Quick Moab Post and Short KTR Recap

I've spent the better part of the past 10 days living outside. The weather has been amazingly cool for this time of year. I've been mostly in or near Moab. It started out with a very successful ride of the Kokopelli Trail last Saturday, then a 3 day float down the Green River, and then back on the bike putting in 3-6 hours a day for the past several days. I've also been trying to mix in some running to maintain as much running fitness as possible.

More about Kokopelli: I didn't know what to expect from this ride except that it would be hard. It did not disappoint. As far as the route was concerned it was harder than I imagined, but physically my body handled it better than I expected. I finished a little under 18 hours, but never once really felt like I pushed much at all. I ran out of water about 45 minutes before Salt Creek which really sucked but other than that it was a very good ride. I had about 3.5 hours of stopped time so my actual ride time was only about 14.5 hours - much faster than I expected to be able to ride such a rugged route. Maybe one of these years I'll actually ride this more as a race to see how fast I can go. Probably the best thing about this ride was that I got to ride with Dave C. and/or Fred W. for more than half of the race. It was so nice to have the company of people who had done the race before. Going into the ride I was a little concerned about route finding but I was latched onto Dave or Fred most of the time so it was never really an issue.

This week I am off to the Capitol Reef / San Rafael Swell area to do more riding. I'll probably put together a 3 or 4 day loop later in the week somewhere down that way and then by the end of the weekend I'll be heading up to Salt Lake to attend to final details before beginning my ride north to the Canadian border. The GDR is going to be so damn hard but I feel so much more prepared for it now then I was just a month ago. June 20th isn't that far away now. I can't wait.