With the perfect storm of my lack of training, the fact that Boone seems to be regarded as extremely difficult, and my first off road race, I decided beginner was the way to go. Call me a sandbagger if you will, but we all have to start somewhere. I pre-rode about 80% of the course and realized that even on the beginner loop, I was going to be in for some hard work. Talking over with the race organizer's, it was a question of whether we should do 2 or 3 laps and I felt to get our money's worth we should do 3 since the pre-ride took less than 20 minutes.
6 of us towed the line for a sprint up the gravel road and into the singletrack before hitting a pretty gnarly and rutted descent before we made a 180 to start the real portion of the beginner loop. Apparently all the gravel riding this winter paid off as I drilled it from the start and made it to the singletrack with a small gap on the rest of the field. Coming into the section I pre-rode, I felt a little more confident and kept my pace high. I cleared all but one obstacle on the first lap and came out with somewhere around a 30-45 second lead over 2nd place. I may have went out a shade too hard as I was starting to feel it coming into the 2nd lap.
I unravelled on this lap. I was just gassed enough that I could make it up to the obstacles, but not clean them. I fell, I flipped and I rolled somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 or 6 times on this lap. I lost my entire lead and let two guys by. Damn. By the end of the lap, I had caught back and passed one of the guys, but the leader was now long gone. Towards the end of the lap I started feeling some pinching in my left shoe. I wasn't sure what it was and it didn't feel very good, but what can you do? I kept the pace as pushed as I could and was starting to regret that I had voiced my opinion that we needed to do 3 laps.
By the start of the 3rd lap, I was in 2nd, but not by much. I had one guy breathing down my neck and I wasn't sure how many more were behind him. I knew I didn't have much left in the tank so I decided early on that I'd be much quicker jumping off the bike and running the obstacles I knew I would have trouble cleaning versus trying them and falling. This would be what saved my goose. I was faster than the guy behind me on the riding portions and he was having to run the same areas I was so I wasn't losing ground. I finally put some time back in the bank and just focused on drilling the rest of the lap without hammering a tree or any other equally gnarly fates that you might find at 7 Oaks. All in all I made it to the finish line in 2nd place and I think less than a minute behind the first place rider.
Some fun facts and stats for just the beginner portion of the ride can be found here. Probably my favorite stat is that I reset my max heart rate to 197. On the final lap I was way beyond gone and heard my computer beeping at me. I looked down to see it wasn't just my head telling me that I was about to go beyond the point of no return. My previous best was 195 BPM and I had set my max at 196 figuring that was a pretty safe figure. Now I just need to figure out how I can get those numbers down to more manageable levels. Any tips?
Alas, with mountain biking, podiums apparently are shunned as we gathered around to here the awards. A number of the death squad members had a pretty good day. They rolled all the way through the expert, single speed, and sport classes, but nary a mention was made about the beginners. Hey, I know we're the little guys, but a shade of recognition would have been cool. All in all a good day to race.
Oh, and about the title, I still don't know how to climb... I just happened to get a lot more practice at it today.
1 comment:
Congrats on a great finish to your first race! Boone is definitely challenging. I am excited to get up there for my first ride of the season on those wicked switchbacks. Too bad its August and I haven't ridden at Boone yet, but I'll try to remedy that soon.
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