Where's The Beef?

The Stats:

• 100 miles
• ~10,000' of elevation gain
• 3rd-place singlespeed
• 19th-place overall
• 8:41:19 to the finish

"Where were you out there?"

It's a fair question.  Several singlespeeders posed it to me after the race, and I've been asking myself the same thing ever since.

I mean, my brain knew I was supposed to be racing.  I had awesome accommodations...

...I was well-rested and well-fed, my race-prep was thorough, and after reassembling my bike it was mostly riding well.

(I made the mistake of going for a new chain without checking the wear on my chainring--not a great match, but other than making a racket it seemed to be pedaling fine.)

It was a beautiful morning at the start line, with a heavy dew in the fields and clear skies overhead.

So why was my body riding like I was out for a Sunday spin?  The race started with 20 miles of mostly fast-spinning roads and rail-trails.  Right off I could see Gerry Pflug and a crew of singlespeeders racing off ahead of me, but my legs just weren't interested in bridging the gap forward to them.  Try and try again, and I just kept dropping back.  I mean, after blowing up at Pierre's Hole I was planning to temper my pace in the early part of the race, but this was ridiculous.

It was so bad that after the race Gerry told me he thought I had missed the start!  Crap.  Ultimately I ended up in a pack of slightly slower riders, figuring that I could ride efficiently until the climbing started and then kick it up.

Then the comedy of errors began.

On a twisty singletrack, just after passing the pack on an uphill, I caught a pedal on a rock and went over the handlebars.  My waterbottle flew out of its bottle cage and the whole pack passed me back while I was pulling myself together.  Then a half-mile later I realized that my Cateye had gotten jacked-up in the fall so I stopped to fix that.  (I've come to rely on knowing my distance on the course to help anticipate aid stations/obstacles/the finish, and figure out when to push it.)

On a stretch of dirt road soon after that I reached back to pull my electrolyte pills out of my jersey pocket and managed to open the cap as I got them out, spilling the contents across the course behind me.  Sweet.

Didn't bother to stop and pick them up.

I caught and passed the pack on the next climb, but my waterbottle exited its cage again in a rocky section at the bottom of the following descent, and they passed me back while I retrieved it.  I lost a bit more time handing another rider a CO2 cartridge for his flat tire, but that seemed worth it.

On the next climb I was able to pass most of the pack again.  And then they passed me back when I missed a course marker and rode 100 yards off-course before correcting.  What the hell?

At this point I was pretty confident that I was well off the back of the singlespeed field, but I was also pissed off and fed up with the back-and-forth with the pack I had been in so I slapped myself around a bit and gave my legs a good talking-to about how we were 30 miles into a 100-mile race and they had better figure their shit out NOW!

And then everything got better.  My body woke up and I was able to charge into the course, cranking hard up climbs and keeping the pace strong--no compromises.  

I attacked the next hill, passed the pack and a few more riders for good measure, and that was finally the last I saw of them.

For the rest of the race, the hardest part was not having Erica there to support me and keep me informed about where I was relative to the rest of the racers.  It was a long stretch of riding solo, with only the music flowing into my right ear for company.  I kept telling myself, "100 miles is a damn long race; anything can happen in the next 50/30/15 miles.  Focus forward, pull them back in."  So that's what I did, to a point.

My body's resurgence to racing corresponded to the course becoming more interesting; we made it out of the bulk of the road riding and into the fun stuff: challenging East Coast singletrack--super twisty, lots of rocks and roots, little in the way of a view forward in the course--interspersed with fast doubletrack stretches.  Some mud bogs thrown in there as well, and a 40-yard long pond across the course that turned out to be thigh-deep.  (I chose to carry my bike over my head after riding until the water came up over my bottom bracket.)

I may have been back in the field, but damn I was having fun.

I caught up to Matt Ferrari just after the trip through the base area (where the 100K course ended and we headed out for another abbrievated lap.)  He was suffering, and just wanted to finish his 30th(!) 100 miler.  Now that's impressive.  He told me I had 3 guys ahead of me, including Gerry (with whom I had hoped to be competitive) but said he hadn't seen them in a pretty long time.

Honestly, the second lap pretty much flew by.  I felt like I was riding strong, and fluidly.  It wasn't long before I was passing 100K riders nearing the end of their race, which psyched me up but also made it a little weird figuring out if the rider I was reeling in was a 100-mile singlespeeder or not.  Coming into the last 5 miles I put in a big finishing push--gave it everything I had to see if I could pull into the top 3--and with a mile left it finally happened.  I rolled up behind Patrick Blair and he glanced back and said, "Please don't tell me you're a singlespeeder."  I wish I had replied with something witty or pleasant, but all I could muster was a grunt and a request to get by--not the smoothest greeting I've ever made in a race.

And that was that.  I spun my tired legs as fast as they could go, rear end bouncing up and down in the saddle, across the grassy ball field to the finish and a barely-squeaked-out spot on the podium.  (Actually, the podium went 5-deep in this race, but the 3rd-place finish will be more helpful than 4th in the series standings.)

I will readily admit that I was disappointed with my performance.  My trip to New Hampshire centered around the hope to compete well with Gerry and whoever else was leading the race, but it just wasn't my day.

To put a more positive spin on the race I'm trying to see it as good training for the Park City Point2Point on September 1st.  (Racing is the best training after all.)  Hopefully the Hampshire 100 worked to shake my body back into racing form and I will compete like I want to in my final NUE race of the season!