Saturday was the Gorilla bike ride in Pittsburg, KS, which coincided with their town festival “Little Balkan Days” (anyone know what a balkan is??). Though not exactly ‘easy’, the gorilla ride is significantly easier than the Tornado Alley for serveral reasons. A- It’s a few miles shorter and B- it’s totally flat.

It was a nice 68 mile ride and went past such landmarks as Big Brutus and the mined land conservation areas and we passed through the Kansas towns of Weir, Scammon, West Mineral, McCune, and of course Pittsburg. My only real complaint about this ride compared to others I have done was that the rest stops seemed really far apart. Aside from that I thought it was great and I really enjoyed myself. My ‘rents also participated on the shorter route.

So that only leaves the Maple Leaf ride next month and my season of biking will be more or less over until next year!

Saturday was the big TA110 bike ride. The route was more or less the same as last year, equally as hard and equally as hot. There are a lot of these types of events, but this is probably one of the harder rides, in that the route is designed to be hilly.

Items of note include the fact that I was apparently in much better condition this year. I made it up every single hill, including the wall of death in Seneca and the never ending stairway to hell on OK-10 north of Grove (last year I had to push up at least 5 or 6 of the hills). Also I shaved an hour and 20 minutes off my previous ride time!

I figure the real reason I was so much faster this year was just that I was wearing spandex shorts. At first I was a bit nervous and awkward about sporting the banana hammock but once I was going I just enjoyed the fact that I didn’t have shorts bunching up everywhere. I kept feeling that people were staring at my junk but in retrospect they were probably just staring at the fact that I was doing the hardest bike ride around on a hybrid trek 7100 retrofitted with race tires.

All in all it was a great ride and I had a lot of fun. These bike events are a blast and I’m very much addicted to them…now I’m looking forward to the Gorilla Century in a couple months. I’m still not quite ready for a full century route, but I can feel it getting closer within reach!