Mud, Sweat and a mountain bike marathon.

I'm a little slow on getting to this, but like any traumatic experience it's good to talk about it.

Last weekend was Dirt, Sweat and Gears 12 hour. after last year I was hoping for poor conditions so I could win the overall on a singlespeed. little did I know the conditions from last year were great compared to this year. Leading up to race day the course was wet from 8+ inches of rain in the week but had promise of drying out the last three days without any rain. Any one that could access the inter web, and it's series of tubes, was checking the weather. things were looking great, everything was just missing us to the north.

Then about 3 hours before the start someone showed me the radar image and the whole western third of Tennessee was covered in red. We figured that it would hit just exactly at 9:00 when the race started. Unfortunately we were wrong, It hit about 2 minutes before the start. Last year a rain like this created a horrible second lap but everything else was fine(the other 8 laps). This year was so bad that I was lapping people less than 3 miles into my second lap and that has nothing to do with how fast I was. the course had the worst anyone had ever seen/hiked in.

My lap times were something like this:
Lap1: 1:15
lap 2: 2:00
lap 3: 4:00
lap 4: 3:00 (I used cross tires for this lap)

Out of the 42 miles I "raced" I think I was only on the bike for about 14-16. the rest I was carrying my bike on my shoulder.





This post is a work in progress.... check back later for more.