Morels, Beeftrail Intervals,& Lucky Ballers

It looks as though our window for good weather is going to be shut on us rather abruptly.  We had a mostly sunny day yesterday in Montana and everyone seemed to have Spring fever as I heard lots of lawn mowers singing their throttled odes to long blades everywhere.  Sure enough we are back to liquid sunshine today with more forecasted for the remainder of the week.

The upside to this rain is that not only do we have mushrooms growing throughout our lawn, but we have some delicacy mushrooms growing too!  I noticed a few morel mushrooms growing along the west side of our garage where we planted a raised flower bed last year.  There must have been some mushroom spores on the bark we laid down because we have several morel mushrooms growing there (and more popping up through the bark).  It is too bad that neither the wifer or I are morel fans...if anyone wants some homegrown shrooms, come on over and harvest...apparently they are good cut length wise and sauteed in butter (Thank Toad for the beta).

It was such a nice day yesterday that I decided to more or less make it miserable by getting on the road bike and doing repeats on Beeftrail Road (not to be confused with Beefcake).  This hill is about 2 miles long and gains about 550 ft over that distance.  So I rode our leisurely to the foot of the hill and then proceeded to try and convince myself this is good training as the legs started to push the gears...I quickly started to hit my lactate threshold and tried to hold there for the next 10 minutes until cresting the hill...point the bike downhill, let 'er rip (can hit around 40 mph without having to pedal much on the way down)...then turn bike around and go back up...So 5 repeats later, my legs were screaming for mercy and it was time to head home.  The best part of the ride was trying to see what max speed I could hit on the steepest part of the downhill on Beeftrail - yesterday the legs managed to get the skinny tires rolling at 46 mph.  I will probably take it somewhat easy the remainder of the week so the legs are not completely hammered for the http://www.knobbytireseries.com/925poster.pdf this weekend.  I am hoping to gauge just where the legs are during this 8 hr race on Saturday.  I am going to use this as a barometer for the Puff, but realistically it will just be a longgggg training ride - just hoping to be able to ride and get some mileage in on the fatty tire singlespeed.

Our outdoor volleyball league starts today - our team (Lucky Ballers) will play each Wed in a nice sandy pit.  It mostly means it is a good excuse to get out of the house in the middle of the week and swill a few bottled PBR's and maybe mix in some shots of Jaeger (our friends Abe & Amanda would be proud!)  This is about the only time PBR enters my lexicon of beer intake but it has now more or less turned into tradition (ok so it is more less just Brian and I having a few adult beverages but hey, traditions have to start somewhere).