Fifty Seven Percent

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!!!

What's to say...

Haven't been moved to write lately.  Well, more accurately, I haven't had time to write lately.  I've been bouncing back and forth between Mar-e-land and Bethlehem (I'll let you figure out which one) for work and that has pretty much taken up all my time, both for blogging and riding unfortunately.  The rest of my time has been spent traveling.  I took a trip with Ms. Geology down to Damascus, VA for the Iron Mountain 100k, a little bike race that is fulfilling my goal to pay Chris Scott's salary for the year.  Lemme tell you how awesome that race was.

IT WAS AWESOME!!!

So good that I will definitely be back next year.  It featured the most slightly rocky, very flowy, ridgetop singletrack that I have ever seen in a race.  Given my love of ridgetop singletrack the course gets a 10.  

Only at a bike race...

The race went pretty well from the start.  We had a nice neutral roll out from town, then hit the Virginia Creeper Trail (a rail trail) for the start of the racing.  Almost immediately a Trek 29er Crew rider slipped off the front.  No one noticed.  No one even picked up the pace.  We rolled along for about 10 minutes just chattin' and having a grand old time until someone spoke up with "Hey, where'd Kyle go?"  It was quickly followed by "Oh, I guess he's off the front."  Conversation ensued basically like this:

Person #1: "Should we go get him"

Person #2 (last year's winner): "No hurry.  We'll give it a few minutes."

Person #3: "He must be pretty far ahead, I can't even see him."

Person #2 (still last year's winner): "Whatever, let him do his roadie thing."

So we chilled and talked for another five minutes or so.  Then Person #2 went to the front and pulled hard.  I managed to stay on the train until the bottom of the first climb, at which point we had caught this "Kyle" who was off the front, and I could not hold the pace up the climb.  I settled into the second group.  It was good.  I gained a few positions on the descents, and lost a few on the climbs.  When we hit the longest climb of the day (9 miles maybe?)  I found a rhythm for about the middle third of the climb, clawed back a few spots, then lost it when it kept going and going.  There's nothing that consistently up hill near the Harbor of Grace, so my "training" was missing that element...

3 miles from the finish I got a flat.  I was running a tube in my rear wheel (regular race wheel still awaiting new hub... see previous post) at 24 psi so it was bound to happen eventually.  I was frankly surprised it lasted that long.  A new tube went in, the CO2 came out, and the CO2 inflator didn't work.  The little pin that punctures the cartridge was completely missing.  I stood there staring at my wheel until some nice guy gave me a pump.  Twenty minutes later I was back on my bike and riding on.  Finished in 6:35.  I probably could have snuck in under 6 hrs if I hadn't flatted and had let it all hang out on the descent.  It was pretty much all downhill from where I flatted... still, that race made me happy.

I spent the next weekend kicking it around in Michaux getting my rock crawling on with Zach and Joe, then last weekend headed up to good ol' Coburn for the Wilderness 101.  More on that later, because I am le tired.