Last updated on March 19, 2013
This morning I took part in the sixth annual Lake Orion High School Winter Race; a cross country (XC) race around the school’s grounds and mountain bike trails. The trail conditions were perfect for all kinds of bikes, and my fatbike definitely wasn’t necessary. It sure didn’t hurt, though, and made for a fun ride. Per usual I didn’t have to brake much, as the increased rolling resistance (the front tire is 4 PSI, rear was 6 PSI) allowed me to stop pedaling before most corners, roll through, then keep going.
Being the only person on a fatbike I won the Fatbike category by default. Had I raced in my appropriate Sport class I would have taken third out of four. (Official results here.)
I really liked the route, as it avoided many of the hard/slick climbs that can be found on the school grounds and instead opted for a nice rolling route. My only complaint would be the overall length of the race, as doing three laps I was only riding for ~46 minutes. I think we could easily have gone to four or five laps and still been sane for a winter race.
GPS data of my ride today can found here on Strava. It seems that for the last third my HRM acted up again, radically under-recording things.
On the way home I noticed that there is now a Great Lakes Coffee location along M-24 / Lapeer Rd. and stopped for some coffee. It seems to be almost colocated with a Kensington Church location so I braced myself for a bit of proselytizing, but I was pleasantly surprised to instead encounter some nice folks who made me a good cup of coffee.
The photo above is one of the first actual-use images taken with my new camera, a Fujifilm FinePix XP50 ruggedized camera. I bought this to replace my aging Olympus Stylus 850SW as my carry-everywhere camera. The Olympus served me very well, but I was wanting something with better low light performance, a more capable movie mode, and SD cards. Finding a good deal on the XP50 I figured I’d give it a go. Its ~20g heavier than the Olympus and lacks the nice auto-retracting metal cover for the primary lens, but I think it’ll work out well. I’ll know for sure at the end of summer.