Full suspension road ride

Chris, Bob, & I tried to do a mtb ride yesterday thinking that if we rode early enough the ground would still be frozen.
We were on our bikes rolling into the trails at 7:00am, but it was immediately clear that it had not gotten cold enough to freeze anything overnight.

The entrance trail was very sloppy. This was a big bummer, but since we were already out on our bikes we turned off onto the road and put in 2.5 hours of road riding on our mountain bikes. My new Fuel EX9 has the pop-lock control on the bar that allows you to lock out all of the suspension on the fly. This will be great for races like the Shenandoah 100 that have a fair amount of road and hard-packed sections. Fully locked out the bike did very well on the road, moving efficiently up the climbs and handling some tight hairpin descents confidently.

We did a nice tour of the Ellicott City hills, Oella, New Cut, College, & Beechwood. We rode the hills at a solid pace for a good tempo workout. That area is great for training rides.

When we returned to the cars our bikes were clean & we felt good about sparing the trails more misery. They'll need a good stretch of warm, dry weather to dry up. Thankfully, we didn't see any other riders heading in.