Pacifica yesterday was barely a warm-up for UC Santa Cruz today which took the butt-clenching to a whole new level. A lot of the trails were pretty good. We started off with Mailbox which seemed pretty fun until it all of a sudden it went to 11 with gnarly rock gardens that climaxes with a waterfall rock garden. It was hard to walk down it. It was definitely cool to see everyone clear it and it was a really pretty spot despite how scary the descent looked. On the way Boris tried an uphill jump and missed making it to the other side and cased his front wheel hard into the lip. Mike managed to get video of it and it looked so much worse than where I initially saw and heard it lower down the hill. After Mailbox, a local showed us some trails. The early trails were doable for me but then we went to Shadow which was way too technical and gnarly for me. Off-camber, loose, rocky, steep and pretty big drops. Then another local showed us a different trail that was still technical but I was able to do more of it since it wasn't quite as steep. It's tough to decide how I felt about today because on the one hand, there was a lot of fun stuff and I didn't die. On the other hand, these small, gnarly, technical sections would break the flow and totally take the rhythm and confidence away that I was building up. Looking back at the Santa Cruz stuff Catherine took me on last year, that freaked me out, that stuff is a piece of cake now compared to the stuff I did these past two days. That's progress, I guess. I wasn't hungry but we were all probably feeling the lack of food towards the end. I'm feeling it now having only had half a sandwich for lunch that Jenny was nice enough to give me.