Yesterday I finished 57% of the Shenandoah 100. If you do your math, that's 57 miles, which put me right at Aid #4, conveniently staffed by my parents and Miss Geology. That's the second NUE race I've DNF'ed this year. The first one I was instantly ok with. Not much I can do to fix a broken freehub in the field. This one I was a little less ok with. I'm still mulling over my decision to pull out at Aid #4. I know it was the right choice, but it's still a tough decision to make. It's not like I was cramping, or bonking, or having bike issues. I was just moving really slowly. I rolled into Aid #4 (remember, that's mile 57) at around 2:00 PM, 7.5 hours after the start. I thought about it, and at the pace I was going (climbing specifically) it would have been another 5 hrs until I finished, if not more, due to late-race fatigue. I know it's kind of a lame excuse, but that finish would have put me two hours behind my PR, and an hour behind my finish time from the first time I did the race. I wasn't mentally ready for a 13 - 14 hour day, as I had been thinking I would be coming in under 10 hours. It just wasn't happening. I made it through the first climb of the day ok, spending a good bit of time climbing with Buck until he had to do his singlespeed thing on the steep parts and I elected to gear down. I made it a good bit of the way up the singletrack climb (Lynn Trail????), which was nice, but I may have burned one two many matches there, as a lot of people walk it since it's so steep and so early in the race. Coming down Wolf's Ridge, I crashed again. No tire issues, no injuries like last year, and only one bike part failure! I must have hit a soft, sandy patch because before I could actually do anything I went from railing a corner to rolling on the ground. I got up, with no injuries whatsoever, and jumped back on my bike, pedaled once and realized that something was wrong. My derailleur was no longer attached to my bike. Oops. I will give a +1 to the X12-style derailleur hangers, where the hanger itself is not meant to fail. Instead the bolt that attaches the hanger to the frame is supposed to fail, which it did, saving my derailleur and my frame from damage. I re-installed the derailleur with a new bolt and went on my way. Shifting was in no way effected, which is the way I like it.
Got to Aid #2, and made the decision to roll through without stopping. I still had food, and I still had drink. I ended up off the bike early going up Hankey Mountain, so I should have probably stopped and ate some free food. Anyway... Dowell's Draft was awesome, the folks at Aid #3 were mostly awesome. The next climb sucked balls, although I did run into a few of my fellow Darksiders as I was walking up the singletrack. They were walking down. Definitely the last people I expected to see in the GW all the way down in Virginny. Braley Pond kicked ass, and that was pretty much my race. I rode back to the campground with a group of people who had the same idea that I did.
Oh well...
In older news, I had my best race ever at the Wilderness 101 a month ago. Set a new PR of 9:10. Very happy, even though I didn't break nine hours as I had hoped.
Now is time to forget how to ride for a day on end, and remember how to ride so hard that I want to throw up after 45 minutes. This will be new, as I don't think I've done a race shorter than 4 hours since, oh, APRIL!!!
