Spreading Christmas Cheer

I decorated the commuter bike with some lights for the holiday season. I think I actually have some cold weather gear figured out for my commute, I was too hot on the way home with temperatures in the 40's.

More from the Snow Front

A quick weekend recap:

I went for a ride up Mt. Falcon on Saturday. I love this ride and it usually takes 30-44 minutes for the main climb (about 3 miles and 2000' of elevation) during the summer depending on how much I want it to hurt. This day with the Pugsley and some pretty difficult conditions it took me 90 minutes and was quite the butt kicker.Going up Castle Trail, the snow in the sun was nice

In the rock garden near the top. I know, what rock garden?

I'm finally in a picture with the Pugs on a trail!...sort of.

Sunday I went for a run with Jenny. Earlier in the week she said "Hey do you want to run my 20-miler with me?" and for some reason I thought it was a good idea. We ran on the Big Dry Creek trail and the first 5 miles had some pretty treacherous conditions. John was on the Pugsley in support mode and was having a hard time keeping up with us it was so bad. Needless to say, when we got to the 10 mile turn around I felt like I had already run 17 or 18 miles. So on the way back we took inventory and realized that both of us had sore knees, ankles, hips and I also had a sore right shoulder (what!?) so we called Andie and had her meet us at a bail out point. We still got in 16.5 miles and that took us as long as the 20 should have and left us a little more beat up. The pizza following the cold snowy pummeling was so incredibly delicious.
I wish I had taken pictures as we were quite the odd bunch with Jenny and I out running 20 miles in the snow and John on the snow tank.

Miles is Brilliant

Miles, my cat, wanted to help me and Andie with our Christmas wrapping activities and this gem was created.

Just Puggin' Away

Last night I went for my first real ride on the Pugsley, tons of fun. I rode up Waterton Canyon to the dam and back, ~13 miles, 20 °F. The main road was pretty packed down, but I made sure to try out some of the deeper stuff on some little side jaunts. I was the only one out there around sunset and finished after dark. 15 psi in both tires worked good for the conditions, but I think I would try the 10-12 range for a climb in similar snow.

Those Endomorphs certainly have a bigger footprint than me.

At the intermediate dam 3 miles up.

I guess I should have drank just a little more on the ride.

Paralyzed by Choices

Per my usual, I am paralyzed by choices. I always do this. I need something, so I research the crap out of it and I'm usually paralyzed by the fact that I have many choices and different compromises with each.

The latest is an "insignificant" mini pump for the Pugsley. I know I want something other than I already have, the requirements are to not be a rigid connection to the pump and high volume (I don't want to be pumping those massive tires for 30 minutes).

The candidates:
Canondale Airspeed Maximum
Axiom Enforce Air XL
GT Mini Typhoon 1800 Deluxe
Cyclaire (the most intriguing design of the bunch)
Lezyne Alloy Drive XL
Serfas Grifter
Serfas 2n1
Planet Bike Mini Versair
Topeak Mountain Morph

I will continue to spend too much time researching a $25 accessory and finally breakdown and get something, though I might just get the GT pump to try right off the bat as it is only $10 at Pricepoint right now.

2008 is going to be good!

So here's a look at possible events for me next year. Several things aren't on there yet, like Primal Quest, Winter Park MTB Series, Mountain States Cup MTB Series, BC Vert. Challenge, Vail Trail Running Series. These are all just possibilities though.

16-Feb			24 Hours in the Old Pueblo
15-Mar			America's Uphill
29-Mar			Rim Ride
5-Apr			Moab 12 hour AR
18-Apr			AZT 300
19-Apr			Grizzly Man Sprint AR
2-May			18 Hours of Fruita
10-May			Buena Vista 12 Hour AR
17-May			USARA Sprint Nationals - Boulder, CO
4-Jun to 8-Jun			Teva Mountain Games
14-Jun			Durango 24 Hour AR
4-Jul			Firecracker 50
19-Jul			Breck 100
19-Jul			Silver Rush 50
26-Jul			Laramie Enduro (date tentative)
9-Aug			Leadville 100 MTB
16-Aug			24 Hours in the Sage
16-Aug to 17-Aug			LT100 Run (probably just volunteering)
6-Sep			Vail 12 hour AR
6-Sep			Imogene Pass Run
25-Sep to 28-Sep			Moab Expedition AR
11-Oct			24 Hours of Moab

Spinervals Virgin No More.

So last night I set up the new (to me) trainer and did a quick Spinervals workout.

It was just a short 30 minute technique workout, but it was nice with me still needing another day to recover from the Vegas Half.

It was a quality workout and I'm glad I've got a variety of them.

Las Vegas Half Marathon Race Report

Vegas Baby! (is there any other way to open this post?)

Andie and I flew to Vegas for the Marathon and Half Marathon this last weekend. I was running the half, she was running the full. That'll be the last time that happens, you wouldn't believe the amount of crap I got for it.

I wasn't expecting much since this was a B race for me and I was only running twice a week in training. I figured about a 1:40. My time, 1:40:06, hows that for guessing. I was 272nd out of 8172 finishers.

Andie ran the full in 3:53 and change, her fist time under 4 and only 13 minutes from boston qualifying.

Andie has now bested my best time from Vegas 2 years ago by 5 minutes, I guess I need to do another full and set a new PR.

New Member in the Family

Some people buy a snowblower after the 4 weeks of blizzards we had last year, I bought the Surly Pugsley. I've been eying it for about 18 months now, and this weekend I found a deal that I deemed good enough. Alpha Bicycle Company was having an end of the season sale so I went to check it out. I knew they had a few Pugsleys (very rare for a shop to carry them) and I told myself that if they had my size and it was a certain price I would do it (new they run about $2200 built up).

100mm wide Bottom bracket to clear the 4 inch tires, oof!

I test rode the Puglsey around the lot and it fit well, it even had grip shift, what I had wanted to try out on a snow bike and possibly for a winter commuter. I asked him how much it was going for and they hit my "buy it" price right on the head. I got them to throw in a shimano freewheel for the front tire and I was out the door.

I really like that shop and was tempted by some good deals on Mary bars and Fleegle bars (to try out), but didn;t pull the trigger. They really have a lot more of the niche stuff in biking, 29ers, Pugsleys, non-standard bars, a sweet geared Spot, Danger Boy levers and much more.

Standard bike pose, for you Cody.

I can't wait for it to snow!

USARA 24 hr Nationals Race Report

Missouri is just not my place for good luck I guess. Here's the quick and sweet, about halfway into the course we were disqualified because I lost our passport. Bummer, out on a technicality and it was my fault too. Long version below.

The race was in Potosi, MO; a very pretty area. We arrived and checked in the night before, there were a lot of big guns out there and Robyn Benincasa was there as a USARA rep and was cheering on the teams, cool, she's a lot smaller than I thought she would be.

The race start was at 7 a.m. at the Trout Lodge, it was cold, temps were in the 20's. We had to split up for the first section of the course, Jim ran up the road to get our passport and then back down to the lake and Sara and I would paddle the canoe across the lake and pick up Jim.

The gun goes off and we quickly split, Sara and I reach the canoes and the madness ensues; canoes falling everywhere (they were stacked three high), people arguing and yelling at each other over who had right to that canoe. Somehow in the madness I ended up snagging a canoe and Sara and I were in the water in 6th place, out of 80. Not bad.

We paddled into the fog on the lake, visually this made for great photos, but it was sooooooo cold out there. Any water that splashed onto the canoe quickly froze. We reached the meeting area just as the front runners were arriving. Jim took a little longer than anticipated, but we still were in the top 20 when we gathered him in and left. This is where the race organizers could've done a better job, we had a two seat canoe for a three person team.

We paddled to the island and quickly nabbed the next CP and continued on. Jim was having trouble getting comfortable without a seat and was constantly changing positions. My hands were starting to feel warm, finally, though I still had ice on the outside of my gloves. We reach the next CP just as the bottleneck started, we were third inline to punch the CP and the line was at least 10 boats long when we left. We finished the paddle and we were in 15th place coming out of the water, doing ok.

Now we implemented our strategy for the start of the race; look at the map, but basically follow the front runners for a while to keep them in our sights. I was a little slow at the start of the orienteering section because my hands were thawing (the previous warming sensation was completely false) and were so painful that I couldn't run fast. Our strategy was working great for teh first 3 CPs, in fact we were catching more and more people. Then we made a small snafu going off trail and lost a few minutes. Then we encountered a trail map with a "You Are Here" on it, that cost us 15 more minutes; who'd have figured that knowing our exact location would throw us off so bad.

Soon we were settled in and one of the teams near us was very familiar, Team Monster Energy was Team Pain Syndicate at the MAR; we were faster then and I knew we could be faster now. We flew through the last few check points and reached the bike transition placed somewhere in the teens. The best exchange of the day was when Robyn Benincasa came over while we transitioned and said,
"What team are you guys?"
"Team Seek Adventure"
"Do you guys have a sponsor?"
"No, not really."
"Man, you guys are scrappy!"

On to the bike, awesome, time to reel in some more teams. We were cruising as usually and within 10 minutes we've already passed a team. We are hitting checkpoints without hesitation and everything is going great. Next thing I know we're passing Team Yoga Slackers, they were quite fast at the MAR and this means we were now cracking into the top 10. The 4th bike CP had a twist, we get there and there's a sign giving us coordinates to the real CP, interesting. We don't pick the best route to get there, but we lose only about 5 minutes. CP 5 is quick and we're blazing towards CP6, right on the heels of another team. We reach and intersection and the other team is there talking to a hiker. He says he came from the right and he started at the campground, that was all we needed, we headed right towards the campground. Well it was the wrong campground and we were then lost for 1.5 hours. Talk about a bummer. We get to the CP in 33rd place (it was only 100 yards to the left when we made the wrong turn).

We keep our pace steady and methodical, we didn't want to blow through any intersections we needed. We were clawing our way back up through the field. The biking was very nice here, mostly singletrack, but it made it difficult to pass. We arrive at the next transition area and we're in 30th place, with several teams there as well. We change over to our trekking stuff and head out, hoping to get to the canoes before it gets dark (and really cold on the water). I was carrying the passport and I switched it over to a pocket in my pack, because carrying it in my short legs didn't seem secure enough for a trek.

Three miles into the trek we're tangled up with the teams in front of us and I decide to do a sanity check on the passport. I reach in the pocket, it's not there. I try some other pockets, still not there. I quickly tell the team to stop (seconds before we were about to splash across a 20 foot stream crossing) and let them know. we check my pockets again and then realize we have to backtrack.

Reluctantly and disappointingly we retrace our steps looking for the passport. We make it all the way back to the previous CP without a trace. We ask if anyone turned one in and the said no, and then they said without it we were DQed. We theorized that some other team might have picked it up or that it blew away with some wind, either way we were out.

The only highlights of this part of the race were when we got back to the transition area the other racers were dumbfounded, they though we had finished the trek and canoe already. The other thing that made us feel ok was that at the same time Team Nike Beaver Creek was pulling out (due to one team mate hurting himself), they were only minutes ahead of us.

So we rode back to the lodge, had a great meal and went to bed early. We heard the next day that everyone was coming off the water freezing and borderline hypothermic, I was glad to miss out on that.

A disappointing end to the season, but it'll serve as good motivation for next year.

I want to thank my teammates Jim and Sara for not making me feel like a schmuck for losing the passport, thanks for understanding.

Colorado Dreaming

I've been in Mississippi for 8 days now for work, man I miss Colorado. That's why this post is just some pictures from some Colorado this year.

BT trucking up Maroon Creek Rd on our warm-up ride.

The road bike posing in front of the Maroon Bells after the climb.

Hanging uot in the cold wind waiting for Andie's leg to start in the Colorado Outward Bound Relay.


My belly button's view of my rides.

Out on a local ride, good old High Grade.

Boom Baby!

My team and I (Team Seek Adventure) just received an invitation to compete in the GoLite USARA Adventure Racing National Championships.

Time to saddle up and redeem myself!

Nov. 2 -3 near Potosi, Missouri

Follow the action on race day with live updates on the USARA Website

The Buildup Is On

After being out of commission Monday with a 1 day cold (that's happened 3 times in the last 6 months now) it was nice to get out and ride again.

I hopped on the non-commuter road bike for the first time in a while. Wow, that's a fast bike, even with me running Andie's heavier wheels right now. Just an hour spin around Bear Creek Lake Park, just me and the cyclocross guys out there.

One of my teammates recently reminded us to "keep training in case we get into nationals.", like I would stop anyways. If I'm not training for AR, it's something else; right now it's a two-headed monster, the Las Vegas Half-Marathon and 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo, which actually combine to be pretty nice AR training.

The LV half is one of the best HM courses I've seen, this should just plain be fun, maybe I should do it as one of the Running Elvi.

24 HOP I will be doing solo, this will be the A race for me and I'm sure I will have a lot of fun prepping for it. Hopefully this year will be more winter riding and less indoor trainer riding. though Andie found me a super sweet Kurt Kinetic Road Machine at the REI garage sale while I was out racing in Missouri.

An interesting thing about the 24 HOP is the running LeMans style start. A lot of 24 hour races start this way to thin out the crowd, I wonder if I can get the hole shot for the run. Time to do a few strides in my biking shoes.

Berryman Adventure Race

Here it is, Team Seek Adventure's attempt at qualifying for the National Championships.

Thursday September 27th, evening. We all meet at my house before departing for Missouri. Jim there's with a nice surprise, our first sponsorship! Jim had been in contact with Crocs and had worked out a gear sponsorship through them. So, with our new footwear on (their socks are uber-comfy BTW, but if you're borderline on the sizing go with the larger) we loaded all of our gear in/on to Joe's suburban.

Joe, like he was possessed, drove entirely through the night and got maybe an hour of car sleep in the morning while I drove, maybe he didn't trust any of us to drive. ;) the drive to Missouri is long and pretty uneventful, 16 hours. I got to catch up on some movies I had never seen, but nobody would let me put in Deliverance until we were on the way out of Missouri, now I know why.

Of course we were short on time after we arrived and we scrambled to get our gear in order and then get some sleep before the race, too bad we couldn't have arrived a few hours earlier.

The race started at 5 a.m. on Friday with an orienteering leg. The race was all bunched up through the first 3 checkpoints. We had one glitch in going for the 4th CP that cost us about 15 minutes, but everything else went smoothly. We came out of the morning mist and into the first transition area in 18th place.

We quickly changed over to our bikes and headed out. We climbed up a hill and then bombed down the other side, that's when Sara told us we missed the turn at the top of the hill, dang. Back up we went and then shortly after getting back on course Sara's pedal fell off, we put it back on. Two minutes later, it comes off again. We investigate a little more and it seems as though her pedal bearings are seizing and her crankarm is starting to strip. We get some lube in there and swith out a pedal from Jim's bike and we're going again. 30 minutes later Jim flats, man, these delays come in bunches. Luckily, biking is our forte and we are passing teams all the time now. We arrive at the next manned CP in 14th place. Most of the route is on the Ozark Trail, an extremely beautiful singletrack that is actually hardly discernible at times, at least it was daylight.

We get to the TA in 9th place, heck yeah, we're in a groove. We fill up our bladders at a clear and cool natural spring and get going. It turns out we took the long way, but we still maintained our position and got to the canoes in 9th place, 1 hour before sunset.

Canoing is wonderful, I'm so used to paddling ridiculous inflatables that these feel extremely nimble. Jim and I are in one boat, while Sara and Joe are in another. I'm in the back, controlling the direction and Jim's just adding horsepower up front. We get into a rhythm and are making great time. We hit the first CP right at sunset, the next three would be done in the dark. This is when it gets fun. Jim and I come around a bend in the river and there is a local there running a generator and big lights on a section of the river. this is nice because we can see the rapids, what isn't nice is his advice. I was going to go straight down the middle, but he wasw frantically yelling "Go left!", now this might've been "Don't go left!", but none of us heard it that way. By the time we realized we shouldn't be on the left it was too late; we hit a tree and then quickly dumped the boat. Swimming at night sucks, we lost our high powered headlamp and about 50% of our food (the biggest problem). Soaking wet we finish out the river leg, very slowly though as our light situation was less than ideal.

We pulled out at 11 p.m. and I quickly changed into some dry clothes so I wouldn't freeze. The next leg was trekking so off we went. The first two CP's were in the middle of nowhere and were a challenge to find, but we got them. On the way to the next one I fell apart. I had a detached head feeling, I was stumbling a bit and I was going pee every 10-15 minutes. I was going through what it could be in my head and things like hyponatremia, caffeine overdose and just plain bonking kept coming up. Finally, I had to make the team stop and try to sleep for 1.5 hours, this only got me to a point where I could be towed. 5 or 6 teams passed us during this.

We get to the end of the trekking leg and by then I think I had figured out that it was the caffeine that screwed me up, I had taken the equivalent of 3 cups of coffee in 2.5 hours, but since I stay away from caffeine at all other times that was enough to do it for me. No more caffeine during races!

We transistion to the final bike leg in 14th place, ugh. Shortly after starting the bike I felt fully recovered, it only took 11 hours, and we were back to chasing down teams. We passed 2 teams during this last leg and finished in 35.5 hours. It looks like we were 15 minutes too slow to qualify for the National Championships, but we'll get the official word later.

~35 miles of Trekking
20 miles of Canoing
83 miles of Biking

Even if we don't qualify it was a good race and I learned even more about what my body will do when pushed in different ways, though I would really like a chance at redemption in Missouri at the USARA National Champs.

Fall is so lovely

I love riding in the fall. Less crowds and more of this:50+ miles and 17 of it was on singletrack just like this. I did see a few people out, but once I got to the Indian Creek trail it was pretty solitary other than the group of three on Blacksheep bikes I saw (one of the guys was the actual builder for Blacksheep bikes), a lot of titanium in that group.

I'm back

Just got back from the Berryman Adventure Race in Missouri. It was a good time, I'll add more details later. A few things slowed us down, but we might have still qualified for the national championships, we'll find out shortly.

Possible Beyond Clothing Sponsorship

So I heard through the grapevine about a possible sponsorship opportunity with Beyond Clothing out of Seattle (http://beyondclothing.com/).

I went to check them out, I remember hearing of them when I wanted a custom jacket, but my money was diverted elsewhere then. Nobody makes stuff for the tall skinny people, I can get the torso to fit, then the arms are too short; or the arms fit and the torso is the size of a gymnasium... not all of America is trending towards obese. Don't even get me started on pants (I actually own a XXL in child's for one pair of waterproof pants to fit my 30x34 legs, the fit isn't ideal).

So it would be pretty exciting if I can get some race wear that fits me well, and their layering system looks like it would be great for those Colorado days that start out freezing and are beautiful a few hours into a workout or race. It would be great to see what the rest of the team and I can throw at some new digs and see how it fares, half the fun is seeing how ridiculous the conditions can become and you still can push through.

Action shots!

I love our little digital camera. Here's a few "action" shots while messing around with it in the van during the Colorado Outward Bound Relay.

i need to work on my van dancing skills.

Bound to be Relaying

Colorado Outward Bound Relay

170 miles, 10 people, 27+ hours of fun.

What a ride the Colorado Outward Bound Relay is. Andie and I joined our friend Alana’s corporate team for the race, they weren’t really shooting to be competitive, which was fine by me, but it is still a race.

I got recruited for the second hardest combination of legs, containing the single most difficult leg of the relay, Georgia Pass. Andie, while initially was assigned the easiest combo of legs was quickly upgraded to the third most difficult as some of the teammates weren’t feeling there Wheaties in the weeks prior to the race.

I started us off, 5:40 a.m. on Friday morning in Idaho Springs. The gun goes off and I try to get in my groove. After a few minutes I’m feeling good and settle in with the group I’m around. About a mile from the end of the first leg a guy surged and I went with him, we left everyone else and cruised to the exchange together. 4.7 miles in 39:20, not quite racing speed, but I really wasn’t wanting to start my next leg tired.

The wind was pretty harsh in the morning, by the time we got to Georgetown to start Andie’s leg it was crazy, porta-potties were blowing over and tumbling around, gross. Luckily for Andie, the wind died after she got out of Georgetown and had nice conditions for her run up the majority of Guanella Pass.

My van was then the “resting” van so we went to the next van trade-off and waited. Finally, at 2:40 I received the baton (a bracelet really) and started out on the hardest leg of the race Georgia Pass. The leg started at Jefferson Creek, climbed 2k+ feet and then descended 2k+ feet to Tiger Road.

I started out and was quickly joined by another runner. We passed another runner within a few minutes. We began talking and she asked if I had done the Leadville 100 run, she thought I looked like a racer she saw there (he was also using poles as well), right then I knew that hanging onto this woman’s pace was going to be intense. Being a little timid on how my Achilles would hold up I eased up and let her go, enough that I couldn’t see her and be tempted to chase. I kept chugging, striving to stay in the positive column of people I’ve passed vs. people passing me. I summit Georgia Pass at 3:58 p.m.; 7 people passed, 6 people passed me (some of those guys were smoking fast!), 6 miles in, doing good.

I don’t consider myself a great descender, probably just above average, but now that the worries about my Achilles were over I picked it up. I kept telling myself “This IS a race” so that I wouldn’t ease up. I had someone tailing me for a while and soon I was pushing hard after every switchback to form a gap and discourage him when he came around the switchback. It didn’t take long before I dropped the tailgater and was in a groove, a fast groove at that. I caught several more racers on the upper slopes, 11 passed, 6 passed me. Next, I caught a guy that had passed me earlier, oh yeah payback, 11 passed, 5 passed me; I went by him in a blur, he might’ve been cracked. I probably looked a little funny to everyone; I was running with my tongue hanging out to get air in my lungs as quickly as possible, once again I wondered if I didn't have enormous tonsils would I perform better. When all was said and done I felt good, 14 people passed 5 passed me, 2:18 for 13.2 miles on the Colorado Trail with 2000+’ of elevation gain/loss and a top elevation over 12,000’. I finished 2 minutes before 5 p.m., another mini-goal of mine.

Andie’s leg came up shortly thereafter and she kicked total butt, running an uphill 10k at elevation in 50 minutes, after having run 7 miles up Guanella Pass earlier in the day. Most importantly she passed the Yellow Highlighter Team that we had been chasing for a while. I was waiting with a Double Chocolate Chip Frappucino as a reward, yummy.

Once we became the resting van again we slept for 3 hours and then met up with the other van again. Some bad info was passed along to us from the other van and when I walked over to the exchange area, at 1 in the morning, our runner had been there for 5 minutes! I headed out with a head of steam trying to make up some time. Being that it was my last leg I was going pretty hard, knowing I didn’t have to save it for anything else. I ran 4.5 miles in 34:47, not bad. It was great to be done and just cheer on my teammates to the finish.

At the finish we all crossed the line together and the team was over 2 hours faster than last year (Andie and I were new to the team this year, coincidence? ;) ) 170 miles in 27 hours 42 minutes and 33 seconds, and we finished in the top 100. The finish line festival was fun and I got free socks from Thorlo and a free USB data stick from Gore Tex for putting on some gear and dancing around in the virtual rain storm booth they had set up.

I had a lot of fun and wouldn’t mind doing more relays, in fact, the “Ultra” option of this relay sounds pretty intriguing, 5 runners instead of 10.

And so it begins.

Mountain Adventure Race Recap Part 4

Part 4: The Calm Before the Storm Before the Calm. Sorry, this is taking longer than the Harry Potter series to finish up.

Evening 3: The weather is perfect, it helps calm the nerves about the next trekking section, 45 miles with at least 30 miles of it at some of the race’s highest elevations of 9-10k feet. The last hour of the previous biking leg the team talked almost exclusively about pizza. We had all hoped that when we went through the outskirts of Big Sky that we would hit a fast food joint, but we only encountered farm land and were disappointed for it. When we arrived at the TA we immediately placed a pizza order with Andie, two large pizzas, ham with pineapple and chicken with mushrooms and basil. We confirmed our pizza order and headed out on the next leg.

We check out with the race directors and we see that another 4-person team is sleeping at the transition, it’s confirmed, we are in second place. Thankfully, we were allowed to ride our bikes the first 5 miles to the trailhead where we would start our trek at, but eggbeater pedals with trail running shoes on tore up feet isn’t exactly pleasurable. I pedaled along with my heaviest pack yet; awkwardly trying to pedal with the arches of my feet to save the balls of my feet for the trek. I thought I would’ve been able to streamline my gear and my pack would get lighter throughout the race, but it’s getting heavier with each new leg, I’m up to around 30 lbs. We get to the trailhead and see that the CP is not manned. We were under the impression that it would be and we could leave our bikes for our support crew to pick up later, wrong. We leave our bikes leaning up against the TH sign and say a little prayer that our bikes won’t be stolen and then head out.

Once again the mood is light. We know that we’ve got a long way to go so we ease into things, not pushing the pace. 2 miles in we make a stop to adjust some footwear and a two person team flies by us, we talk briefly, they are moving like their feet don’t hurt at all, I’m jealous. The trail is absolutely gorgeous, the most beautiful scenery yet. In the five mile approach to Hyalite lake we pass by seven waterfalls, not your typical “Colorado” waterfalls, these were at least 30 ft tall, some were triple falls, one was a thirty foot falls followed by a 200 foot natural water slide that went right under the bridge. When we reach the lake our pace has reached full speed, we’re really cruising; we filter water and eat food. Sundown is about 10 minutes away and we decide to take a 2-hour sleep prior to getting onto the ridge, we’d rather sleep in the trees. We bed down on some grass, the most comfortable grass I’ve ever laid on by the way, in a small group of trees just off the trail. I put on every piece of clothing I am carrying, I then remember the race directors advising us not to sleep in this section of the course because of the bear danger, I move my bear spray to by my head and then quickly fall asleep. An hour in I wake up to a light rain, it’s dark and we watch a 4 person team pass us before forming ourselves into a puppy pile and going to sleep for another hour; we will chase when we’re more rested.

We wake up from our slumber, in which I apparently snored, and start our chase. We knew one team had passed us, did both nearby teams pass us? We were unsure. We climb to the top of Hyalite Peak, the rain is now a drizzle and I wish I had my gloves, we can see at least three other teams scattered across the ridge. With no moon visible because of the clouds it is hard to tell who is closest. We continue on and soon I have an idea of which headlamps are in front of us. Every once in a while I would see a headlamp look back at us, I’d glance at my watch and then time how long it took to get to that point. We were 45 minutes behind the team in front of us at the first time check, within 30 minutes we’re only thirty minutes behind. We’re catching them fast, but I’m not realizing how fast we’re catching them in my condition. Finally, around 1:40 I see a headlamp looking our way, it’s not a short glance this time though, they’re staring. At 1:46 the headlamp disappears and I figure they turned around and continued on, 7 minutes later we come across the team in front of us sleeping on the ridge. They were snoring and sleeping out in the drizzle on the ridge, totally exposed. I give a fist pump and short celebratory dance as we go by, now we’re in 2^nd or 3^rd, not completely sure. We’re making good time, we talk about how stupid that team will feel when they walk 10 minutes down the trail and see a nice area to sleep protected from the wind and rain. Everything is going great and we’re moving fast, after racing for three days at least. Then we reach Crater Lake.

We come down to a saddle and the trail disappears. We look around and see one trail, going the wrong way. We follow the trail anyways and it descends, and descends, and follows the wrong ridge. It’s 2 in the morning and we are not liking this trail, which is not on the map, so we turn around and go back up to the saddle. We search more, and search some more. Finally, we agree to bushwhack back up to the ridge and follow the ridge until the trail regained the ridge 1.5 kilometers later. There’s a reason that the trail doesn’t follow the ridge at this point. Progress is slow, and for the first time I start to get short with one of my teammates. Jim, who obviously is convinced that we don’t know where we are, keeps asking where the lake is for a reference; during one of his episodes in which he left us standing on the ridge in the middle of a storm of wind and rain/ice and walked back a ¼ mile to see the lake I lose patience and Angrily yell “Jim!”. Obviously sensing my patience is thin, he replies with a courteous “Yeah?”. I give another slightly irritated “Let’s get going!”, he quickly agrees and we continue. Soon we’re cliffed out on the ridge, we have to down climb and go around and then get back to the ridge. At sunrise we finally meet up with the trail again and we see that the trail had been re-routed and if we had stayed on the first trail we would’ve been fine, frustrating, 3.5 hours to go 1.5 kilometers.

As we continue over progressively higher peaks I am feeling stronger and stronger, the cooler weather and my ability to eat large quantities of food have given me strength, but my teammates are deteriorating around me. We reached the billionth summit of this trek and Rod and Jim need a sleep. They sleep, face down in the dirt, for thirty minutes while Sara and I tend to our feet; the sun is up and my solar power is working. The pass for the next CP is near and we’re excited. We get to the pass and decide to take our chance on a trail not on the map. It goes to an old cabin, and a stream. We soak our feet in the stream for 10 minutes while we filter more water. It is here I have my first encounter with a leech, the tiny little blood sucker latched onto my foot when I wasn’t looking, great now I’ll probably get some weird leech disease. I’m leading us along now and Sara is navigating. I don’t realize how out of it Sara is, after a while I stop and she just hands me the map and says, “Here, I can’t do this anymore.” I look it over and immediately conclude we are near the CP and send us off in the wrong direction. We quickly end up 2.5 miles past the CP, my bad. We turn around and march back. Now Rod and I are feeling stronger and Sara and Jim decide to stay at the trail while we look for the CP. We didn’t know this and soon we were separated. Great, now we’re in middle of bear country looking for two teammates that don’t have a map and are extremely sleep deprived. After an hour of yelling “Marco” and finally get a “Polo!” response we get back together and find the CP.

The CP is deserted, we see clothes and chairs, but no people, hmmmm, this is bear country. A cry comes from our left, we look, two girls are running towards us with bear spray and satellite phone in hand. They run up and ask us if we are ok, of course we were. They were worried about us as we were expected to be in 6 hours earlier (we spent about 6 hours being lost, coincidence). We looked at the check-in list and realized that we were indeed in 2^nd place, yippee, we had been convinced that our lost wanderings had cost us placement. Our wanderings had not cost us a ranking, but it did cost us money. While we were on this leg the race directors started instituting previously unknown time cutoffs throughout the course and we had missed the cutoff to continue on the full course here and ended our run at being in the money at the end of the race. We were to be shuttled to the next transition area and finish on a short course. We were pretty happy that we had second place pretty well locked up and we didn’t have to do the 9 mile downhill trod to the TA. We chatted a little with the CP girls as they asked us questions like “What do you guys talk about out there?” and told us “The last guys were eating a lot of Pringles, weird” to which I eagerly replied “What? You have Pringles! Where?” Before we left, they gave us one of the biggest compliments that we had received because apparently we were much more jovial than any other team so far “If I ever do one of these races, I want to race with you guys!” We then slowly and painfully hiked 45 minutes down to a parking lot to await the arrival of our shuttle.

We get to the parking lot and nobody is there yet, just two cars, the CP girls’ truck and a white Subaru. We lay down and eat a lot of the remaining food we were carrying. Then hallucinations round 2 began, my first moving one too. I looked at a pine tree and in the branches I could see an ogre playing a flute, not moving, I had a staring contest off and on with him for 15 minutes, he was good, better than me. Then out of the corner of my eye I see a guy about a hundred yards away walk a Weimaraner to a spot in the forest. The Weimaraner sat down and eagerly looked up at his master, and they stayed frozen like that for 20 minutes. I would’ve investigated the Weimaraner and man if my feet didn’t hurt so much, instead I fell asleep in middle of the dirt parking lot, the most comfortable dirt parking lot I’ve ever encountered by the way, and so did the rest of the team. When we woke up the Subaru was gone, we wondered what the person thought when they returned and saw us passed out in the dirt, it made us chuckle. It had now been 2 hours since our ride left the TA, which is 20-30 minutes away. The rain starts to come down and we are cursing things and we decide if it opens up any more we will get our stuff and crawl under the Toyota truck for shelter. Before the rain could get worse our ride shows up, he had been lost for the last 90 minutes or so. When he opened up his car doors he presented us with gifts, 2 pizzas and Gatorade for everyone, courtesy of Andie. I hadn’t been that excited about cold pizza since, well ever.

Jim, thinking he was giving some sort of a compliment said “Wow, your car really smells like a bowling alley!” Whether the car smelled like a bowling alley or not is irrelevant, we all stunk and a confined space made it obvious. We rode with the windows down and cranked up the radio when Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” came on as it tied into our earlier reciting of the More Cowbell skit from SNL. Somewhere along the way back to the TA we passed one of the race directors going the other way and stopped to ask him what our course was going to be. He informed us we were done, but gave us the option of doing the final biking leg. I sarcastically said that I would actually prefer another trek and he replied, oh well there’s plenty of that on the biking leg. That’s what sealed the deal for us, we weren’t doing the biking leg! It was a good decision because the other teams said it was about 50/50 hike/bike and there were countless trees fallen across the trail.

We finally met up with Andie and Barb shortly thereafter and we all returned to the finish line. We enjoyed a nice cold shower and some food and then went to sleep. Surprisingly we only slept about 9 hours before we woke up and started packing everything away. In the afternoon we went to the post-race bbq and talked to the rest of the teams, it was nice to hear that a lot of other people ran into problems at Crater Lake. I found out how small a world it was when I talked to two other people from the CU aerospace program, on two other teams, and one of which I had already worked with on the MaCH-SR1 project (my senior project). Stupid rocket scientists, what do they think they are doing entering races like this.

Some stats:

Mileage: 200-225 miles

Elevation gain: ~37,000’

Jelly Belly Sport Beans Consumed: ~720 (about 4800 calories in Jelly Bellies alone)

Time racing: ~80 hours

Time sleeping: 4 hours 20 min

Time spent lost: ~12 hours (ouch! wish that was sleeping)

Caffeine pills consumed: 3 (all in the 2^nd night)

Dangerous wildlife seen: Leech (Timberland saw a mt. lion and 3 bears though)

Weight purposefully gained prior to the race: 5 lbs (ate like I was at peak training all through my taper)

Weight lost during the race: 4 lbs

Water consumed: ~3000 oz (21 gallons in 3.5 days!)

Thanks for following me on Checkpoint Tracker everyone and for reading my report, I had fun racing it, telling people about it and writing it out for everyone as well.

-Nick

p.s. I would like to thank my sponsors: Andie, she did the best support crew job ever and all for a free pedicure.

p.p.s. I should seriously try to get some sponsorship from Jelly Belly, I eat enough of their stuff.

Mountain Adventure Race Recap Part 3

Part 3: Hallucinations, Blisters and Other Delicious Treats

We all leave the TA in a great mood; we haven’t been this chatty and elated in a while. 37 hours without sleep and counting. Rod has taken over the navigation duties to give Sara a break, we wanted to make some good progress in the 3 hours of sunlight we had left. Rod convinces us to bushwhack to cut out roughly ½ a mile to get to the trail we want. Even though our feet were screaming at us to take the trail, we began to bushwhack. Rod had showed us all the map and what we were shooting for, it looked straight forward. We were to go until we hit the drainage and then the trail should be on the other side of the drainage. We get to the drainage, it’s stuffed full of dead fall. The other side of the drainage has a lot of deadfall too, but we see a faint trail. We assume the trail hasn’t been used in a long time and continue up the drainage, very slow going. We get further and further along, the trail is no longer there, but we’ve convinced ourselves that we are getting close to the saddle that we want and then hopefully the trail will be there. Climbing over logs, under logs, on top of logs, logs crumbling as we put weight on them. Finally, we decide the best way is to go up, we had to get out of this dead fall, on more than one occasion somebody said something to the effect of “Somebody just needs to throw a match in this damn tinder box”. Rod and I top out first, we take some compass bearings to nearby peaks and it seems to match up well, we even see a trail on the saddle below us, but the saddle is like 40 feet below us instead of 300 feet, and the trail was actually a rock band faking us out. Sara and Jim join us and we investigate things and we discuss things. The light bulb goes off and we realize that the slope we came up was running East-West, not North-South like we wanted. We all had missed it, we were on top of the wrong mountain. Lesson learned, trust the topography on the map, it doesn’t change. Using the last of the daylight we hurried back down the mountain and quickly found the beautiful wide highway of a trail that we should have been on. 3 hours blown because none of use realized we were looking for the 2^nd drainage, not the first.

We made it to the top of the saddle a little after sunset. It was getting dark fast, our conversation had died down and I was realizing how solar-powered I really am. At 9:45 I’m starting to get the “blinkies”, I’m fighting to stay awake and it’s only been dark for 15 minutes! I abruptly start a loud conversation with the rest of the team, I don’t really remember about what, but I burned up the only joke I could remember, “How many A.D.D. kids does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Nobody is being very chatty back to me, this makes it difficult to stay awake via conversation. Finally, at 10:30 I give in, time to grab the hammer and break the glass in case of emergency; I opened up the caffeine pills. Each pill is equal to 1 cup of coffee and since I don’t ever have any caffeine I take one. The sleep monsters are tugging on my eyelids pretty heavily now and the hallucinations are beginning. Every white rock I see is either a discarded Styrofoam coffee cup or a baggie full of electrolyte drink mix, I test them all with my trekking poles. Look! A giant lizard! Nope just a stick, wait that’s a lizard! Nope, damn sticks. Then the oddest hallucination yet, in the leaves of a plant I see, plain as day, the face of my white cat, sticking his tongue out at me. When will this caffeine ever kick in! Jim needs to fill his water bladder, he lost half of it to a leak earlier in the trek, so we stop to fill it at a stream and I take the opportunity to try and rest a little. I didn’t fall asleep, but I think lying on the ground for 5 minutes, on the most comfortable decomposing log I’ve ever encountered by the way, helped the caffeine work into my system. We continue and I’m now awake and chatty as ever, it’s my goal to get everyone as awake as I am. I ask questions to each individual, not allowing a one or two word answer to suffice. Soon, we’re to the first CP of the leg, sweet. We continue on and my caffeine is wearing off, now whenever anyone has to take a nature break the other three of us take the chance to lie down. Pop another pill, it has been 3 hours since the last one. This pill doesn’t perk me up as much as the other, the trail keeps climbing and we’re all fighting to stay awake, Jim and Rod both give in too “Fine, give me a damn evil caffeine pill.” About 2/3^rd of the way to the next CP Jim has to “build a cairn” (nature was calling), the other three of us lay down in middle of the trail , the most comfortable trail I’ve ever encountered by the way, and I’m out instantly. I don’t remember it but apparently Jim came back and said he wanted a little rest and I said “You better set an alarm if you want any rest.” Jim set his watch alarm and ten minutes later we were all up and going again after a weird 15-20 minute pseudo sleep.

Trudging along, dodging downed trees, and then the trail disappears, we look all over and a two person team catches us while we’re looking. With all of us looking we find it again after about 45 mintues. The two person team is feeling stronger and they go ahead, we trod along eventually topping out a little over 10,000’ a little before sunrise. We descend and this is when our feet begin to really hurt, but the foot pain cannot help me stay awake, where’s the sun!? The sun mercifully rises and after about 45 minutes of sunlight in my face I’m back awake. We roll into the TA at 7 something in the morning. We all drink and eat a little and decide to take a nap. I took care of my feet before going to sleep and had my “pro” moment; I was draining my left little toe (80% of the toe was a blister) and when I punctured it, it squirted out several feet, jut like on TV! I lay down, wide awake, it takes at least 15 minutes for me to fall asleep, ridiculous. It was our first real sleep in 51 hours. I wake up after 45 minutes of sleep in an incredible sweat, the sun is blazing and the tent is an oven; Andie hands me a cold wet towel and I go outside to sleep. A little over an hour later Andie wakes me up, the team is up, the other 4-person team is in, we have to get going. I’m in bad shape the hot sweaty sleep has left me low on water and electrolytes. I hop on the bike, I’m now belching once or twice every minute, my stomach is complaining about something. Andie would later tell me that she was just about crying when she saw me leave; I looked like I was in really bad shape.

The start of the bike was 7 kilometers of downhill, just what I needed. I had warned the team that I may need a tow during this leg, but by the time the descent was done I had cooled back down, and had taken in a lot of food, water and electrolytes, though the belching persisted for another hour or so. We climbed up a small hill and a few people exclaimed at how hard the climb was, I thought it wasn’t bad, a good sign that I had recovered from my funk, though I wasn’t going to press my luck by towing someone just yet. The first CP was a little tricky, but we figured that we got it in the average time of the other teams, as we were approaching it we saw the 4 person team that had passed us leaving it, we were closing. I had familiarized myself with the map and I felt like I was a General directing an army on the move, giving loud commands to the rest of the team and descriptions detailed enough that nobody had questions. A little more climbing and then a beautiful fast singletrack descent. This descent was loose so once again Jim was a little slow, nobody cared though. I let Sara pass as she was following closely and I didn’t want the crasher to crash because of something I do, big mistake. Sara shoots off ahead and I wait to see Rod and Jim and then continue. I descend past a few people that were hiking up and meet Sara at the bottom at the next CP. “Did that woman back there have her top on when you went by? she asked. “Yeah, why?” I said, slightly confused. “She was topless when I went by, and she asked if there were any guys coming down behind me.” Missed opportunity, I knew I should’ve stayed in the lead.

Now we were on the road, a quick ride through some farm country and then we turned up the canyon again. Sara was feeling fine, but couldn’t keep up with the pace we were all cranking out so I hooked up a tow. Rod and I traded off on towing Sara while Jim stayed at the front of the paceline. Soon we were passing a campground and I suggested that we go in and soak our legs in the river, the heat was picking up now. Reluctantly they all agreed and we took a 10 minute siesta in the river. BT, I thank you for teaching me the benefits of cold river water on tired legs. I was the only one to sit fully in the river, everyone else were just feet soakers, but everybody loved it. We considered a soaking at every stream crossing from then on. This was the best TA yet, we roll in and Andie is dumbfounded. We told her it would be 7 hours, 4 hours later we show up! She’s really excited for us, the other 4 person team is nowhere to be seen yet. I love it when she’s this excited, it happened before in the Moab race when I rolled by her in 3^rd place with 2^nd just seconds in front of me, her excitement really pumps me up. Everyone was stunned at how fast we did it, we were 2 hours faster than Team Timberland, the pro team that was in the lead; we were the fastest team through that segment, even with our river leg soak.

We transitioned while the other team’s support crew talked to us and fed us lies about there teams whereabouts (those guys were always trying to slow us down, trickery). Sometime during the transistion, I heard that our next leg was 45 miles of trekking. I was secretly panicking, not wanting to show it to my team though. 45 miles, that would be the longest trek I’ve ever done, and my feet hurt already. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure Sara would make it, I had seen her feet, they were the worst of the bunch. Jim now had both ankles hurting, he had them both taped and was wearing three braces between the 2 ankles.

Stay tuned for the finale Part 4: The Calm Before the Storm Before the Calm.

Mountain Adventure Race Recap Part 2

Part 2: Biking and Hiking and Bears, oh my!

Sunset 1 (My new race time telling method, it’s too tiring to look at my watch) Transition Area – We arrived at the TA and were elated; the death march was over, and there were two other teams at the TA with us. We go over to our support crew, and I’m completely stunned; Andie must’ve been on Pimp my TA or something, because we were definitely hooked up. Andie had been taking notes from some pro-team TA’s and had set us up a tarp with a chair in every corner and each of us had our 2 gear boxes next to our chairs. The stove was going and before we even got our shoes off we heard “Who wants pasta?”, four enthusiastic “I do” replies quickly followed. Andie and Barb hurried around filling our water bottles and hydration bladders, asking us questions and keeping us excited about the race. We were all checking out the condition of our feet, nobody was doing exceptionally well, but nobody was too bad off either. I drained the blister on the side of my heel and then re-taped my feet. I went to put on my bike shoes, and they weren’t even close to fitting. I had heard of this happening before, I just expected it days into the race, not hours. My feet had swollen a full size larger, they weren’t so much longer as they were wider. Luckily, I had a second pair of bike shoes with me that were larger, my normal bike shoes were just dead weight in my gear box, there was no way my feet were going to get smaller during the race.

We left the TA after about an hour, not exactly competitive-pro pace, but the comforts of the TA and our support crew were tough to leave. It was now completely dark and we all departed wearing multiple layers and bike lights blazing. The start of the ride was wonderful; it was a climb, of course, but it was the perfect gradient that our weary legs never forced us to walk, we just kept on grinding away and enjoyed not having to walk or run. As we got deeper into the trees and further away from the low lying areas with water the temperature rose, so we stripped off our extra layers pretty quickly. While taking our layers off I statused everyone, all felt good, though we were all sucking down large amounts of water, we think the pasta was making us thirsty. We kept up our charge along the course, knowing that there were two teams within 30 minutes of us, and Andie had let us know that the 4-person right in front of us were having girl problems. The Yoga Slackers’ girl teammate had been sick, only being able to eat half a power bar all day long, and I don’t think that even stayed down very long. We topped out on the climb and even though the 25 year old race maps weren’t showing all the details of the trail (hello switchbacks!), we were confident in our position on the map and our direction. After a short fast descent we came around a bend and went past the 4 person team immediately in front of us while they were studying the map. We were excited and then quickly after that we passed two other teams consulting maps. We were on fire!, no wait, we were lost and just didn’t know it yet.

We reach what looked like the road we should intersect, hang a left and then start looking for our next turn, it’s not there. That’s ok, 25 year old maps, let’s go a little further, the trail turns North, definitely wrong. We go back to where we think the trail should be, nothing there, except now there are about 4 teams riding all around the area trying to figure this out. We ride down a fast little descent and then a sound comes from my rear tire at about 20 mph, BANG, Hisssssssss, BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGABANG. We stop to check out what that was all about, obviously I had a flat. I flip my bike over and spin the wheel, clang clang clang, sounds like a broken spoke hitting my frame, crap. I get out my headlamp and we are relieved to see that I had hit a 4 inch rusty nail that was protruding out of my tire and hitting my frame. A quick change out of the tube and pump up from a CO2 cartridge and we’re going again; I’ve heard that Team Nike (current AR World Champs) can change a tube out in 1.5 minutes flat, I was a bit slower at around 5 minutes. Back at the turn where we think we should see the trail, Sara and Rod look over the map and I take the opportunity to answer the call of nature. As I go through about 10 feet of brush I pop out onto a road, eureka! I quickly tell the others and we investigate after I take care of business. We think we hit the jackpot as no other team has found this and we are currently out of sight of the others. We descend on the road and it gets rougher as we go, then about ¾ of a mile into it the road dies. We slog our bikes back up the hill as this is not rideable in the up direction. Time to go back further.

We backtrack to a place were we were certain of our location, coincidentally it is the same location were we passed several teams looking at maps. While Rod and Sara look over the map again Jim and I lay in the dirt to try and rest a little. No sleep came, but lying down felt nice. Finally, after ten minutes we all get up and go off in a new direction, woohoo the trail we want, we think. We go along for a while and then finally see a sign, yes we were in fact on the correct trail now, just three hours lost, that’s all. When you’re lost and it’s in that 1-4 a.m. time block you definitely start thinking about how stupid it is to not be sleeping if you’re not making progress anyways. The trail is very fun through this part, small climbs, smooth swooping descents, we’re making good time. At one point I was leading and noticing that we had all been quiet for a while and all of our bikes were running pretty silent so I yelled out a “Hey Bear” to let any wildlife know that we are there and we’re coming; of course, yelling “Hey Bear!” at 3 a.m. without any warnings to your team mates will freak them out a little bit. Lesson learned, don’t yell any phrase with “bear” in it while traveling in bear country, I changed over to “Hidey-Ho” and “Marco”, no bear ever replied with “Polo”.

At some point I started to smell smoke, a little odd I thought the fires were far away. The smoke kept getting thicker, we could see it in our light beams, and soon I had to pull over to eat and drink something as the smoke was making me a little nauseous. We weren’t near the fires, but the lack of winds made the smoke from the Yellowstone fires settle right upon us. The rest of the night time was filled with nice smooth riding through the smoke and the cursing of map inaccuracies.

Sunrise 2 – We stop to double check the map, we’re on course, and I force the team to not dawdle as a cow near us had a case of diarrhea and I swear if I had to stand there any longer I’m puking. We roll into the next CP while the sun was still low in the sky, there are other teams there, we’re all still clumped together. We dawdle a bit on purpose as some of the teams left in a direction we thought stupid, and we did not want to encourage anyone to follow us to the better route. We were going to take a risk and assume that the road that the map said wasn’t complete in 1983 would be complete by now. We head out with only one team at the CP with us, and they evidently did not want to follow the only team that went the other way. We go down and we want to try and cut across some country to catch some descending switchbacks. We dive off onto a cow trail that might take us there, after riding along that for a while it’s obvious that cows are dumb and don’t know the fastest way to get down from this mountain. Lesson learned, you’ll get nowhere following a cow trail, and don’t ride with your mouth open when on them. We haul our bikes back up to the road and just follow it. The jumble of roads the map shows is non-existent, it’s a beautiful road that goes right where we want it too. On the descent we encountered the genius cow trail builders hanging out on the road, I found out that they can easily run 20 mph when they want and with four people you can use mountain bikes to herd cattle. Soon enough we found out that the road was complete, good, that’ll help make up for being lost for 3 hours.

The next CP came and the two guys there were stunned to see us, they expected there own team to be there, we whooped them by taking the fast way, they left the last CP 3 minutes ahead of us, but got to this CP 1 hour 23 minutes behind us. We all used the toilet there, which was pleasantly stocked with TP , wet wipes and hand sanitizer; a luxury outhouse if I’ve ever seen one. We left the CP after a short chat with the guys there, it turns out they were trying to distract us to slow us down and let their team catch up, trickery! We were now in 4^th place and spirits were high. We rode the roads over to the next CP where we caught Yoga Slackers as they were just leaving, their girl had just had to throw in the towel and the guys were now continuing as a three person team; we had just moved up to 3^rd in our division, podium baby!

The next stretch was awful, a hike-a-bike that was relentless and we were in the midday heat. When we finally reached the top we were relieved, we continued on to find the next trail, it was worse. It took us 1.5 hours to go ¾ of a mile, oh yeah and gained about 1200’ in elevation and the trail was only about 8 inches wide, had some serious exposure on one side and had trees fallen across the trail all over the place, hardest “biking” of the race by far. Rod and I were both nearly out of water, again (we were drinking like we were in college again), so we stop at a stream and fill up, cold water is yummy. We keep on rolling through some nice flowing meadows and then the crashes begin. Sara was the first to go, standard over the bars for her, really it wouldn’t be racing if she didn’t crash a couple of times. Next crash, Sara again, not sure how, just heard it. Third crash, Jim, the roadie was getting a quick lesson on descending on tight steep loose terrain. 4^th crash, Sara again, this time I was laughing, she was still clipped in and landed in a creek, painful, but funny. 5^th crash (pseudo), Rod was trying to get through a short mud hole and didn’t notice the giant wheel sucking mud hole beyond it, came to a dead halt, managed to clip out, but placed his right foot directly into the stinky mud up to mid-calf, I laughed again. 6^th crash, Jim again. 7^th crash, Sara. 8^th crash, Jim again and the swearing has begun, words were flowing for a minute or two. I don’t know how I came through the Bermuda Triangle of bike crashes that we just went through unscathed, but I was glad for it. Last route decision for this section and I convinced everyone to go a different way than we had planned (I think not crashing gave me a little trail cred there), smooth sailing to the TA, and the race director told us that the route we took was about 30 minutes faster than the other, hooray me, I’ll make up for that time savings later though. About 80 miles covered, 9000’ of vertical, and another 400 oz of water or so.

The TA was once again beautiful, this time we were on waterfront property. We took our time, nobody really wanting to put on their running shoes again. We had some food, talked to Andie and the race director, cleaned up in the lake. Finally, after Andie had fed and watered all of us, we headed out on the course again, we had about 3.5 hours of sunlight left and we wanted to make good use of it. As were were leaving we saw that the 2^nd place team had just finished the trekking leg and were heading out on their bikes again, 3 strong. The Mergeo.com team lost their female to illness as well, we were in 2^nd if we finished this leg and left on the bikes as a foursome.

Stay tuned for Part 3: Hallucinations, Blisters and Other Delicious Treats