This year both Paul and I bit the bullet and bought new mountain bikes. That’s its own post, and I’ll write up that experience soon (because it has been an adventure).
But for now I’ll say that yesterday we took those bikes out to Valmont Bike Park, which is 1mi from our house. It’s a 42 acre bike park with skills trails and terrain parks. It’s pretty awesome.
It was a great place to test the bikes and start to get used to them. It’s also the first time either of us have ever ridden on mountain bikes with clipless pedals, which was fun.
We hopped on some ramps, flat logs, small rock jumps, and the like. You can see the largest ramp we pedaled up on the right in that first picture.
We mainly were on “small”features (sizes ranged from XS-XL). There was a nice “medium” jump feature that both of us nearly went off, but the drop was about 2ft. Doesn’t sound like much, but we weren’t quite sure we were ready yesterday. Next time I think.
We got 10miles in zooming around and playing, and about 600ft of climbing. It was just ridiculously FUN to go play on the bikes for a bit. No grinding hills, no freezing cold, no big pushes. Just solid Type 1 fun.
We’ll go off and explore longer trails soon, but thrilled to know this park exists, and that a quick hour after work will let us start to really hone in on some of our skills!
