There was no marathon category for this race so I decided to enter the Cat 2 Open class, this is the old Sport class that I used to race in many years ago, despite being old enough I refused to enter the 35+ category. I didn't really have enough time to preride the course so I just checked out the beginning to see what it was going to be like at the start. This was somewhat scary as there was a pavement section that was going to rocket speeds above 30mph and then a hard right into the trails. If that wasn't bad enough, the trails kept going down until you ended up at probably the lowest part of the park, and there was some tricky logs that would not be play very nice as a crowd of riders came screaming over them...
A lot of this turned out to be a non issue as the race was started on a gravel road with a big uphill climb, this sorted out the pack quite well, it's also where I was smacked in the face with the reality of my low power and high weight, I watched the pack speed away and found myself near the back of the 20 riders in the open class and sadly there was nothing I could do about it. None the less I was right about the chaos that was going on in the trails, even though I was probably 30 seconds behind there were several guys that had bit it on those logs/roots and were just picking themselves up as I came by.
The first lap was painful, I was actually probably in 8th place at one point, and the pace was killing me, finally when I could bear it no longer I looked down at my HR monitor and quickly discovered why it hurt so much; my HR was at 191. Good in the sense that my conditioning is coming along well, but bad for this race because there was no way I could sustain that pace...
At this point I just started letting riders by, the worst part was that there was guy with a Tshirt racing and he was in front of me, only a beginner races in cotton. Still battling the mental defeat of the 12hr race, I found myself mentally weak in this race again, I had no plan of quitting, but the thought did cross my mind.
The second lap was an interesting one, it still hurt, and since the race was being ran "backward" on the trails it felt like the whole thing was uphill, there just didn't seem to be any spots to rest and if it did go downhill for awhile it didn't feel like it. On one of the uphills, I noticed a $10 bill on the ground, I was already going so slow anyway I stopped and grabbed it without even noticing I slowed down. This seemed like a good find until I thought about the fact that I paid $20 to suffer like this... The next thing I noticed was that riding this far back (I actually had no idea what place I was in by now - I assumed last) most of the guys I was riding with had minimal trial skills, not smooth at all, but it really didn't matter because as soon as we started climbing they just walked away from me and one guy literally was walking away, he was getting off his bike, and hopefully running, faster than I was riding. After noting the terrible handling skills of all the other riders, I decided to join the crowd by tackling a tree, this is first time ever I have hit a tree so hard, thank goodness is was only 3 or 4 inches in diameter, being so small it moved when I hit it and therefore probably saved me from breaking my shoulder on it. The funny part was that the guy behind me was following my lines exactly and he ran right into the tree also, I guess that will teach him for following me.
Lap 3 was really rather uneventful and the race was finally over, my time was somewhere around 1 hr 20 min, which if I were to have guessed I would have said each lap was 40 min long, I remember thinking on the first lap it was going to be a 3 hour race...
I actually finished 13th out of the 21 guys that started, better than I expected, but not the result I was hoping for.
Click Here for Garmin Connect Data - Lewis & Clarke
My day didn't end there, next I was off to Swanson park to get some more riding in, I put in another 2 hours there, grabbed a bite to eat and then went over to Tranquility for another hour before I ran out of daylight, and drove home exhausted.
Click Here for Garmin Connect Data - Swanson
Click Here for Garmin Connect Data - Tranquility
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