For those of you not interested in the details, I'll give you the meat and potatoes up front then, I'll go through the small stuff.
Rode a total of 13 laps with each lap being 15.5 miles long, so if you do the math, I rode over 200 miles. Finished 16th place out of about 85 Solo Male participants (with gears). There was another category with almost as many riders but for singlespeeders.
Anyway the winner of my category was the never aging Tinker Juarez. He rode 18 laps, but he was done by 9:30 am. One interesting thing about me and Tinker is that he lapped me TWICE in CONSECUTIVE laps. He was riding strong but I also had two flats on the same lap. Thankfully I got a chance to catch up to him after the end of the race for a photo op.
The Details
For this race I headed out to Tucson on Friday by myself because Norma had to work. So I loaded as much stuff as possible in the Matrix and left around 10 am. I could have easily have made this into a commercial for Toyota. This is some of the stuff I got into my car:
Large square cooler
Large water cooler
Huge fire-pit
8-person tent
2-person tent
8x10 foot gazebo
Long plastic table
Folding wooden table
Four lawn chairs
Two tool boxes
A bike stand
Three sleeping bags
Three plastic storage totes
A boombox
Two propane lamps
A propane stove
20 pounds of fire wood
4 fire-logs
2 bags with clothes
And three bikes...so that's the reason my car looks so low.
I finally made to the race site by noon. It took me a while to find a camping spot that was not too far from the trail. In the end I found a spot about 200 yards from the trail but really far for the Start/Finish area. There were already over 1800 people when I got there so there wasn't much to choose from.I got all the campsite set up in about two hours and then went to pick up my number. Later that Friday I got a chance to do one lap of the course before dark. It took me 1;15 to do one lap at about the same effort I was planning for the race.
Once the sun went down the temperature drop a little so I made a fire and sat by it while gazing at the sky lit by stars. After some dinner, it was time to go to bed, however the wind started to pick up and it made it a little hard to sleep. Around 3 am I got up to discover that the gazebo had been blown away and was not resting on top of my car. It was too early to fix it, so I anchored it down and left it there.
In the morning I fixed the gazebo then Norma and her mom got there with her two nephews.
We had breakfast and soon it was time to head to the start.
Shortly before noon I got signed in and placed my bike at the start line.
Then it was time to head to the official start line about 400 yards before here, from where we would run to our bikes and officially start the 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo.At about 1:20 PM on Saturday, I was completing my first lap. We kept the pit stop to refuel within 5 minutes then it was time for another lap. Laps 2, 3 and 4 were about the same. Lap 5 was not so good tough. We had planned for me to take the Giant for a lap while Norma was going to get the Trek ready for a few more laps, but less than half way into the lap I had already had two flats. I only had one tube with me so, a kind soul gave me one so I could barely finish that lap. I didn't ride the Giant for any other laps.
The night laps were just a tad longer than the day ones and by midnight I had already logged 8 laps. Then I stop to have some food and sit down for a few minutes. My stomach was not feeling 100% and I was having a hard time staying warm. This pit stop turned out to be quite long. From falling sleep on a chair, I went to taking a "short" 1.5 hour nap inside the tent.
I don't know how, but I manage to get up and get going again after 3 am and it took me a while to get warm but the rest helped. I rode two more laps until the sun came up, then with the sun I recharged batteries. I even told Norma that I am like most calculators. We have a back up battery but we work best with solar energy.
Anyway, I completed my last three laps during the rest of the morning by keeping my laps within 1:25. Not to bad for more than 20 hours of riding. My last lap was pretty interesting because I knew there was someone ahead of me with the same number of laps, however I didn't know he had left only 17 minutes ahead of my. I tried to keep a pretty high pace and pretty much used up all the energy left to power through the wind that affected us all day. On the last climb of the lap I started to feel light-headed and nauseas. I could barely turn the cranks but I knew I was less than 1/4 of a mile from the top.
Once I reach the top, I took the downhill to the finish while Norma, Michael and Scott were waiting for me at different points to take pictures.
I never caugh up to the other guy but the results show he finished less than a minute ahead of me. Oh well, I could have moved to 15th, but 16th is just as well.
The support couldn't have been better. Norma was up all night getting me gels, food and Accelarade. She also recharged the batteries for my lights and lubed my bike. Kept track of my fluid and calorie intake and even had time to entertain her mother and nephews. Early on Sunday morning she had to surrender and sleep for a few hours but had left everything ready for me to refuel. I couldn't have done it without her.
The post race was a little off-plan. We spend a while looking for one of her nephews in the crowd of over 10000 people, just to find out he wasn't missing then it took us a while to get the campsite torn-down.
After a quick stop at Arby's for some greasy food to calm my hunger, we drove home and were in bed by 11 pm.
Definetely a fun race and a great come back from injury. I wish the course wasn't that windy, at times I was barely pushing 8 MPH on the flats while facing the wind.
Not sure if I am doing it again next year. I kind of want to get a 4 person team instead but we'll see. In a few days I'll probably be planning on riding solo, so who knows.
Check out the complete results at EpicRides.com. Look for me in the Male Solo category.
That's all for now, thanks for reading.
Pura Vida!
Jeff
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