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
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 4th 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 3rd 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. 4th crash, Sara again, this time I was laughing, she was still clipped in and landed in a creek, painful, but funny. 5th 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. 6th crash, Jim again. 7th crash, Sara. 8th 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 2nd 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 2nd if we finished this leg and left on the bikes as a foursome.
Stay tuned for Part 3: Hallucinations, Blisters and Other Delicious Treats
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