That Familiar Burn: Christmas come early

First off, a quick mention. I rejoined the runner's world on Wednesday when I decided to do one of the trail running races up here in Duluth. Basically a whole bunch of people get together and go race around a different trail each week. With a whopping entry fee of $1, I don't know how many I will be able to go to...
It was pretty fun though, I had not done a running race since cross country in high school. It was really entertaining to run full blast through some rough trail. Including running through a river multiple times. Overall I think there were over 80 people there, including most of the top runners in the area. I had absolutely no expectations of doing well and just did it to see what happened. I was not to far back in the end, just a couple of minutes. I think the course was 8.5 km and I had something just over 35 minutes for it.

Friday at the Ski Hut was a very good day. The energy was high in the shop due to the fact that the brand new multiple $10,000 ski edger was being brought to life for the first time. I guess that will make our life much much easier down in the shop. All I know is that the things inside look like a contraption out of Star Wars.
Well that was being put together by the Companies guy, Jimmy Johns decided that we deserved sample sandwiches and dropped of a very large box of them.
Shortly after that the usual knock on the deliver door came, and to my surprise (I was not sure if they would ever come) and delight our new cross bikes showed up.
For a while the Shop was a complete mess. Boxes, tools, people, bikes, skis, people, dogs everywhere. It was great.
I then proceeded to rip off what I needed from my old cross bike, take all my new parts, and throw the thing together as fast as I could so I could go for a bike ride. However I did also have to put my old bike back together, so those in combination took way too long. Eventually I got it all done and zipped home, got things adjusted and went pedaling. Not until 5:30 though...

I brought a blinky and ended up riding until 9. The moon was really bright and made the roads easy to see, not so much the trails.

I am quite please with the ride, it is significantly better than ye old Red Line. And it really wants to go fast. If you look closely you may notice it has SRAM, yes SRAM. It has SRAM because it was significantly cheap than even 105 set, it came from QBP as a cyclo-cross build kit, and Shimano take 2-4 weeks for delivery. This came next day. So far I am still a bit weirded out by the Double tap, but it is not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be...

Last night I got an email from Kangaroo Jack that told me about a nice long ride with lots of watts that he just did. Due to this, and the fact that my plan to race Chequamegon fell though I had the perfect riding plan for today. Go faster then Mr. Noonan. So that is what I did. I also bonked hard core, had I not come across a group of UMD riders coming home from Two Harboors I may have gotten hypothermia and died due to the cold rain that decided to come with 30 minutes left.