With the unbearable summer heat upon us, most of the boys are getting lazy to get up to a sweltering morning (at 5am at that!) to ride under the even more unbearable sun. But we’re not about to retire for the season just yet. The solution? Ride at night what else?
I’ve done quite a few night rides already but mostly because it just so happens that we reach nightfall due to a rather long ride. And some 12hr or 24 hour races. But this is the first where instead of meeting up at 6am to ride, we actually met up at around 6pm.
La Mesa was the perfect venue for a night ride, primarily for several reasons –
- Safety: it’s a closed area, so minimal chance of encountering and ‘unwanted elements’
- Support: your entrance fee gets you a ranger to accompany you during the ride (1 for every 5 riders)
- More Support: aside from your guides, the La Mesa folks also have a pick-up traversing the fire road around the park. So if any emergency arises, you can be easily brought out of the park
- Smoooooth Trails: unlike our usual trails where we basically ride fire roads or foot paths, the La Mesa singletracks were built for mountain biking
For night rides, La Mesa requires a minimum number of riders. You need at least 30 bike addicts paying 200 each (or 20 paying 400 each, 10 at 600 . . .).
Ride starts with the usual gear check, with the additional work to prepare our night lights. For a night ride, you’d want at least 100 lumens shining the way. I was hoping to rely on my Princeton Tec Headlamp (at 70 lumens) which we had bought for our Nepal trip. Just to be sure I had borrowed another lamp (150 lumens) which I just duct taped to my helmet. LED lamps offer a broader coverage, but at a shorter range. This becomes pretty glaring when you lift your head up a bit, and the LED light just seems to dissolve in the darkness. Tilt a little bit down again and a couple of meters infront of your bike shines brightly again. LED doesn’t eat up a lot of power also, so you run less risk of losing your light in the middle of a 4-5 hour night ride.
I figure I also want other decorative lights on my next night ride (like blinking lights on my wheels, or those other stuff you see at rave parties . . . hey it’s a Saturday night anyway!)
I’ve ridden La Mesa several times already, but the rush was so much different at night. Riders usually look for that ‘Flow’ – that feeling that all conscious actions dissolve and you ride on pure instinct,one with the bike, one with the trail. Maybe it’s the tunnel vision of seeing just a couple of meters ahead, maybe it’s the encompassing darkness, maybe it’s the fear of being left all alone in the pitch darkness … but that Flow was definitely there.
Somehow I just kept my momentum all across from sudden drops to sudden ascents . . . it felt great, it felt fast . . . until the rational mind kicked and said, ’stop, your body is tired!’
At the middle of the ride, someone took a nasty spill. No major injuries fortunately, but she was quite shaken up, with a sore shoulder. Good thing the park rangers had a pick-up waiting at one of the rest stops. We loaded her and her bike on the pick-up to recover back at home base while the rest of us pushed on (reminiscent of those scenes from The Pacific).
Onward we went to the final stretch of single track going down to the lake. I didn’t want to miss this as I knew I could get a good shot down there. Nice and smooth ride down until a couple of loose branches caught my handlebar and my I face planted down on the ground, cursing in the darkness (not so much because of the pain, though it was painful, but because of my bruised ego – no I shouldn’t have crashed, I was a veteran rider). But crash I did and I think my helmet hit the ground pretty hard. Some scratches on my cheek, knees, shoulders, but otherwise I was fortunate that the ground was quite soft.
After a couple of pagmumuni-muni moments, we rode on back to homebase. We opted to ride mostly ride roads this time, since we’re all pretty tired. The line was pretty stretched this time, as all of us were simply thinking of getting back as fast as possible so we can finally rest easy. No more pitstops this time folks, just a final dash for home . . .
Where boxes of Shakeys Pizza was waiting for us! Yes, made sure to call Shakeys before our ride so that they’d deliver our pizza just in time. Was a bit of a challenge explaining to them where the La Mesa Nature Reserve was (not the Eco Park mind you), but hey, they got there! Kudos to Shakes customer service! Talagang kahit saan makaka-deliver. In since we had the Shakeys Pizzamatic card, that’s buy 1 take 1 folks! 8 boxes! And a couple of liters of Coke and Poweraide from our kind friend Toots.
Lots of the riders were wondering why we didn’t do night rides more often! Well, we got part 2 planned, and I’ve already bought some equipment to help me next time
- Rudy Project Yellow lens for my Zyon. Darkness and dust just doesn’t do well for my eyes.
- additional 200 lumens LED light
Now I just need to look for those neon whatever rave party accessories and we’re good to party again, La Mesa Coke Zero style!
