A great day to ride your bike!

Today was the first day of the Fat Tire Festival at Nordic Hertiage in Presque Isle, Maine. And what a great day it was. The weekend started with my favorite event. The mountain bike biathlon race.
We had folks from the age of around six to over sixty! There was fun for all ages. In addition to the biathlon event there was also a kids cross country race and the downhill race for all ages.
We couldn't have asked for any better of weather or a better planned event. Tomorrow the festivities continue with the longer cross country races. I am going to dare to put on a bib and hop on my bike and give it a try. It will be something new for me. Wish me luck! If you are in the area come and join in on the fun! The more the merrier.
cheers, BA

Not your average Tour

While most people are following "The Tour" going on in France this time of year, our small group of crazy, fun Nordic skiers and biathletes headed out Sunday afternoon on a tour of our own. It was the 9th annual Tour of Stockholm, brought to us by the one and only Will Sweetser. For those of you who are familiar with the event, it is a day of mixed distance training, ie: running, rollerskiing, biking, paddling and often bushwhacking.
Every year I have participated, I havehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif had a blast. It is always an adventure. You can usually anticipate some kind of detour, (last year it was a two hour detour through the woods/swamp with my mountain bike on my shoulder and about 10,000 horse flies swarming my head!), or unexpected hiccup to occur at some point throughout 4-6 hour tour.
I would say on average this year was fairly mellow. Please don't take this the wrong way, mellow is a very, very good thing in this case! Besides taking a good tumble up and over my handlebars on my mountain bike, I'd say it was pretty smooth sailing.

Many thanks to Will for organizing the event! Great time had by all. Hope you enjoy the few pictures I captured a different points during the day.

Cheers to the many adventures yet to come!
-BA

Some like it hot....I don't.

Summer. So many great things about it; swimming, growing things, long days, lots of sun shine, thunderstorms, barbecues. But then there is also the heat. I am a Northern girl, all the way. I melt in the heat, or so I like to think. So this past week has been a challenging one for me. Thankfully I was also a low week for me, so I could minimize my time burning rollerskiing the scolding hot blacktop.
This easy week wraps up my third training block of the year. It is crazy how quickly time flies by. Tomorrow is the start of block four. I am looking forward to spending more time with my rifle and keeping my training fun but effective. I am training hard, to ski fast this winter. It's a tough concept understand and follow at times, but I am doing my best to keep that in my thoughts before, during and after workouts.

Right now that thought is telling me I need to go to bed and get some rest! Below are a few more pictures from the past couple weeks of training. I'd just like to highlight one. This first one marks today, July 10th, 2010, as beginning of raspberry picking season! Mmmmmm, can't wait for many more days of picking to come! Enjoy!
BA

It's all about the timing

On Wednesday Maine Winter Sports took a group of athletes down to Katahdin to make the trek up. I have lived in Maine for over five years now and hadn't yet gone up. I was more than excited to see this trip on the schedule this spring. I closed off two days of work to making sure I had nothing in the way of putting me at the top of that mountain.
Despite these efforts I never got there. I misunderstood the timing of it all, not realizing that we were going to leave the evening before the two days chosen. Bummer! A couple hours later departure and I would have been there. I guess it wasn't meant to be this time around. Something tells me there will be others opportunities.
After realizing I was going to miss out on a great four to five hours distance adventure workout, I decided I needed to create one on my own. Since there aren't any mountain big enough around here for a four hours hike, I decided on going on a bike adventure. This would be a great opportunity to check out some new territory in Aroostook County. Out came the Maine Gazetteer and my highlighter and with the help of David, I mapped out a nice long loop that would wind me around down towards Ashland and then slowly wind back up to Caribou.
Back pockets packed with food, water, money and phone, I started off. It was beautiful riding. The farmland in this area is gorgeous and very inspiring. About an hour in however, I spotted some pretty dark clouds rolling my way. I was not looking forward to hitting this storm on my bike, but I pedaled into it anyways. I did stop under the eve of an old abandon gas station for a couple minutes, hoping I could wait just a few more and have the worst of it pass. I realized quickly that wasn't going to happen, so back on my bike I went. The rain started to fall and things got pretty dark. I kept pedaling dreaming for warm, dry places and before I knew it my route took me left, away from the storm! Blue skies were in sight! I pedaled faster and quickly drove myself away from the storm. I couldn't help but think of what amazing timing I had. The pavement was very wet were I was now riding, but the storm was quickly moving in away from me. Crisis averted! Well maybe it wasn't a crisis but four hours of cold, wet riding was anyways.
So while the timing didn't work out for one adventure, it helped me stay dry and happy on another.
Happy 4th to you all! Hope you can all get out there and have an adventure of your own. Cheers, BethAnn

P.S. I apologize for not having any pictures with this post. I took many great shots during my ride, but forgot to put the memory card back in my camera before I did so! Lesson learned.