Tuesdays with Ken

The Tuesday Morning Ride (TMR) is Ken's ride.  He's been leading it, every summer-Tuesday at 6:30 AM, with very few absences, for more than 20 years. I've been along for the ride semi-regularly during my summer-break for about the last 15.  In view of his undying commitment to the Ride, it's only fair that this truly-terrible, jittery, jumpy (and, for my camera: nearly-fatal) video should feature Ken prominently.  Thing is, when you follow someone on a ride, especially if you follow them closely enough to be able to talk together on the climbs, with a camera mounted to your handlebars, you tend to take a lot of video of their hind-parts.

Most Tuesday Morning Rides go something like this: meet at the shop at 6:30.  Start riding by about 6:40.  Determine the destination in-route. Ride a bunch of empty trails. Stop and talk. Ride a bunch more trails. Stop and talk some more. Ride. Stop. Ride. Stop. Ride.  Get back home 3 or 4 hours later.  That being said... this video could pretty much have been shot during any TMR in the past 20 years.  As it so happens, I shot it this past Tuesday when Ken, Tim, and I rode Lockett Trust, Shultz, Fort Valley, Dogfood, Once-ler, Common Knowledge (aka: Spotted Owl, or new Orion Spring, or New Secret), Gnarly, The Pickle, Brookbank, Lower Oldham and Night Ranger.  The June-woods were both empty and dry.  It was, as is typically the case, a fine TMR, despite Tim's rather memorable OTB dismount on Pickle wherein he, "left [his] mojo back up there beside the trail somewhere."

However, because of the near-death experience of my camera (wherein the plastic-threaded tripod mount on my Sony Webbie HD camera completely sheared off the bottom of the camera, sending the camera flying as I was bombing down Oldham Trail... See the last few seconds of the video), this may very well be the first and last Tuesday Morning Ride video of all time, perhaps the only record in moving-pictures that will ever exist of this memorable Ride and all that it's meant to so many of us over the years... Compounding that sadness, for all of us TMR fans, we're also gonna have to deal with watching a few seconds of Ken's butt in order to relive it now and then whenever we watch this video.

It's a terrible video.  But, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!