Alan Bell

Happy Birthday Steve Edwards Challenge

50,000 feet of elevation gain in 50 days
The basic run was 2500 feet door to door in 22 miles.
Fall 2010

A simple plan:
Ride up hill as much as humanly possible.

When Lisa mentioned the idea of a Birthday Challenge in honor of Steve I knew I wanted to do this. This represents my first ever attempt at anything so intense but it has been worth it. I thought I would put 5000 feet of climbing on my mountain bike a week and then do another 5000 in over each weekend. The first too weeks went well. I rode two days a week getting up at 530am to do the rides before work. And then doing extra climbs on each weekend.

The Canell Meadows Plunge
One of my weekend excursions was up to Kernville where I road from Sherman pass to Kervnille. This was mostly down hill but I managed to add an additional 1500 feet of climbing into the 30 mile ride by doing a section as a loop. Another great climbing loop I found to do on the weekend is the Mt Pinos loop. If you ride up the single track you can put almost 3000 feet of climbing under your belt. I did this ride on several occasions. Once I was able to get a friend to come along. Then tragedy struck. I fell off my bike in a pretty hard way. Broke a couple of ribs and did something nasty to my shoulder. At least it was fun when it happened.

I have had to change my challenge mid stream but I am okay with that, because I learned something here that I almost forgot. I started to remember what it feels like to be an athlete again. Over the past 8 weeks my ( I made some changes before
the challenge) I have totally changed my eating habits and started whatching the amount of food I put into my body. I started this thing out at 190 lbs. I now way 177. I plan to slowly make it to 165 and then maintain that through riding and eating right. So at the moment I owe this challenge about 35000 feet of climbing and 12 more lbs of weight loss.

Happy Birthday Steve! You are an inspiration to me. Thanks for that!