, but possibly better.  At that time I really wasn’t in great shape.  The next year, when I did 87 miles as part of a 4-person team, I was definitely in better shape than I am now.

I talked with Chris Z about it today, and he seemed up for the event.  He’s done a number of longer road rides and noted, “66 miles on a mountain bike is a long way.”  Well, yes it is.  But the TOWM is on relatively tame trails.  At altitude for sure (7000+ feet), but nothing remotely technical.

For now, I’m inclined toward the 52 mile distance.  It offers some single track I have yet to ride, less forest roads than the 41 miler, and an added climb in the beginning to get me thinking, “Will I be able to finish?”, in the first 10 miles.  That’s what these events are all about.  Finding a way to finish.

My family and my brother Robert’s family came up to our house in Pinetop for the long weekend.  It’s so relaxing up here, it’s tough to ever want to leave, and it makes us wonder why we don’t come up even more.  Our Pinetop house is at ~7000 feet, so temperatures are fairly cool.  It’s surrounded by tall ponderosa pine trees, and backs up to the tenth green of Pinetop Country Club, so temperatures are rarely much over 85, and this weekend, I don’t think the temp was every much over 75.

Robert and I went to ride the Country Club loop trail on Saturday, but unfortunately it started raining on the first go-round, so the plan to ride it twice (clockwise and counter) was cut in half.  That’s life during the Monsoon in Arizona. 

Earlier we had gone to the local Indian Casino and played in a poker tourney.  Robert was the first one eliminated, choosing not to throw another $30 at it and re-buy.  I lasted to around 15th place out of 35 or so, which was basically horrible, considering how weak the field was.  Still, at times you need to get some cards, and when I had cards, I just didn’t get the right action.  And when I got action, I had some brutal suck-outs against me.  Oh well.

Today, Robert and I decided to ride a bit earlier (around 2pm), hoping to get ahead of the afternoon Monsoon.   That seemed like a good plan, except it rained again right as we headed for the trailhead.  The light rain ended about the time we started our ride, but we rode through a bit of mud on the flatter sections.  The ride plan called for a ride on what I had heard was the White Mountain’s premier trail:  Los Burros.  Reviews were mixed, but I was hoping to finally find a trail up here that was enjoyable and repeatable.

Los Burros is a 14 mile loop.  The early mud had us both thinking we may have made a mistake attempting a ride, but alas, what mud there was wasn’t really that bad, and the ride turned out to be pretty good.  The scenery is nice, and the single track is truly special.  It’s that narrow single track that you just so rarely see any more.  Because of this, I did my very best to stay in the track, even when there was a little mud, rather than ride in the grassy track adjacent to it at times.  Riding in today’s conditions was certainly borderline.  I worried we’d damage the trail, but I really don’t think we did.  Much more rain though, and it would have been inconsiderate to ride.

As to the trail itself, I’d liken it to Pemberton in McDowell Regional Park.  A long loop, but for the most part a casual ride.  There were a couple of tasty sections, but they were short to be sure.  It seemed like we climbed for 10 or 11 miles, only to give back the elevation in a tremendous hurry.    One stretch of trail did work my lungs hard, even if it didn’t work my legs.  This is the first steep section of trail I’d found, here in the Pinetop area, so I was happy to find something that presented at least a bit of challenge.

The tour of the White Mountains uses all of these trails, plus some forest roads and more, which is a ride in early October I’m seriously considering.  The big decision would be which distance to attempt.  At a minimum I’d go for the 41 miler, but the 52 and 66 miler also seem appealing.  I’ve got until 9/8/07 to register, so I best get my act in gear and decide.

On my road to make my real estate blog, I took a couple of detours.  First I started with Blogger.com.  It was pretty easy to get set up, but I was having two problems.  The first was that I wanted to host the blog on my own server, but the publishing process didn’t seem to work very well.  The second, and more significant problem, was that a Blogger.com blog is a bit plain, and seemed lacking in comparison to other blogs I had seen.

 So I did what I should have done from the beginning, and fired up the Synaptic Package installer on my Linux box.  I recognize that you probably don’t know what that means, but Synaptic lists almost every bit of free software that you can get for a Linux Server.  It’s not a fairly nice search tool, so I searched for blog.  And near the end of the search I found WordPress. 

And thanks to their famous 5 minute install….5 minutes later I was up and running.  Well, almost.  But it was fairly easy to set up.  The hard part, is picking a theme.  There must be 100′s of themes you can choose from, and naturally none of them seem quite right.  But I found a theme I felt I could work with, and customized it over the course of a few days.  I also looked for plug-ins that would add custom features to the basic wordpress software, like SEO optimization, sitemap generation, and a different post editor.

I’m still looking to improve my blog’s look and features, but as they say, it’s good enough for now.  SideDoor, was substantially easier, since I knew how to do the setup.  It really came down to picking a theme.

If you want your own blog, Blogger.com is a good place to start.  But WordPress.com is also a good place to start.  Custom themes have a small cost at WordPress, but the software is substantially better.

I’m pleased to announce my new blog. This is for me, Steve Belt, to share interesting things with my friends, family, and anyone that may think what I have to say is for some reason interesting. I’ll comment on my real estate career, how Oxford Learning is doing, the trails I’ve been riding my mountain bike on, my latest Ninjitsu belt, and how the girls are doing.

If you don’t want the hassle of checking the site now and again for updates, feel free to subscribe by clicking the RSS feed link at the top right.

Oh, and one comment about the banner photos at the top.  There are 12 photos that can be selected.  If you you click F5 and udpate the page every second you’ll see all 12 of them.  In all cases, I’m either in the photo on my bike, or I took the photo.