Our Practice Honeymoon

...we did pretty well. I think we're ready for our real honeymoon now, we just have to pick a date and a place. Maybe my riding legs will be back by then!!

Eddie and I got into Black Mountain late on Saturday, with just enough time for a short road ride. It turned out there was a big Halloween party at the (awful) hotel we stayed at (Monte Vista--don't ever stay there) and we got a total of 2 hours of sleep Saturday night. The plan was to ride the ORAMM route on Sunday, but with 2 hours of sleep and my lack of fitness (after pretty much 4 weeks of little riding and 2 weeks of no riding) the plan changed a bit. We ended up riding Kitzuma and Heartbreak Ridge---the uphills were tough to say the least. Riding my SS up in Pisgah has to be the stupidest idea ever...especially when I'm out of shape. It convinced me that I need to build a geared bike up again. The descents were hair-raising fun. There was at least 4 inches of leaves covering the 12" wide singletrack, hiding the million off camber roots underneath. Luckily there were no spectacular crashes--but I came close a few times!!









We decided to find a quieter hotel in Asheville on Saturday night so we could get some much needed sleep. Today we slept in a bit and did a nice road ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I needed to ride a bike with gears, even though I really wanted to check out Bent Creek. The fall colors along the BRP were amazing. Our ride was basically 2 hours of climbing, and 30 min. of descending to get back to the car.









Good times!

New things

I decided to change up my blog with the "new" beta-blogger, it's a little easier to use, but i lost my old header that Mallie designed. She was going to update it anyway, with a fresh new look and different colors! Sorry if I screwed anything up Mallie...

There has been a lot of stuff going on this week! In the work/school arena, I've decided to add Sports Nutrition "coaching" to my list of 55nine Performance services. Stay tuned to our site, there will be more on that in the next couple months.

Also, I got a new road bike. Actually, it's the Litespeed Ghisallo that Eddie couldn't sell.


We decided that I would keep this one and sell my Orbea, which we believe there will be more of a market for.

We're leaving tomorrow morning for our temporary honeymoon. We will be enjoying a weekend of mountain biking in our favorite place...PISGAH!! The plan is to ride the ORAMM route tomorrow. I will take lots of pics. Since I haven't ridden more than 2x in the past 2 weeks, I'm sure I will want the breaks...it will be the Unit 2-9's first trip to the big Pisgah Forest too--eeeek.

I will now leave you with some of Andrew Kornylak's awesome photos that he took at our wedding. To order your own print, go here.

Some of my favorites..........

Thanks to Gretchen for these pics. Check the gallery for the new pics!

It's over

The wedding is over, and I am now a married woman! You can now call me Namrita (Kumar) O'Dea. Here is a pic of my new hubby and I enjoying the reception. I think I can honestly say it was the best day of my life. We were fortunate to be together and surrounded by our closest friends and family.



There are many more pictures in our guest's gallery. If you have some to upload, please email me and I will give you the login information.

I can't think of a better way to start out my 30's. Yes, I'm officially old as today is my birthday!

Scouting pics

Only one flat, one bee-sting, a little rain, a brazilian scratches, lots of big tire grabbing obstacles, hardly any real trail, way too much bushwacking. Not the best route, but any day in the woods is a good day.

This is how it started out

















A brief respite...can ride for a bit





















Eddie would make a good adventure racer ;)


















Hmm, interesting discovery


















Woohoo, no big rocks or deadfall in my way, for a few minutes






















We found a waterfall, though you can't really see it in the pic. I posted this one for me, this cute boy will be my husband next week :-)

















Only one flat for the day, it was mine, but it's starting to rain so Eddie graciously volunteers (again) to change it..a lot more quickly than I would have. Thanks baby (again).

















We made it out of the woods..not too far from the car. We were pretty close on our nav this time. It helped to have a map to use with the compass!! Duh.


















P.S. The new Ride424 jerseys are awesome!! They do run small, but the material is so soft and comfy. I think I will have to get some matching shorts now.

Updates

The last week just flew by...School has been keeping me busy. While I like it and all, I can't wait to actually get into some Sports Nutrition stuff (and research) next year. I just got my subscription to the Sports Nutrition Clinic and I'm going to start using it ASAP. I will report back on how I like it.

Lucky me, I am taking the day off today to give myself a break and Eddie and I are going to go exploring again...we'll use our new Adeo Motion Lingo device and hopefully have a good route mapped out soon. I'm going to make sure we take a map and compass this time :) I'll bring a camera too so I can post some shots of the area.

Other than that...I can't believe that I will be married in less than two weeks. We got our marriage license yesterday and that was so crazy. Things are coming together for the actual wedding, though we still have a ton of loose ends to tie up. We are planning to do a road ride in the early morning before the wedding since we are getting married pretty much on the Six-Gap route in the North GA mountains..it will be beautiful with the fall colors. We are also fortunate to have our friend Andrew Kornylak who is an amazing photographer shoot the entire day's events. One of my college friends is coming into town early from Boulder, CO to play with her bluegrass band here in Atlanta tomorrow night. I'm really looking forward to it, I don't get out much anymore :) Actually, I will be 30 in two weeks also...getting old!

Ride424.com and the race this weekend

I'm not racing, or supporting, but I was going to go out and cheer my friend Danielle on, and drink beer, watch some good mtb racing, etc. etc. However, plans have changed. Unfortunately, Danielle will not be coming to the race due to an IT band injury (BOO). Also, for some reason the fact that I have midterms next week kind of slipped my mind, duh. So, I will be doing some local rides, studying and writing A LOT, and hopefully getting out to Conyers for a beer Saturday night...hopefully.

In case you haven't heard, there will be live updates from the race, from pros as well as the weekend warriors, check www.ride424.com for details! While you're there, do some race reviews on the good and bad races you did this year.

Good luck to everyone racing this weekend. I might be out there Friday for a morning ride on my sweet green machine before Atlanta traffic gets ugly.

Speaking of green, check out the new shirt I just ordered from Twin Six. I special ordered it in the girly version.

Freestyle Navigation

Eddie and I went on a recon mission of a certain area yesterday, to scout out parts for a potential route for a potential event in the making. But, we didn't have any maps on us, nor did we have any lights. We did have a bunch of gu's, a space blanket, a lighter, and iodine tabs though. We started our ride around 1:30pm, and it's starting to get dark around 7pm in the woods now, not to mention cold. The plan was to get about 4 hours in and to ride some new stuff. We had one compass but that's it, and we didn't break it out until we were already lost. Without a map, it didn't do us a ton of good.

About 40 minutes into the ride we turned off the main gravel road in hopes of discovering some sweet singletrack or even B-roads. Well, we found it alright--though some of it was really overgrown with briars waiting to shred your skin, or trees fallen over the trail (too big to hop over), and some of it was so steep that not only did I not want to ride (or walk) up it, I didn't want to ride (or walk) down it!! At one point in the ride, some nice open trail points downhill, for a ways, and Eddie says to me, "If we go down this, it's going to be a real committment". Since we had only been out 1.5 hours I said, ok, let's go for it (though I knew I didn't want to have to backtrack this same route). I was planning on about a 4 hour ride since the doggies were waiting for us in the car.

Somewhere between that point and another hour or two later, after several dead ends, we found ourselves in the woods at an intersection of what used to be two overgrown road beds...one appeared to be marked with pink ribbon as if it was going to be a real trail some day. I had been navigating us back North, by keeping the sun to the west...but apparently Eddie had a different idea. After going in circles all over this one mountain I started getting nervous and a little frustrated. Eddie plops down and starts creating a map made of sticks on the ground to show me where he thought we were. Of course, I didn't have time to look at stick maps..I reiterated how stupid it was of us to go out into the middle of nowhere without a map or even a light. We decided that it would be best to follow the pink ribbon trail in the same direction until it hit something...anything...before the sun started to go down.

Eventually we found our way to a main road and I was completely turned around. Apparently we had to go SOUTH, not NORTH as I had been thinking all this time. (This is why I should never be the navigator! Though I am better with a map, than without, I promise). Thank goodness Eddie's method of freestyle navigation still got us back where we needed to be. At that point, I would take several miles of climbing on a gravel road over being stuck in the woods anyday. Eddie was using a new GPS system and reported to me that by climbing this gravel road we had actually raised our average speed for the day! That's how much bike-whacking we did through the woods. We arrived at our car safe and sound almost 5 hours after we departed. It was a happy reunion with the dogs, and then we returned to Josh's house to get cleaned up and got a bite to eat. As we drank a beer at the Crimson Moon Cafe, we laughed about the days events, and how I wasn't a big fan of Eddie's way of freestyle navigating. Good times.

It really was a great weekend--relaxing, great riding, and the best company. Thanks to Eddie's coach Josh for letting us stay up there again. Now we both REALLY want to buy a place in the mountains. We're going to figure out how to make it happen next year.