TransNorthGeorgia [Finished]

[The Setup]

Sitting in the parking lot of a Burger King in Dalton last August, wishing I could enjoy the beautiful fall weather, I knew I would be back. I knew that one day, I would ride by that spot and begin the final, unknown (to me) stretches of this blindingly sadistic route.

Four months prior to that, I stopped much shorter on the route when my ride partner, Kinzer, developed a very bad knee injury. At the time, I had relatively good fitness and, although the course is incredibly challenging, I felt like I was able to suffer through and would have been fine otherwise. Perhaps this [inflated?] sense of self contributed to me hardly riding at all during the intervening months, and when combined with bad weather fortunes, conspired to tear me down to a broken, ripped, shell of a man, force-feeding himself a croissan’wich™. Continue reading TransNorthGeorgia [Finished]

TNGA [Redo]

In April I made an attempt at riding the TransNorthGeorgia mountain bike route. The ride was cut short on the second day after only covering about a third of the distance. The big take-away at the time was the the route was extremely vertical and required excellent physical shape and proper gear tuning/fitting to complete.

I made the decision shortly after coming back from the bailout that I would sign up for the official race, nearly four months away at that point, and complete the ride from the start.

The [not] Prep

I felt good after that first attempt, probably because I was coming off some good fitness from riding a lot earlier in the season, so even though I had experienced what the route could dish out, I took a rather lackadaisical approach to training any further… that is to say, I didn’t. Continue reading TNGA [Redo]

TransNorthGeorgia Day 2 [Unfinished]

Waking up this morning was the driest I’ve been at a campsite in a long time. A quick cup of coffee, a tube of jerky and a refill of the water bottles in the creek and we were on our way up to Tray Gap.

Within ten minutes of starting the day, I had already convinced myself three times over that not riding this stretch the previous night was the right call.

Roads like these...It ended up taking us another 3 and a half hours to make it to the place where I’d planned on camping while doing our ride planning. Continue reading TransNorthGeorgia Day 2 [Unfinished]