So last year Tom and I signed up for an inaugural 100 mile mtn bike event. It turned out that the event overlapped with activities around buying our cabin and we postponed our entry to this year’s event. We’ve been riding alot this summer and thought we had a good shot at finishing…
With our crazy location schedule (house, cabin, Tom in Bishop) lots of driving is always part of doing anything. I dropped the dogs in Sac at my parents’ house and then headed to set up camp near Truckee. Tom got a late start from Bishop and didn’t arrive until 11pm that night…not so good with the 6:30am race meeting and a 25 min drive to the start…
Wisely knowing about the Sierra “moon dust” as it is often called, we opted for bandanas since the race started with 7 miles of downhill. We started at the back of the pack and made our way down the hill…it was about 7:15am when we reached the bottom and had the first 7 miles of 91 (course wasn’t quite 100 miles) done. A bit of gentle climbing started which then got steeper…steep enough that we walked part of the climb…no sense in burning out so early and we’re not totally warmed up yet. We reached the top and spectacular views of Granite Chief and the wilderness around it. The first aid station was about 10 miles in and now we’ve been on course for over an hour. We top off our water bladders, eat PB&J sandwiches and some other snacks and continue on. A mile or so of rolling terrain was followed by another DH section. It was about 12 miles to the next aid station and I knew another long climb was coming, albeit less steep. Tom didn’t have a chance to study the course map with his busy week…
The fun little water bar jumps gave way to the long fire road climb. I thought it was a nice pitch, not so severe that you couldn’t just crank along…but Tom was struggling. His busy week, long drive the night before, etc. left him not feeling so great. We finally made it to the top of the climb and the aid station after several stops. We’d only gone about 22 miles and had been on course for nearly 3 1/2 hours. The aid station marked the split in courses…100 milers go one way, 50 milers go the other. Tom looked at me and said he had 50 in him but not 100. The course sweep noted that we would not finish on our current pace…
We now became 50 milers…instead of going down the singletrack, we now had more climbing…about 8 miles of rolling fireroad…up, down, up, down. We kept passing racers going the other way and begin to figure out that once we reached the next aid station, we had to turn around and ride all this back to the turn home. We finally reached the aid station at about the 31 mile mark. Again we filled bladders and ate as much as we could. I’m guessing we spent 5-15 minutes at each aid station…
As we feared, we turned around to head the same way we just came…it was now mid afternoon and the winds were picking up. Fortunately it had been cloudy much of the morning and never got too hot. On one of the hills I was waiting for Tom only to see a racer quickly approaching…it was Tinker Juarez, leading the 100 milers. He would go on to finish the race in something like 7 hours 20 minutes…crazy! At this point I was passing time with my iPod since Tom and I were rarely riding together. Again we reached an aid station, the last one with water. We had about 12 miles to go…
What we thought would be mostly DH turned out to be more up and down…with only slightly more down. While on this section, a little thunderstorm rolled through and we got rained on…it felt really good but with the wind, it almost got chilly. Tom’s energy had actually picked up as the day wore on…I knew he was in fine shape to be riding but was probably just generally fatigued. I felt fine other than a little knee pain starting to flare up. We reach the last aid station over 7 hours into our ride. More food and drink and we started the last 7 miles back. Now we’re just excited to reach the end, we alternate walking and riding…my knee hurts.
We start to see spectators as we get close…you can hear people cheering (which makes such a difference at this point!) I slow and wait for Tom so we can cross the finish line together. We rode almost 53 miles and were on course for more than 9 and 1/2 hours. I guessed that Tom was done with endurance events (since he usually does event at my goading.) The next day he says, “Next year I’m wearing a smaller pack…” We’ll see if next year brings us closer to completing 100 miles…
Details of our ride…
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/13490977
