I have been fairly lazy, at least with my lunchtime workouts and bike commuting.  I probably averaged less than one ride to work a week.  I ran at lunch once.  I have been only mildly active on the weekends.  I put on 5 lbs in the month.  Bad news.  Seriously bad news.  I will have to do something to get in shape for speed skating season.

So what all did I do?  I went fly fishing with the snow falling and the wind biting at my face.  It was like steelhead fishing back in Wisconsin and Michigan, except I only caught one 8 inch rainbow instead of a 15 lbs silver bullet steelhead.

I only took my Trek Fuel EX 8 mountain bike out once.  Katie and I went out to Marshall Mesa for an easy ride.  Except we were battling 20 mile winds.  Which was awesome…  I will write more about that tomorrow.

I rode in three cyclocross races.  Technically only one of them was in October, but that is acceptable as I collectively performed miserably at all of them.  The first, at the Louisville Rec center as part of the Boulder Cyclocross series, I was actually doing fairly well (probably somewhere in the top 15-20) before I crashed on the downhill immediately following the sandpit.  I went down hard on the turn and bent my derailleur hanger, of course I didn’t notice until my chain sucked behind my cassette and refused to be freed.  Alas.  The next race was the Valmont Bike Park Fest race where I continued my trend of falling.  Not only did I fall, but I fell three times.  And by falling I do not mean poor mounts, though I had plenty of those as well.  I went down twice in the loose dirt after the run-up and then once again when some guy bumped me into the tape.   I think I somehow managed to be the last person not to be lapped.  Finally I competed in the Boulder Cup.  I did not manage to avoid getting lapped; apparently I have a lot to learn about cyclocross, like that it helps to train…  At least my Jamis Supernova is performing well.

In pre-winter news, we had three different ski houses fall through.  If you know of anyone who needs two more (and a bulldog), let us know!

Oh, and it snowed 23 inches in two days; forty-eight later it was all but melted.  We’ll see what November brings.

Rainbow trout from an irrigation ditch

Who says ditches are boring.

One of my MBA classmates tipped me off on an irrigation ditch that was beaming with trout. Odd I thought, but certainly worthwhile exploring. So this morning, with my legs still burning from yesterday’s two hour speedskating session, I decided to go try out fishing in a ditch. I even managed to convince Katie to buy a license and come along, though unfortunately the temperature was already too warm for our bulldog Sherbert to join us.

I grabbed my 7.5′ Orvis Superfine 3-wt and we headed out with a quick stop for the license. Of course, as we were being lazy on a Sunday morning, it was already 10:45 by the time we parked. We wandered the ditch, stopping to watch the numerous spawning rainbow trout. It was decidedly odd seeing so many 12-18 inch trout in a shallow irrigation ditch. I threw a wide variety of nymphs and dry flies, but with no success; apparently with sex on the brain the rainbows wanted nothing to do with me. Without much (read any) action, Katie sat on the bank and enjoyed her book while basking in the sun.

Dejected, we eventually started to make our way back to the car when I spotted a small rainbow take something off of the surface. I had not seen any bugs coming off the water so I went to my surface standby, a 16 Adams. Sure enough, I had a take on my first drift! Katie looked up in shock; I am pretty sure she thinks that I never actually catch anything. After a short battle, I landed the fish and had a picture. While the fish was obviously not huge, I was content with catching the only active fish I had seen all day.