Just had time for a bike ride this morning and did the Marshall Mesa loop - which is a 14.9 mile loop, about half on awesome single track, and the other half on dirt road and a couple miles on paved road. It's a fun loop that I used to do all the time and i have never been able to break an hour on it on my mountain bike before. Today I think I rode it in right about an hour. It was actually 1:05 - but I stopped to chat with my old Bishop, Bob Ure from our previous ward. I saw him running down the trail and so we had about a year and a half to catch up on...I didn't look at the watch, but I'm pretty sure that took 5 minutes or so, because we talked about a lot of stuff. Oh well..doesn't really matter, but I was trying to see where my biking fitness was compared to last time I tried this last year, and so I was pretty pleased that I was able to hold a 15 mile/hour average on it pretty comfortably. I started out really slow to warm up, and I was never really going all that hard, just steady riding the whole time. So i'm glad. I still think there's a good chance the 100 miles of leadville is going to totally work me over on Saturday. But I'm glad that my overall fitness level is good, even though my specific biking strength and endurance surely isn't as good as it could be if I had actually trained more than 3 times in a 1 week period. I'm also getting antsy to run more, I can't wait to go running for 8 or 10 miles tomorrow when I'm in Leadville. | 