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Author Archives: slowpoke2320


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Seeking Unconventional Women: The Gorgeous Ladies of Enduro

The following is reposted from State College Laser Cat and resident #femdurobro, Lindsay Hall-Stec. You can read more about her adventures at http://trainingonaprayer.blogspot.com/.

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“The best rivalries are not about the rival. They’re about the insecurities that your rival brings out in you…” – Rogelio from “Jane the Virgin”

GLOE

When I first read Gloria Liu’s Bicycle magazine article titled “That Time I Went Full Enduro” a few weeks ago, it was hard to get through it without my heart racing and my eyes welling up with tears. I had developed a bit of a girl crush on Gloria a year or so before, when I discovered the value of reading bike and gear reviews from a real person who I’d encountered in real life and whose riding style and terrain was close to my own. Gloria’s opinions held much more weight than any random woman in Colorado, California, or the UK talking about howwell (or not) bikes and gear performed. When she won both the enduro stage and overall enduro classification at the Tran-Sylvania Epic this year, I was stoked…and jealous, but knowing that it wasn’t my time yet, I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather see it go to.

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The Laurel Classic

By Lindsay, aka State College Laser Cat

This weekend turned out to be an unexpected race weekend for me. This makes the second summer in a row where I’m not quite ready to give up on my late-summer activities, but I know that the ‘cross season transition is coming up, so I just jump into a random race to get it over with. Last year I was working really hard on my gravel climbing late in the summer, so I decided to cap that off with the sudden decision to do a gravel race that was pretty darn flat and favored pack riding. The past few weeks I’ve been working on getting familiar with the stages of the Transylvania Epic with special focus on the enduro segments to prepare for my big 2017 goal, but  last weekend I decided to do a 22-mile climbing-heavy mountain bike race on terrain that I know nothing about. Basically, I say to myself, “Well, I’ve been working really hard and improving on this thing, so I’m totally ready to compete against other people, except let’s find a version that doesn’t really favor the aspects that I’ve been working on.”

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Rothrock TrailMix: So I Didn’t DNF

by Lindsay Hall-Stec (State College Laser Cat)

This past weekend I accomplished a goal that had eluded me for two years: I finished the long course at the Rothrock TrailMix. A couple of qualifications to this are that a) A bridge was out on the road up to the John Wert trail, which is the most technical trail of the traditional long course, which adds an extra “ain’t nobody got time for this” aspect with its placement near the end of the deceptively hard 36 mile course. So having not included the John Wert trail, I still don’t feel like I’ve finished the *real* long course. b) Implicit in my goal of finishing was that finishing meant something closer to the five hour mark than the six hour mark and not just simple dragging my blown-out body through the length of the course before the point that the race staff kicked me off of it. Continue reading →