So, last month I raced in the Big Mountain Enduro in Durango. There were six other girls in my category, and I trounced them all to claim first place!
Well, that's not entirely true. The girl who came in third, Alexandra, was hot on my heels on Stages 1 and 2, but she had a mechanical problem on Stage 3 that knocked her cumulative time back by a couple minutes. (I know she had a mechanical because she was trying to fix it when I caught up to her right before a chunky uphill section. I hopped off my bike to start shoving as she moved out of the trail, but I then tripped and fell onto her, which probably did not help her time either.) The girl in second, Terah, was only a second behind me on Stage 2, but my lead on the other stages built up to give me the win. Woo!
So, let's take a quick look at the evolution of my podium finishes.
Here we have: "I did not expect to be here and am still not entirely sure how this happened."
Next, we have: "I have been up here before, but I still do not know what I'm supposed to do exactly."
And finally: "I earned this one, dammit! Booyah!"
In fact, I over-earned the last one, because immediately afterward I came down with a nasty cold that left me moaning and snuffling for a week. I was pretty determined to put up a good showing, so much so that I went to Durango with a few friends on the Wednesday evening before the race in order to pre-ride the stages. Day 1 was Kennebec Pass, which included two untimed 6 mile-ish climbs and two fast, occasionally terrifying singletrack descents. Here's the first part of the trail:
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| Eeep. |
Day 2 was Raiders Ridge, just east of town, and a second, marginally technical trail, the name of which now escapes me.
Kennebec Pass was an absolute beast. On Thursday, we paid to get shuttled to the trailhead in a lifted van instead of
riding pushing our bikes up the rough 4WD road to the top of the pass, because we didn't want to get wrecked before the race even started. We made our way to the rumored start line and assessed the situation: nasty exposure, steep drop to the right, couple scree fields, waterbars that had to be taken slowly or we'd go flying off the mountainside, blind corners, overgrown trail...super. Happily, our group had no incidents, but I had to go frustratingly slow for the first few hundred yards because I was unfamiliar with the trail. Then we dropped into a drainage with lots of surprise switchbacks and stream crossings, and eventually came to the finish of Stage 1. This meant that it was time to start climbing! We were in no hurry, having literally nothing else to do that day but ride this trail, but even at an easy pace we were out of breath and hating the race organizers for being so cruel as to make us pedal our bikes uphill. The bastards!
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| This is Matt. He is out of breath. |
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| This is Eric. He is also out of breath, but he has a dog named Kaia. |
Eventually we made it to the start line for the second stage, and had a blast riding the flowy, jumpy downhill to the road back into Durango. We had some beers, ate some dinner, and crashed early.
On Friday, a few of the local riders led us on a preview of Raider's Ridge, which is almost exactly like Dakota Ridge in Golden, Colorado, but longer and more difficult and with less shade. The ridge undulates for a few miles in a general south-ish direction, and alternates between ledgy off-camber rock and ledgy cliff-exposure rock, plus some loose stuff here and there to keep it interesting. It was awful. I'm sure the locals can go and figure out the lines and piece everything together eventually, but for a race, it was a mess.
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| Carnage in 3, 2, 1... |
We decided that we would just pick up our bikes and run over the majority of the trail on race day. Then, in the last few hundred yards of the stage, the race organizers had decided not to send us on a nice newly finished fast flowy section, but to instead make us ride down two super-steep sections that were covered with what Liz christened 'demon baby heads': loose rocks about 6 inches in diameter that really really wanted to slip under our tires and make us crash.
It was a fitting, final 'F YOU' from the trail, and we were not looking forward to racing it.
And then we did not pre-ride Stage 4. Everyone told us that there was nothing to it, and we shouldn't bother. Just fast and flowy downhill. Right. So we went to Tricia's house, waded in the nearby Las Animas river to ease the aching in our forearms and hamstrings, ate dinner, and went to bed.
For a while, at least. Mike couldn't leave Denver until after work on Friday, so he rolled in to the campsite at 1:30 on Saturday morning. Yay Labor Day weekend.
After Mike's arrival, I got a few more hours of fitful shut-eye (Ellie kept stepping on me), and then it was time to get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, drink coffee, and go to Tricia's house to meet the people with whom we'd be carpooling to the start of the Stage 1 climb. Officially, the race organizers wanted all racers to meet in Durango and ride the shuttle buses to the start, but after the shitshow in Angel Fire (wherein the trailer carrying the bikes first broke and then went off the fire road into a ditch) we broke the rules and shuttled ourselves. There was no advantage in terms of the distance we had to ride; we started the climb at the exact same spot as everyone else. But since we began pedaling right as the first round of shuttles was heading back to town for the next load of people and bikes, we had the road to ourselves and thus felt free to go as slowly as was physically possible. Before we set off, however, we did some yoga
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| Ellie is helping | |
and then we had a quick dance party to warm ourselves up, thanks to Liz's Jammy Pack:
If anyone cares, I would be happy to get one of these for my birthday or Christmas :)
Liz kept the Jammy Pack rocking for the entire 6-mile slog up the pass, which helped our spirits enormously, and Tricia decreed that in order to conserve energy, we should not be working so hard that we couldn't sing along to the music. It was a good strategy, and we went slow enough that it took us two hours, but we were still a little beat at the top. We refilled our water, stuffed some Clif energy shots in our pockets (do not try the vanilla flavor, it's horrifying), and queued up at the start line:
There was a group of 8 or so women, and we decided that we should all go at the same time to create a buffer between ourselves and the boys, who, by dint of being silly and competitive and reckless, are generally faster riders. Liz went first, then Tricia, then me, then Leigh, who is faster than me but hadn't ridden the trail before. A photographer got a shot of Leigh and her awesome socks after she went by:
As I expected to, I went painfully slowly on the first section, especially over the loose nasty scree
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| Please don't let my brakes fail. |
but once I dropped into the trees I opened up the throttle and caught Tricia on the first short uphill section. Leigh caught me at the same spot, so she went in front and I chased her, with Tricia close behind. We were having a super time, hootin and hollerin, until I came to a section that had given me trouble before: a blind corner with a stream crossing and a big rock that you have to manual over. I almost made it, but I stalled and had to unclip my right foot to catch myself. But instead of falling right, I fell left, and wasted a few seconds flailing around under my bike, trying to free myself. I got going again and had no more issues, and crossed the finish very tired and out of breath.
Since it was quite hot, several of us all but submerged ourselves in the stream running along the trail and declared that we were too tired to ride bikes ever ever again, that riding bikes was in fact the dumbest thing a person could do, but then twenty minutes later we were up again and shoving our bikes towards the Stage 2 start line, 5 miles away.
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| Tricia rides a 29er because she's tall. |
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Stage 2 was uneventful, except I had to stop briefly and extricate the shattered remains of my chain guide from my drivetrain so that I could pedal again, which cost me a couple seconds.
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| fin | |
Liz's friend Arturo was not so lucky; he redlined in the last mile, crashed, and broke his helmet and one of his front teeth. Supervan was called in to take him to the ER south of Durango, and Paddington helped by sitting on him during the ride. He returned to Tricia's house a few hours later with a concussion, some painkillers and strict instructions not to not to race the second day. Luckily, Arturo's dad is a dentist in Ecuador, so he'll get fixed up next time he goes to visit.
Upon returning to town, we waded in the river again, ate dinner again, and sat by a campfire for a while, consuming a perfectly reasonable amount of alcohol, before going to bed (again).
Day 2! Up at 6, breakfast, drive to start of climb, dance party, pedaling. It was really really very hot that day, so of course we had to race at 11am, because heatstroke really helps to narrow the field.
We stopped in the last bit of shade before the ridge began in earnest:
and had another quick dance party, then put on our armor and got in line to drop.
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| Not a single goddamn cloud in the sky. |
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Remember how our plan was to just pick up our bikes and sprint over the parts we couldn't ride? Yeah, that didn't work out. It was so hot, and I was so about to have a heart attack, that the best I could do was trudge along while resting my weight on my saddle and taking giant, scalding lungfuls of stupid Durango air. I may or may not have been hallucinating by the end.
There was one section on the trail where you could either send a 3-ish foot drop, roll a middle line, or take a roundabout route that keeps your wheels on the ground. I wanted to huck it (the landing was clean), but I did the smart thing and took the middle line:
And finally, after what felt like days of riding/hiking, I got to the demon baby heads. My tires made it clear that they would buck me off if I dragged my brakes the way I wanted to, so I jumped off and ran down the sketchiest section, then hopped back on for the last hundred yards:
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| Not amused. |
After everyone in our group came down, we sat under a tree and got rehydrated before tackling the climb to the last stage, which was, remember, supposed to be a piece of cake. "All downhill," they said! "Nothing to it." Yeah, right. It was like 90 percent pedaling, and I went so hard that I literally started dry heaving after crossing the finish line!
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| (barf) |
Luckily the finish area was only a few minutes' walk from the ubiquitous Las Animas river, so we soaked ourselves and our nasty shammy until it was time to go to the park that BME was using as a staging area to look at our times.
There was beer
and dogs
and a man with a mohawk
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| The guy with the epic goatee is Gary, and the guy with the plugs is Joe, and they're both very cool. |
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and a podium! Look, there's Leigh in first place for amateur women 30-39!
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| wow, the girl on the left is super ripped... |
Her cumulative time was only 12 seconds ahead of mine, and she's pretending to be worried about the fact that we will be in the same category next year. I think we should just practice getting the exact same time in races so that we can share the top spot.
So, that was my adventure in Durango, and if you want to see more pictures of people that aren't me,
check out Mountain Flyer Magazine's coverage of the race.
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| (fin) |
