Outdoor Addict

Boy, where do I begin? It was a few stressful days leading up to the 8th annual Pat’s Peak Mountain Bike Festival. Unfortunately, my pit crew that was going to help me had an emergency of sorts pop up and was unable to help.  Fortunately, with some scrolling through my phone’s address book, I was able to sucker, I mean, convince someone to help me out with the race.

At 12 noon, the gun went off and let the Lemans start have us all running for our bikes. I never felt the need to run around a while when I am going to be riding the bike for so long, so a nice 100 meter walk had me getting on the bike in dead last. Luckily, there was a short hill that I managed to pass about 30 people on. See, why run when you can do it on the bike.

The next 3 hours seemed to go by pretty status quo and I would average about 45 minutes a lap. The nutrition/hydration and pacing plan laid out to me by my coach was working perfectly. I was right where I wanted to be. Tied with the first placed single speeder. It was also about that time, I noticed a weak link in his armor and saw he was spending more and more time in his pits. After a quick chat, it seemed like his body core temp went up so quickly, he was unable to do anything. It was my time to attack. I stuck to the pacing plan laid out, kept pedaling, and took a few more minutes each pit, but I was putting some time on everyone else.

By the 8 pm mandated time to put on my lights, I took some extra time in the scoring tent to make sure my lead was solid. With a 2 lap lead, I went out on the first night lap. After all, some of the best riding in a 24 hour race is at night.

Midway through my second night lap, the rains came, and came, and came.  With the past month of rain, I have gotten quite used to riding in the rain, but knowing that I have another solid 15 hours of it in front of me didn’t make me a happy camper. With a few lap lead and seeing my closest competitor in pants and a jacket, I knew I could rest a bit and hopefully wait out the rain in my pits. With all my luck, it seemed that every time I thought about going out for another lap, it would start pouring again, keeping me in the pits.

Around 2am, I saw all the lights turn out on the competitions camp and knew that meant one thing, sleep. With everyone sleeping, I took advantage of it and got in some ZZZ’s myself. At around 3am, I heard the air horn go off signaling the race was paused due to thunder and lightning. GREAT!! I can now sleep and know the other riders aren’t
pulling a fast one on me and heading out while I slept. Plus, with the race stopped, I couldn’t feel guilty about sleeping.

With the sound of the horn at 6am letting us know the storm has passed and we can get back on the course, I knew that only meant one thing, time to get back to racing. I quickly got up and out on the bike putting in 2 strong laps. On the 3rd, I grabbed my ipod because the pain was gone and i was back to having fun. 8 am in a 24 hour race and I am actually out there smiling. It’s official, something is wrong with me.

With some time to kill due to my lead, I took advantage and rested up while my crew and I cleaned up the camp. Rules of the race dictate that in order to finish the race, I need to be out on the course at the 12 noon deadline or the race would not count. So around 11:00, I grabbed me 3 Pabst Blue Ribbon pounders, loaded up my jersey pockets and went out for a quick “ceremonial” spin. I got back to the start/finish line and a bunch others had the same idea. We sat, chit chatted and I drank 2 of my well earned beers. Sure, might not be the best thing for a recovering athlete to drink some beer, but, it tasted darn good.

I rolled across the line at about 12:05 and had completed 14 laps. Not to shabby for my first ever endurance solo single speed adventure on a “climbers course”. Most of the course had 95% of the competitors climbing in their granny gears, even the big names who won the thing.

So there it is, first endurance race of the year and things went as well as planned. I finished 6th over all and 1st single speed. I am disappointed to say that I was lumped in with the geared riders (something I found out at 10am of the last day) instead of having our own category.  But, without being on the podium, I did what I set out to do and that was
to finish the race and come out on top of the other single speeders.  I put forth the energy that I needed to to complete the task and not much more. I need to save that for the next adventure.

All of my gear worked perfectly. My GT Zaskar handled all the bumps and roots that the course through at me while my Yess Labs ETR-B chain tensioner kept everything spinning smoothly. Even though the I didn’t get to use my Cygolite TridenX lights as much as I would have, they kept the trails nice and bright, giving me definite advantage over my competitors.  I found that with following the nutrition and pacing plan laid out by my Coach, Grasky Endurance, there was no way the other single speeders were going to beat me and my Pearl Izumi Elite shoes kept my feet planted solid in all the mud that we had to deal with.

Thanks to those who helped out with getting me prepped for this race and especially to Jay, Alex, and Max who helped out and got my pits working perfectly. Without them, there was no way that I was going to get the results that I did.

Now its time to prop my feet up for a little, but not to long and get back to it. The Wilderness 101 is up next during the first week of August, so no time to spare, I need to keep on turning those pedals.

Share/Bookmark