#lt100 #leadville100 #livestrong I came across this great video after following the Leadville 100 on TweetDeck yesterday. I was exploring
@fatcyclist ‘s blog: www.fatcyclist.com (Elden crashed out of Leadville 100 but is OK) when I came across this post and fantastic video!
Elden’s description from another blog post Tibble Fork: The Best Place in the World:
Joy
At this moment, you could turn around and go down the way you came up. I’ve done this dozens of times. Or you can go down the other side, down South Fork of Deer Creek trail, which is the most unimaginative name for a trail ever. Instead of using this clinical name, we call the trail “Joy.”You’d have to ride this trail to really understand why it’s called Joy. It’s a little like being in that scene in Return of the Jedi where Luke and Leia are being chased through the forest on their motorcycle-esque landspeeders. Except it’s real, and it’s downhill, and the trails are banked to perfection, and you’re threading through the aspen and evergreen trees knowing — but not caring — that if you fall right now you will wrap around one of them, and then there’s a little jump on the side of the trail (you need to know to watch for it), and you’re pedaling in your big ring, not quite spun out but oh-so-close and then you’re suddenly in sagebrush, still flying, and the trail’s banked just where it needs to be so that you can just open it up on your mountain bike like nowhere else in the world.
And then it’s over. It ends at a little campground, where everyone regroups and tries to describe what just happened. But it always comes out just giggles and big sloppy grins to match.
Joy is the only trail that has ever brought tears to my eyes. It is perfect.
Another video on Lance’s 2009 Leadville 100 win.