Saturday morning the weather was perfect. I got together with Todd and Keith for a longish ride starting at Tunnel Canyon. Todd is in training mode for the xterra circuit and Keith does those crazy ironman races. Todd has really improved on his mountain biking and took a 3rd in tough conditions at Socorro a few weeks back in his first ever NMORS race in the competitive sport 30-39 class. Todds bro works for Trek/Bontrager and as a result, he gets some awesome bikes and percs. Todd is riding a team issue carbon fiber Fuel and believe me, you could not buy anything remotely close to this bike from your local Trek dealer.
Keith has incredible stamina from his triathlon training and though he's got some work to do on his off road skills, he was grinning the entire ride. Needless to say, we didn't break any speed records, but I was able to hammer up the climbs on the single speed, spin the flats, and rest at intersections, so it was a little like interval training.

It had rained the night before, but just enough to groom the trails and we were the first wheels on the trails all day. In fact, there were hardly any people on the trails for some reason. We headed up Tunnel to Rambo, to the withdrawal boundary, down new trail to Otero, up new trail, over to meadow junction with 56. Took 326 to intersection w/ FR106 to continuation of 326 with the new section that parallels the withdrawal boundary out to junction with 106 again. Proceeded over to Cajun pine and climbed over to Mars Court and took the 126? trail down into David Canyon and climbed turkey trot. I can climb turkey trot on my geared bike, but it's been giving me trouble on the single speed; getting a lot of wheel spin outs in the dry loose stuff. At the top of turkey trot, took new trail back to intersection w/ FR106, climbed to top of the ridge, and followed 106 back to 326 and back tracked down to meadow/56 junction again, then came down east Otero ridge, then back up to Rambo, down to Tunnel and back to the lot. All in all, a distance of 25 miles with total climbing of approximately 3,000.

A nice ride for me, though I had wanted to do about 10 more miles. My knee felt pretty decent and though I could feel some tightness by the end, it never really was hurting. I had a lot of fun, and that was the most miles I've done yet on the single speed. I'm trying to build up this year to reach my goal of a metric century on the singlespeed. Maybe by next year I'll be ready for the "Sport class" of the unofficial New Mexico Endurance series. If the forests close soon, like I'm hearing, I'll be getting a lot of road miles in the rest of the summer.