Spent the last few days in North Carolina on a mini-cycling trip. 5 of us total on the trip....goal was to log a bunch of miles and get some serious climbing in the legs. Mission accomplished.....

Drove down last Thursday with one other guy....about 13 hours total, but a totlally easy drive. We had everyone's bikes with us and the other guys flew in. Very scenic drive....

Friday was just a light warm-up day since Saturday we were scheduled to do the Beech Mountain Metric ride. So we did ~50 miles and 4500 feet of climbing. Went from the cabin we stayed in, up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and back. A few sustained climbs but nothing too crazy. Weather was iffy and we got pretty wet on the way back, but it was a gorgeous. Saturday was the Beech Mountain Metric....62 miles and 7K feet of climbing and some seriously steep stuff.....last climb up Beech was 1500 feet in 3 miles. Final 5K averaged 12.5%.....there was a nother nutpunch climb about 2/3 of the way in called Stone Mountain. Brutal.....but I got to take it a bit easy since my college roomie came up form Charlotte to do the ride. He isn't quite as strong as the guys I was there with and I rode with him the whole day. Weather was perfect and it was great riding with him. However, I started having shifting / FD issues about halfway through the ride. Lots of chain rub on the FD and problems throwing the chain over the big ring or it dropping coming down....the bike is Di2, so it wasn't a shifting issue (although I thought it was at first). Got it functional enough that I could use most of the gears except the 12-16 cogs when I was in the big ring. Since most of the ride left was climbing and my buddy wasn't a great descender, this was serviceable. The last climb up Beech was a ballbuster, though....I was in my 34x28 and grinding for everything I had.

Get back to the cabin and start working on the bike....long story short, the problem is not the shifting, it is my BB. Dumb-ass pressfit design on my Venge has been a problem for awhile. I could literally just put the bearing in the BB by hand and it creaked like a mofo. LBS switched it over to a Wheels Manufacturing BB that was kinda similar to the old Mavic BB design in that it threaded togher from both sides of the BB shell to get it snug. Also requires special wrences to tighten and the fooker had come loose. There was about a .5MM of play in the BB, but it was enough for it to slide back and forth in the frame, causing the different shifting issues. Local Specialized shop did not have the tools to tighten it....crap. In order to keep riding, I ended up renting a bike from them....Specialized Tarmac w/ road discs. Was a size up form my Venge, but had a short stem so it was OK.

Next day, we set off for another 50 miles and 4K feet of climbing, but the weather was schitt. Raining the whole time, etc. Still pretty warm (low-60's) so it wasn't too bad. We decided to ride George's Gap again from the day before....it was an awesome climb with a great twisty descent. From there were gonna loop back over to the Blue Ridge and back home....kind of a figure 8 loop. The weather and the route were perfect for me on the tarmic w/ discs. Lemme tell you....they were awesome. I could brake so much later coming into a turn and not worry about breaking traction on the tires. More power, more modulation and zero issues with the wet. These things were the schitt!! But when we got to the middle part of the loop, a couple guys were headed back to the cabin and I went with them. Would have liked to do the whole ride, but I was doing pizza on the grill for everyone that night (nod to gurb) and needed to get some things going for that. So that day was 33 miles and 2250 ft of climbing.

The last day we drove down to Marion, NC and tackled Mt. Mitchell. Wow....tough, but gorgeous climb. 56 miles total ride, but really 28 miles of climbing and 28 miles of descent. So we eneded up climbing 7K feet in 28 miles. I had come into the trip a little low on my mileage this year as I have been working on my run all winter. I was paying for it the first few days as my buddies were ahead of me on the climbs. I got dropped when we started the ascent to Mitchell, but managed to claw my way back to them about halfway up. From there, we got on the Blue Ridge to head towards Mitchell and I hung with them for a bit and even managed a few surges....but then I dropped back a bit.....and then I blew up. Still had 3K feet to climb and I was toast! Made for a long, slow crawl up to Mitchell. To make matters worse, this bike only had a 36 front ring, so I was in a 36x28 instead of my 34x28. Ugh. But we all regrouped up top and then me and a buddy just BOMBED the descent. He ways about 40 lbs more than me, so I couldn't pull much, but we were flying. The best part was once we got off the Blue Ridge and onto Hwy 80....oh man, what a descent. Twisty, turny but not so technical that you couldn't just let it rip. I was literally laughing out loud during one little twisty section it was so fun.

And that ended the trip....had dinner that night at the Pedlain' Pig BBQ and drove hoome yesterday. About 200 miles and 20K feet of climbing across 4 days....not too shabby!