Course Selection Last year I went to SBT GRVL with the All Bodies on Bikes team. I’d done Moab Rocks as my very first mountain bike stage race in the Spring and was taking on my first gravel race. I did the blue course which is a 100 miles long. Such a great day on […]
Author: Moniera
SBT GRVL 2023
How much further can I go?
My journey home from Torrey UT in the Spring was 1200 miles and would take 18 hours for someone who would drive straight through. I need 100 stops – at least! – not just for the bathroom, but for some fresh air and a little bit of movement so I can stay alert behind the […]
Books and all they carry between their pages
I have a thing about books! My father was a book man, and as Daddy’s little Princess, I am still strongly influenced by my father who died 42 years ago. He was a book man, and I still have a book thing – reading books and writing books. He was a pen man so I […]
What is time?
After spending a week together for the race, we all went our separate ways. My friends headed home, and I headed over to a campground in Moab where I’d rented a little cabin for the next 6 nights. The cabin was tiny, with not even enough space to unroll my yoga mat. There was a […]
Learning about racing
I felt so good heading to Moab: bolstered by the confidence of almost 16 months of training and I’d done this race last year so had an idea what to expect. Last year it was my first race experience and I went in blind on the course, on riding in Moab, on racing – it […]
Road trip rambles
These are scribbles from some of the pages of my journals as captured from the road. I drove down to Moab last month to go and race Moab Rocks – a 3-day mountain bike stage race, to see my friends and to have spend some time exploring in the desert. A bumpy start This morning […]
This was my brother
His name was Ismail, and would have turned 60 next month, but he died 40 years ago today in motorbike accident. 40 years? He has been gone twice as long as he was here. He had played well in a rugby match a few days earlier, and limped proudly with some minor injury that he […]
Easter memories
I wrote this a number of years ago, but it is still fitting. The memories still make me smile. Coming home with a bag of hot cross buns from the grocery store. I bit into one, and frowned as the bland, dry mass moved around my mouth. Of course I compared it to the hot cross buns […]
The stages of racing
The pre-race crazy stage I’m less than two weeks out from racing Moab Rocks for the second – and final – time. The current conversation in my head goes something like this. How can I work so hard and still be so shit – maybe I didn’t work hard enough – ugh – I should […]
Ma
Last week, my grandmother would have been 111 years old had she still been around. My father called her Ma, so we did too. I think she passed away in 1988 or 1989, so would have been in her late 70’s. I never knew my grandmother except as an old, old woman. Even my earliest […]