Recently in race report Category

Just finished what is easily in the running for my best day of skiing ever. 

I've literally been planning this thing for years. We lucked out in that an access road is plowed this winter, cutting several miles off the trip. It was possible to complete this in about 9 hours instead of requiring an overnight.

And it was even better than I expected, despite spring-like conditions. 

What? No, Utah is next week. 

And as much as that costs it better be completely mindblowing when I've got this in my backyard:

Oh yeah, we also had another fatbike race on Saturday.  This one was on some trails I'm very familiar with at MTU. That, combined with the big ring on my Pugs (something a lot of fatbikes don't have) let me beat quite a few people who normally finish far ahead of me.  Sadly though, this was just an all out hammerfest, completely redlined the entire duration of the race, which kind of gets away from what I like about fatbiking.  But the organizers agree that throwing in some singletrack next year sounds like a good idea, so this race has some potential.  

That's what it means when I come in 47th at the Noquemanon Snowbike World Championships, right? 

So yeah, it's a good thing my folks came into town to say hi, otherwise I never would have made it past L'Anse. Apparently they got pounded with nearly 18" of snow the night before. 

What? No, I would not have skipped a bike race to go skiing!

I, um.... don't like to drive in the snow.  Yeah, that's it.  

But hey, it was cool to say hi to all the Marquette peeps and check out all the snowbikes.  Lots of stock Mukluks and Pugsleys, but also a lot of cool, customized rides. Even amongst the horribly uncool folks like like me without a totally custom setup, it's nearly impossible to find two bikes alike (check out my red cables, yo!) 

But hey, it's race start time- everybody line up! 

Now ok, I'll admit it. I'm not really very good at this snowbiking thing. I'm totally squirrelly. I spin out a lot. I go shooting across the trail in weird directions without warning. I like to crash a lot.  And I'm slow. Real slow. 

So I took a nice conservative spot towards the back and didn't dive into the melee at the start. Which is a good thing. Because we immediately started making sharp right turns before getting to a stretch of ungroomed soft snow.   Where we all had to jump off our bikes and start running....

...and running...

...and running... 

...I guess it's a bike race in that, yes- I am pushing my bicycle. Nobody ever said anything about riding it. 

There was one stretch that wasn't so bad, but man- nearly the entire first half of the course was basically unrideable. But hey, it was beautiful day, and we got to hikeabike past some stuff that looked like it might be good fun to come back and ski.

But then, finally- the course went from unrideable to perfectly groomed, nearly entirely downhill racetrack, packed in even more by the 50-odd people in front of me. 

Holy man. It's a good thing those ski trails are wide, I was going faster than I'd go on my mountain bike in the summer. I went flying past maybe 6 people in the last 7k and finished just behind a 7th for 47th out of 67 people.   And I thought I'd never use the big ring on my Pugs... 

Hung out at the finish hoping to score a new set of tires in the raffle, but no dice. Had a couple hours of daylight to kill on the way back home, so stopped off to check out a potential route into some new ski terrain we've been eyeing up and get my favorite kind of fatbiking in- exploring new territory while taking in the natural beauty of the UP.

This year was tough.  

A couple of key organizers decided to take a long deserved break and the rest of us had to step up to take up the slack.  This had me doing a lot more organizer type things in addition to my regular rallymaster duties. Mostly this involved calling people on the phone and asking them for things. I hate sales.  But what are you gonna do?

Not ride your bike much and get incredibly stressed out it seems. 

Plus, I've kind of had a bad attitude about the sport of rally as of late. It seems I hear no end of bitching every time I try to include a cool two track stage or we don't finish in time for people to get to the bar. Add in the spiraling cost of competition that's driven away many of my friends and I was convinced that the sport was largely being overtaken by a bunch of dandies. 

Usually, my duties start to wind down a bit the week before the rally, and if I've done my job right, I can start to enjoy the event. Not so this year. I immediately had to switch into the Chief of Communications hat and recruit about 25 qualified radio operators, set up a net control station, and figure out how to run a net for a rally.  My buddy Dave saved my ass in countless ways on this one- getting me the local ham contacts, setting us up in the CCRAA radio shack for net control and generally bringing a lot of expertise and equipment that I am sorely lacking in. 

So there I am, Friday morning of the rally, already way behind on sleep and I just want to get through it as quickly as possible so I can go up to Copper Harbor, ride my bike, and get my new kayak. And then never ever organize another rally again.

We kind of got tossed into the fire on net control, but we were figuring it out.  Casual comments from previous net control operators got us moving in the correct direction and horrendous weather conditions out on the stages were keeping spectator and civilian problems at bay.

And then, finally- on the last stage of the night, we had or first "problem".  Car zero came back and said we should just skip it.  It sounded like the stage was passable, but very very muddy.  Unable to come up with a suitable plan to navigate the cars back to service, I agreed to transit the stage. Car zero came back and said if I'm going to send them down it, I might as well let them compete. There may have been some egging on by a long time competitor working the finish control too.  Go ahead and run it...

I think I can safely use the word "epic" here.  6 cars off, nearly a quarter of the remaining field. Stories of one particular driver who was giving a full on, 11/10ths driving performance when his co-driver looked over and told him he was doing upwards of 25mph.  And comments like "Sorry, no car count- our log sheets have disintegrated in the rain." It took a while, but we got everybody out of the woods safely. I was back at the hotel and in bed by 4am, but couldn't sleep. I was stoked! Finally, rally was cool again.  It was an epic battle of will against the elements! Forget winning, just getting through those conditions was an accomplishment worth celebrating. Here was rally's chance to prove it's mettle to me... 

We certainly had our challenges the next day, including a stuck transmitter that forced us to transit a stage and do an emergency frequency change, but we had mastered the basic routine of getting a stage up and running. We even made it down to the banquet to catch the last few scraps of food on the buffet (not that we need it, Dave's wife was feeding us pretty well that whole weekend).

During the awards ceremony, rally made me proud. Everybody agreed it was a horrendous, difficult night. But the attitude was, "that's what makes this cool". I didn't hear a single complaint about running that last stage.  Spent the night drinking beer, shaking hands, thanking the people on the ground that made net control so much easier for us, and talking about "next year!".

Kind of an exciting weekend for staring at this for nearly 40 hours straight:

I won't delve too deep into it, but man... the rally is just killing me this year. 

So I was really, really looking forward to a weekend off to head over to Duluth to race 100 miles of the Minnesota Arrowhead's finest gravel  in this year's Heck of the North. 

This summer though, I finally dialed in the perfect rack setup on the ol' Jake and I'm reluctant to strip it down for 'cross season and gravel road racing again. I've got a Salsa Fargo frame waiting to get built up, but funding has not been approved as of yet. So I did the rational thing and threw some drop bars on my single speed mountain bike. Sure, I have all of two 'cross races under my belt with this setup, but all my fellow alt/hipster, beer swilling, beard sporting, single speed riders agree, it's a pretty sweet setup. So it must be perfect for a gravel road race.  Did I mention I left the 32x17 gearing on it? And the 29x2.55 tires?  This not unlike entering a rally in a one ton diesel truck on 44" super swampers. And then leaving the transfer case in low range.... 

The start went well, if you call "well" getting completely and utterly dropped.  Hard. Seems 32x17 ain't much good for anything above 15mph.  But who cares? It's a beautiful day on the north shore of Superior in prime color season.  Why rush through it? 

I was having a grand old time, kibitzing with my fellow riders, enjoying the day, and then we hit the first snowmobile trail section.  The Heck is unique amongst gravel road races in that it throws in these 1 mile sections that are damn near impossible to ride through completely.  But my monstercross setup could ride a lot more than most people, and faster too!  So I found myself passing a lot of people.  Hoo boy, looks like I'm racing. 

After that first snowmobile section, I made my big bad decision. I found myself riding with a couple of guys, pushing 16-17mph. Definitely on the high end of my cadence abilities, but manageable.  Or so it seemed. 

So I came screaming into the halfway checkpoint with them and suddenly realized what I had done.  My legs felt like lead. No other way to describe it. I've never had my legs feel like this. I could still mash, but just couldn't get them to spin at any decent cadence. 

So for the next 35 miles or so, I was kind of riding my own ride. Doing the recovery thing. Singing to myself. Have you seen the new Powderwhores trailer? As per usual, I like the song. In this case, "Bugs" by O'Death. Which means I watched their video.   



Which is kind of creepy.  And seems to be shot someplace along the Heck of the North course.  I was always half expecting one of these weird woods people to be standing back in the trees as I rode past. 

But the next person I saw was my teammate, Bruce at about mile 90. I sort of dropped him for a little bit, but realized I had nothing to really try and prove in this race.  Singlespeed with a low gear had kicked my ass hard and merely finishing was something to be happy about.  So I rode (and walked up Pleasant View Road- man, that road was not named by a bicyclist!) the last few miles in with him to the finish. 

Oddly enough, I finished 15 minutes earlier than last year. 

The Heck continues to be my favorite gravel road race ever.  Just can't beat the setting and some of the unique challenges of it. It's a tough time of year for me fitness wise with work and rally responsibilities, so it's a real challenge too. But now I'm intrigued by this single speed thing. I wonder what I could do with a bigger gear?  

162 (actually, 157) miles of southeast Minnesota gravel roads.

90 people thought it was a good idea this winter to sign up for this.

Given the forecast for rain and cold on race day, only 57 folks showed up at registration.

Only 25 managed to cross the finish line. 

I was the last to do so before the "official" cut-off time of 15 hours.

Now, I'm sure there was a great reason I signed up for this. Probably something about fitness, health and personal accomplishment fit for the cheery pages of "Bicycling" magazine or somesuch. 

Those folks of the same mindset probably did the sensible thing and stayed at home and rode their trainers. 

Only those with darker, ulterior motives found themselves in the parking lot of the Spring Valley high school parking lot at 7am on a cold rainy morning. The usual, lighthearted, startline banter was kept to a minimum. These men and women were here to commit unspeakable acts against man, machine and soul in hopes of finding just where their breaking point was. 

And many did. 

I love when success or failure in a race is decided not by how many hours I trained, or how crisp and clean my new whiz-bang gruppo shifts, but by things like keeping my route instructions from disintegrating in the rain and how many pieces of pizza I can shove in my mouth at once. 

Thankfully, I've actually endured worse conditions on the back of a motorcycle of all things, so I was able to stay pretty positive through the whole event. As long as I kept moving, I stayed warm. Quitting actually became too complicated of an option after the last major city at mile 60. It would mean having to find shelter, making contact with my teammate who hopefully finished his 100 mile ride, and organizing transportation back to the start.  No, it was just easier to keep the pedals turning over and plodding down the course. 

This race became especially tough as I essentially had to do the entire thing solo. There was no drafting to help me through the cold winds. Everybody near the back of the pack was dropping out of the race. I saw all of two riders during the last 100 miles.

I finished out the last 10 miles in the dark, 17 minutes shy of the official cut off time of 15 hours.

Of course, the problem I face now is this- I still haven't found my limit. I've still never DNFed a race. What do I do next?

My legion of fanS (Yes, it's plural now!) have been demanding an update. With less writing and more pictures. 

So yes, I did finish out the tour. Riding through the Traverse City area reminded me of all the reasons I stayed in the UP. I cut the trip back up through WI a bit short as it was pretty hot, and this being my 3rd time on the same route, I was getting a little bored of it.  All in all, another great tour though. I could do this for the rest of my life if I had too. More pictures here.


But then it was back to racing...

The 2010 UP State Singlespeed Championships went pretty well. I had a sprint to the finish to come in just behind last year's UP State singlespeed champion.  I still really like the Deer Chase. It's probably the only MTB race I really do anymore for the racing.
 

Somewhere in there, I started organizing a team for the upcoming Gentlemen's Ride in MN the next month.  One of my teammates came over to the UP to do some riding with me and we rode from my house down to Eagle River, WI for the Central ADV Rally. We stuck with mostly gravel roads on the way down and it turned into quite the adventure- what with the moose encounter, and finishing out the last 20 miles in the dark on a sandy two track with minimal lighting.  We took surprisingly little crap for showing up at a motorcycle rally in spandex trousers on bicycles. As always, a hell of a party. The hangover was mostly gone by the time I finished the 100 mile grind back north.  At least I fared better than the two guys who woke up at the campground literally days after the rally ended concluding an epic bender.
 


After that it was off to Fat Tire up in copper harbor.  Weather was a little crappy this year, so I neglected to ride up and also skipped out on the Super D the day before leaving the title of Central Upper Northern Midwest But Not Wisconsin Touring/XC/Downhill title up for grabs. Sadly, there were no contenders so my title is still safe.  I showed up with my 29er, did the long race and felt I did pretty good, but I was just kind of reminded that the better I get at XC MTB racing, the more I seem to dislike it.  I love riding single track, but racing on it just seems to suck the fun out of it. You're either going too fast trying to make time, or too slow because some doofus is in front of you. Then you're stuck racing like a total tool just to maintain your position when you can. It's quickly becoming not worth it anymore.  Thankfully, Fat Tire has a great party afterwards and that's always fun....

I think cyclocross started shortly thereafter.  And, well... I still love CX, but with my move to "Eh" class, things didn't go as well.  A bunch of other guys made the jump as well, but the racing just wasn't the same. Our little pack was totally broken up and a lot of the fun of CX was missing.  I did run one race in the "Bees", gave it my all and still came in fourth with some great racing. I hate any semblance of sandbagging, but it's not like I'm waltzing up to the podium if I move back in 2011.  We'll see....


The we had the Gentemen's Ride, a rendition of the Almanzo 100 that must be completed as a team of four riders. I recruited one of my imaginary internet motorcycle friends and a couple of my teammates and had a pretty good time on this. The slightly slower pace allowed me to enjoy the course more and I think I made a few converts to gravel road racing as well. 

Shortly thereafter was the Heck of the North, another gravel road race in Duluth, MN.  Absolutely, stunningly, beautiful course right in peak color season on the North Shore of MN.  Too bad my fitness level wasn't up to the challenge. The start was a little rough and it took me a while to find my rhythm. I eventually pulled through with a respectable finish, but I'm looking forward to getting back in 2011 for revenge. Gotta get a plug in here for the cool folks that run the Gardenwood resort just north of Duluth. Great hosts for the weekend!

And that kind of finished us out... Honestly, I was getting pretty anxious for ski season.

So apparently, "The Killer Gravel Road Race" didn't quite scare my dad off from bicycle racing. Earlier this summer he expressed interest in maybe doing a mountain bike race too.  When he found out about 12 hours of Potluck, and the informal "Best Dish" award, he announced- without hesitation that he was in it.  To win.  He might even ride a bike too.  

I did this one last year for Fat Tire and have been looking for a good opportunity to do it again. Bikepack to a race, carrying whatever I need for raceday and camping there with me on the bike.  And it goes without saying I race whatever bike I ride there too. 

Miner's Revenge was the perfect race to do this. The race is only maybe 35 miles from my house and a weekend of camping is just part of the event with plenty of nice spots right on site.  Plus it's kind of a technical course with lots of opportunities to hurt myself by riding over my head, so knowing I have to get me and the bike back home under my own power is kind of a good motivator to chill out a bit.

The big plan was to leave Friday right after work and take the long way there, camping along the way someplace.  It's usually a nice idea in theory, but rarely works out for me. Instead, I found myself packing for the trip at midnight and on the road the next morning at 7:30AM.  I was hoping to stick with dirt as much as possible, but a navigational error put me behind schedule a little more than I'd like. (Did you know there's a drainage ditch between Greenland, MI and my house named "Greenland"? My GPS does.)  I hopped out on the pavement for the last 15-20 miles into Mass City and cranked her up making it to registration with minutes to spare.  A side benefit of this was that everybody coming from Marquette for the race that morning now knew me as the doofus that rode his bike to the race. 

The race went well. I started in the back and managed to work my way up a bit on the climbs, but took it easy on the descents. I managed to avoid getting into the red mist of racing too much and had an enjoyable ride, joking with folks on the trail and really enjoying the new singletrack.  Rob and his crew have been hard at work and have built some awesome new trails out there. I wish I could have made it down to help them out this year, but they seem to be getting along fine without me right now.  I also just plain flat out enjoy this event. A lot of traditional mountain bike races are lacking in technical challenges. Not so here, and it's certainly not lacking in aerobic challenges either. You have to be a strong all around rider to excel at this event. Which is probably why I finished way in the back. But finish, I did- with me and the bike in one piece.  

Shortly thereafter, a friend of mine showed up with a cooler full of beer. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the Coors Light, or maybe it was just the fact that he had a truck and could haul the twisted remains of me and the bike home if it didn't work out, but I decided to do the downhill event as well.  I figured I was in way over my head when I was the only one at the start line in spandex on a bike sporting a rear rack instead of rear suspension. Nonetheless, I managed to post some not totally embarrassing times. The course was a fun and it was worth the $10 entry fee just to ride in a 6x6 Pinzgauer up the old ski hill to the start.

We set to work on the rest of the beer around the bonfire that night and it wasn't too long before I wandered off and passed out in my bivy sack for the night.  I woke up feeling pretty good, but there was a low point early on that I report with much sorrow. I was handed my first significant defeat of the season by Grandma's Cafe in Mass City, MI.  Usually, there are several foodstuffs that I never really fill up on, I just merely run out- pancakes being one of them.  Well, Grandma's serves a pretty colossal pile and I was forced to admit defeat and not finish them. 

The ride home proved pretty uneventful and I managed to avoid most of the rain.  I'm getting my bikepacking setup a little more dialed in. I think I'm going to need a tent to keep doing this comfortably in the midwest, but I was only an extra pair of bikeshorts away from having everything I needed to keep pedaling for a whole week with me on this trip. I'm looking forward to my next bikepacking trip to Copper Harbor for Fat Tire.  

"Dude, how'd it go?"  

That's what the nice lady on horseback at Forestville State Park wanted to know. 

I mean, there's got to be one heck of a prize involved that would lead 200+ people to race down 100 miles of dusty Minnesota gravel roads on bicycles, right? 

As we were all cramming food down our throats, guzzling water, and making some last minute adjustments to get us through the final 40 miles of the day somebody managed to answer her question- 

"A jar of rocks."  

After previously questioning us on how many we were, where we had been and how far we had come, she was suddenly out of questions.  We were clearly all complete nut jobs who were liable to spook the horses. 

Honestly, I was beginning to question my own sanity a bit too.  I went into this 2010 rendition of the Almanzo 100 with no idea what to expect.  I felt I had a pretty good showing at the Ragnarok 105, but that was over a month ago. I had just returned from my annual week and a half long One Lap of America jaunt where my only exercise consisted of adjusting the power seats in a BMW 335d to encompass my rapidly expanding ass as I hopped from Waffle House to Waffle House across the heartland of America. 

I figured I'd be pretty happy with another 8 hour 100 mile gravel grind, but I wasn't making any bets.  I was packing a little extra water and food in case I was out there for a 12 hour haul.  I had maybe 4-5 solid hours on the bike since I returned from my trip and while I felt strong, I had no idea how my endurance would hold up. So I took a conservative midpack starting position and started easy. 

And then started passing people. 

Lots and lots of people. 

And then I latched onto a group of 2-5 people just slightly faster than me and we kept it up until the ranks thinned out and it was just us out there.  Sometimes we pushed hard, sometimes we kept it at conversation pace. But we kept the pace up and held our position. We'd pick off the occasional straggler, but nobody was getting by us.

That "slightly faster" part stand out at all? Yeah, it became readily apparent to me too by mile 50, but I managed to hold on until the 60 mile checkpoint.  I figured at that point I could let them go and keep a casual pace for the rest of the ride and enjoy it.  Because, well- a self assessment here was not yielding positive results. I was hurting in ways I had never hurt before and had no effective strategy to deal with it.

Now, for whatever reason- and I'd like to think it's because I maybe helped pull for approximately 45 seconds of the 4 hours we had been pedaling thus far, they asked if I was going to continue on with them.  Or maybe it they just felt bad for the fat kid who drove down from Michigan for this thing or maybe just found it kind of funny how I'd occasionally stuff three Fig Newtons in my mouth and then try to keep breathing. 

Anyway, I jumped at the opportunity and almost immediately knew I was in over my head.  I was struggling to hang on to the tail of the group. It was just a matter of when I would get dropped. And sure enough, on a rough climb after the water crossing (Yes, there was a stream crossing in this race. And it was totally awesome. And refreshing.), they started to pull away. 

I gave it a go trying to hang on, as we only had twenty miles left but that was it. I was done. Down to the littlest chainring for a couple of miles. It was all I could do just to keep the pedals turning over.  Surprisingly, only maybe 10 people caught up to me in this time.  I managed to recover a bit and pick up the pace a little on the home stretch with only a few more people making a sprint to the end getting by me. 

Craig Linder managed to get a few awesome pictures of me. 

Just before the pack really started to thin around mile 40:


And about 10 miles from the finish.  With visions of "Grainbelt" brand beer dancing in my head:


I pulled in with a 6:39 finish time.  Good enough for 51st.  Out of 267 official finishers? I'm amazed.  It's enough to make we want to take this gravel grinder stuff really, really seriously. 

But I can't end this story about the Almanzo 100 without talking about the event itself. Having spent some time on the organizer side of the equation once or twice, I'm just simply in awe of what the Almanzo 100 organizer has managed to do.  From the handwritten note addressed to me in my registration packet to the heartfelt handshake from him at the end- it's a class act, all the way. And even more amazing is that he can do this all without charging anybody any entry fees.   I can't say enough good things about this race.