St. Patrick's Day Muddy Massacre at Berryman

I've had pretty good luck with the Berryman trail over the past couple months.  I decided to try again today since I was off work and the trails here were muddy.  It takes 90 minutes from my door until I pull into the Brazil Creek parking lot.  I was met with...nobody.  Notta.  Not a single car or person in the lot.  Ah, the trails all to myself!

What else did I have to myself?  Water.  And mud.  Lots of it.  Seems that it rained a LOT there this morning.  Ug.  Anyone that knows me knows that I hate mud and riding in it.  But I brushed off my concerns because DAMMIT I needed a good day on the bike.

Another thing people might know about me is that I usually forget something when I go riding.  Sometimes it's not important.  Other times?  Kinda important.  Today, it was Gu.  Energy gels.  Berryman takes more than a couple hours of pretty intense effort and this old body needs some kind of get-up-and-go along the way.  I had an epiphany at the Sullivan gas station on the way...Skittles.  I just thought they would be easy to reach in my jersey pocket and gobble up as-needed.  Oh, they were easy to grab.  But harder to eat.  Jesus in a rowboat, those things were chewy and took forever to swallow.  Not to mention that they just flat out don't cut it as a substitute for energy gels.  And now there are a bunch of them stuck in my jersey pocket.

Remember how I said I brushed off my concerns about the wet trails?  About 100 feet into the trail, my concerns were front and center.  Many sections of the trail were flowing like the Meramec river.  And about the counter-clockwise direction...I don't like it much.  Maybe I would have liked it more if I wasn't simultaneously choking on chewy Skittles and getting sprayed in my eyes with water from the trail.  I don't know, it just wasn't a great ride.

I was happy to see that Strava thought this was a "Historic" effort.  It felt historic to me.  I was suffering and may have blurted out some swear words to the squirrels and birds as I closed in on the final miles.  I may go back to riding the other direction, at least I have grown a bit more familiar with that way.  I will definitely go back to Vanilla Bean Gu.