Ramble On

Last night my wife Jenny and I went to see Van Halen at the Wells Fargo arena in Philadelphia.  This is the fourth (or fifth?) time I'm seen Van Halen over the past twenty some years and Eddie rocked this one better than ever.  Just awesome.  And with David Lee Roth fronting the band again...even better.  The opening act was Kool and the Gang.  Yeah, I know...."wha?"  But to me it makes sense.  Still odd, but makes sense.  Three other friends scored tickets as well and they all said the same thing, "my wife is totally excited about Kool and the Gang".  Kool and the Gang is pretty cool no matter what music you like so this was a win win.  Good night out.

Discovering Iron Hill
So what does this have to do with mountain biking?  Well, I used the late night out as an excuse to burn a vacation day on Tuesday and do a little mountain biking.  The plan was to learn the 2011 mountain bike race course at Iron Hill Park in Newark, DE in hopes that the 2012 race course would be similar and give me a little experience.  Problem is I had never ridden any of the trails so I would need to navigate myself around with a GPS map of the race course that I found on the internet.  The last few times I did something like this (learn a new trail system) it was a pain for a couple reasons.

1. I am using an iPhone as my GPS tracking device.  It's cold weather season so I am wearing long fingered gloves and every time I stop to check the map I have to take off one of my gloves to navigate the touch screen.
2. I don't have a handlebar mount for my iPhone so I have to stop and pull it out of my pocket.

Unfortunately I only solved for the first issue for the ride today and the ride today was yet another reminder that getting the GPS on the bars will be a huge help.

Here is the GPS course I was following for my ride today:

Iron Hill MASS Race Course 2011 at EveryTrail


Here's the course I plotted as I got lost every five minutes (need that bar mount!).  I ended up cutting a tire after 1 1/2 laps so I will need to finish this discovery another day - I had a few wrong turns on the first lap.
Discovering Iron Hill at EveryTrail


Hi Tech Gloves
When I was in the bike shop the other day I spied a pair of riding gloves that had a conductive patch sewn into the index finger of each hand - specifically for navigating touch screen mobile devices.  The pair I bought was made by Cannondale and the product name was simple "Classic Long Glove".  I paid $25.00 for the gloves.  They run small so I ended up buying a size XL and there still a bit small.  (I usually where size Large).  While the gloves worked great for navigating the touch screen I didn't like them from a comfort standpoint.  They had stitching on the top across the knuckles in just the wrong spot and it was very uncomfortable.  I think there may have been a defect in the left glove because the stitching looked bigger and it was only uncomfortable on the left hand.  These are also the first pair of biking gloves that didn't have a velcro strap to tighten at the wrist and, consequently, they kept riding up toward my palm.  Not good.  And finally, by the end of the ride the stitching that held the conductive fabric on the right finger had come undone and was flapping loose on one side.  So, in my opinion, epic fail on the Cannondale gloves.  Good idea poorly executed I guess.  Here's a graphic and link for the gloves from the Cannondale website.  I would post a photo of mine but they are getting washed.  They were on a gnarly ride...dude.

Cannondale Classic Long Gloves