As you may have noticed, keep­ing up with this blog didn’t top my hit parade last year. it wasn’t a very good year for tri­als, either, so it didn’t mat­ter much. :-)
I got ill dur­ing the colum­bia cup, then I injured my elbow while prac­tic­ing last june, and it took many months for it to heal, so I didn’t ride very much through the sum­mer. so that’s ’09 in a nut­shell, on to 2010!

THe year started out with our first event, the “Plas­tered Pur­ple Pen­guin” on jan­u­ary 3rd. A new loca­tion for most of us, a pri­vate area in Marysville. We had excel­lent weather for jan­u­ary (45 degrees and not rain­ing) and Tom had a unique event planned with a group check observed tri­als in the morn­ing, and a Scot Trial in the after­noon (a race where you points both for the dabs in the sec­tions and for how far you are behind the tar­get time).

This area has a 3.5 mile scram­bles track laid out, and that’s pretty much what we used for the loop, with the sec­tions in the woods next to the track at var­i­ous places. Really easy to wear your­self out try­ing to go quickly on the scram­bles track; that’s not what a tri­als bike is really good at!

A good selec­tion of sec­tions, with not a lot of splits between advanced and expert, but fun. Once again I proved con­clu­sively that I can­not ride com­peta­tively at the advanced level by just hop­ping on the bike the morn­ing of the event, and call­ing the 30 min­utes warmup ‘prac­tice’. I had fun, but made a num­ber of stu­pid mis­takes, and fin­ished in last place. I also had some issues with the bike being hard to start and kick­ing back while start­ing, so i guess it’s time to catch up with all that deferred main­te­nance. :-) (this will be a sub­ject for a future post)

after lunch, 5 or six folks (all but one on larger enduro machines) tried their hand at the Scot Tri­als. It cer­tainly looked like fun, maybe next year I’ll talk some fool into loan­ing me a WR or some­thing and try my hand. :-)

All in all, though, a fun way to start out the year

Next Event: Walker Val­ley, Feb 7. See you there. Direc­tions are avail­able on the Puget Sound Tri­alers web site.

keep those feet up!
black­dog