Playing With Gravity: Chasing Mr. Smith

The Stats:

54 Miles
~6000' of climbing
3rd-place Singlespeed
4:20:25 to the finish
# of Wrecks: 2 (I've decided to start including a "wrecking" stat, as that seems to be part of any race for me.)

Relaxing in "camp" the night before the race.

Waking up the morning of the MTB Marathon National Championships was actually pretty nice--I was camped in the parking lot, so with a 9:30am start time I rolled out of the back of my truck at 7 and had a leisurely morning of methodically going through my race prep routine. Pretty different than the morning of a 6am start.

The butterflies were raging when I pulled up to the line with Carey Smith and the rest of the lycra-clad, über-fast singlespeed crowd. Once the whistle blew we cruised off the line, surprisingly taking it a bit easy up the brief opening climb, but that was not to last. My goal for the race was to stick with Carey as long as possible to see if I could compete. As it turned out we had a group of 6 or so who rode together for the first few miles, but after that it shrunk to Carey, Cody Peterson, Ryan Voss, and myself.

Somewhere around mile 6 I could feel that we were racing harder than I had ridden all season, and when I looked down I saw that my heart rate was pinned WAY higher than it had been all season. So I faded off the pace, realizing that I needed to ease up if I was going to finish. Ryan was apparently feeling the same thing, so the two of us ended up riding most of the first half of the race together. He was even there to watch me launch over the handlebars upon stuffing my front wheel into a boulder-strewn dry creekbed-crossing. That was exciting.

The riding between Bend and Mount Bachelor was once again unbelievable--this place rivals Moab as a mountain biking destination; the amount of ridiculous-quality singletrack that has been cut into the forest around here boggles the mind. And the Marathon course was exquisitely laid-out to maximize the singletrack fun with little in the way of doubletrack connectors. SO FUN!

Back to the story--I managed to open a gap ahead of Ryan shortly before the half-way point, but knew he would keep it from opening up too big so I couldn't let off the gas. I kept it hot, pushing through every obstacle and passing the riders ahead as efficiently as possible. (The passing game got to be kind of a pain; the way the race is structured every division goes off independently, with 3-minute intervals. We were the 8th wave to start, so we were endlessly passing riders throughout the race.)

The ride down to the bottom of the course was mind-blowing: full-speed descending through huge bermed corners, rolling whoop-dees, gaps, you name it, all on a hardtail race bike--sporty for sure, but oh-so-fun. Then the climb back up was actually super fun as well--technical, rocky sections but overall relatively low-angle climbing so I could turn it over fairly fast. I was definitely fending off some serious cramping but figured that with less than five miles left to an uphill finish it would be more fun to just accept that I was in for a half-hour of pain and keep charging.

Whoa, dirtboy. You need a shower.

And then I cranked through the finish with a couple of geared riders and it was over! Sure I had hoped to place better than 3rd, and hoped to beat 4:15, but I had so much fun racing this thing that it was hard to feel anything but stoked about it. What a ride.