Race weekend started Friday evening with a short drive up to the Ocoee White Water Center for packet pick-up and aid station bag check-in. Upon gathering my aid station items, I came across a busted gel flask at the bottom of my bag. HUGE mess, and 4 hours of nutrition GONE. Note to self: bring entire bottle of gel to race. Good thing my bike bag contains a vast collection of things I "might" need, because in it I found an extra half-way filled flask! Who knows how long it had been in there. I did the smell/taste test, still the same. Kind of reminds me of space food...I don't think that stuff ever spoils. So, got my bags checked, checked into our cabin, met up with the Simrils, got the bike tuned & oiled, and gear laid out for the morning. After many laughs and unsettled nerves for me, I got into bed and was fast asleep.
The next morning I woke up an hour before my alarm was supposed to go off, and just thought of the impending doom. I had plenty of time for my morning rituals; forced my coffee and breakfast down, and prayed my nervous stomach would soon settle. My goal for this race was to just finish, preferably in a shorter time then Shenandoah took. Since this was my second 100 mile race ever and it contained way more elevation gain than I had ever done in one day (14,000 feet!), I wasn't sure what my legs were going to do to me. I used the same nutrition plan I used for Fools Gold and Shenandoah since it worked (at least I've got something figured out.) The start was very similar to a XC race, 0 to 60 in 30 seconds, and it was a 2 mile climb on the road to the singletrack entrance of Brush Creek. I quickly found myself on the verge of throwing up and it was hard to control my breathing, so I slowed down and let what seemed like the entire field pass me, and settled into a rhythm. I did not dare look behind me, I was afraid I would see 1 or 2 people...on tricycles. I found out later that there were actually a good number of people behind me and it was also good to hear that everyone else felt a little "death" on that climb.
Brush Creek was fun; unfortunately because I was with a large pack of people, the pace was set for me. I had to keep a little distance in front of me because of the "fumblers" I had ended up behind. Since I knew the course pretty well, I was able to predict the sections that would slow them down, and I was able to pass them rather smoothly. That's pretty much how it was on all the singletrack. Knowing the trails certainly helped me pick good passing spots uphill and downhill. After bombing down poison ivy alley (AKA Westfork or Poplar Groove), we began the first of many gravel road climbs. Thankfully, the meat of this race was an uneventful monotony. I could sum it up by saying, "I climbed a gravel road for awhile, then had a great gravel road descent, then it went back up..." You get the point.
We climbed the same mountain twice, taking hours each way, separated by a couple of miles of singletrack, looking at mostly the same little bits of gravel of all shapes and sizes. In my hallucinating mind I saw many bear (tree stumps), snakes (squiggly sticks), diamonds (quartz rocks), bats (butterflies), turtles (rocks), and a panther up in a tree (tree limb that fell and almost hit me). I started to loose a couple of brain cells while climbing back up Potato Patch Mountain, and the flying insects were out in full swing as usual. Good thing I had my insect repellent! Yes, I tucked a small thing of "OFF" in my camelbak for this particular section because every time I have done this climb the flying/biting insects get pretty close to carrying me off. Everything else I keep in my pack will remain a secret.
So, mile 75 goes by and I decide that I'm feeling alot better than I should be, and that's when my race began. From Watson Gap to the finish I had fun spending what was left in my tank. I passed people that had passed me much earlier in the day. I used my secret weapon (3rd chainring) and passed many more people descending PP all the way to the campground. I knew I could hurt BAD for 25 miles. At the end of the gravel road my computer showed 96 miles, then we turned onto the last bit of singletrack. We took the longish route, and somehow 4 extra miles got added into the mix. I heard many saying at the end of the race that their computers said the same 104 miles, what's another 4 miles right? With 3 miles to go I came upon a snake across the trail. I stopped and threw rocks and sticks at it, but it didn't budge. I finally had to ride over it because I couldn't go around it. The head was on my left side so I put that leg really high in the air. If that snake was going to bite me, I was going to make him work for it. I finished that race in 11 hours 40 minutes, an hour shorter than my Shenandoah time. Not too shabby for a newbie like me...the improvement that is. I've got a long way to go and this is only the beginning.
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