So what do you do when you're stuck in Topeka, Kansas for three days with your mountain bike? You find a bike shop and hit them up for the word on the local trails, if there are any. I didn't have much hope for Topeka, but I figured at the very least, I could do 20 miles or so of road work just to keep the legs in the game. As luck would have it, there was bike shop right across the street from my motel, so I sauntered over and chatted them up about the local trail scene.

The guy in the shop immediately recommended an eight-mile loop in Dornwood Park, which was about five miles from my motel. Sounded perfect. I'd ride out to Dornwood, do the loop, and ride home for a good 18 to 20 miles. While in the shop, I was chagrined to notice flyers for numerous mountain bike race events in the area, including a duathlon the following day and a six-hour race in September. I was chagrined because how is it that Kansas has a variety of mountain bike races for the months of August and September, but at home in the Bay Area, the supposed cradle of mountain biking, Romulus and I are hard-pressed to find three doable races in a year. Can somebody explain this please?

I located the park in a rundown section of town and found a decrepit wooden sign announcing " Trail OK" off of the main parking area. The trail wound its way past some roofless limestone buildings and down into a heavily wooded, swampy, humid depression. The light was dim and the air was heavy under the trees, the stench of the bogwater adding to the atmosphere. I followed the trail for a while, taking a couple of spurs along the way. The trails were not bad, but this place had a malevolent feel. Maybe it was the foul, heavy air, or the darkness, or the threatening graffiti on the ruined bridge foundations ("All wiggers must die"), but this was the kind of place you'd expect to find a body -- kind of a combination of the Blair Witch Project and the 1980s Atlanta child murders. Adding to this atmosphere were two high school dopers who came into the woods arguing with each other. I avoided them in the woods, but later, while I was having a snack back in the parking lot, I watched one of the guys come out of the woods looking over his shoulder. I waited another five minutes, but never did see the other guy come out.

Descending into Dornwood	Helmet webs	Waiting for the starting gun at the BMX track

But the real killer about Dornwood was the spider webs. They were everywhere in there, stretching from one side of the trail to the other. The first couple of webs caught me unaware, and my beard, face, and helmet were soon coated with a thick, sticky tangle of web and dead insects. I kept hoping that the webs would eventually go away, but they just kept coming. For protection, I rode with one hand on the bars and the other waving around in front of me, acting as a webbreaker to keep the shit off my face. From a distance, I must have looked some crazed Benedictine Monk riding around in the woods blessing the trees. This sucked because I couldn't go very fast and because it was taking my focus away from the joy of riding, but I was willing to go on as long as there weren't spiders dropping down on me every time I broke one of these webs. Then, I came around a corner in the trail and saw a huge web across the trail backlit the by the sun. Uggh, shudder. In the middle was a spider of considerable size. It was balled up, but was about the size of a golf ball, with a thick, bulbous abdomen. That was the final straw. I can handle having 50 dead gnats in my beard, but I'm not OK with something that will go splat when you step on it.

I hightailed it out of Dornwood and headed back to Topeka Avenue. In 1998, when JB and I had come here for her Papa's 90th birthday, I found some paved trails on one of my runs (I was a runner then). Sure enough, I found the Shunga Trail, a paved multi-use path that links together a constellation of city micro parks, including Shunga Glen, Edgewater, Crestview, and Fairlawn. I followed the Shunga far to the west, exploring some gravel roads built on old railroad grades. In one of the parks was the Heartland BMX track. Surprisingly, there was nobody there, so I did five laps on the quarter-mile track. I have to admit, I was pretty gassed after the first couple of laps. Once I started to get the technique, I wasn't as tired. It was pretty fun, but I'm glad no BMX'ers were there to heckle me.