Sweet Open Blog

Vermont 50 Race Report - 2010

Yes, I know—I’m leapfrogging the Portsmouth Crit. I will get to that ASAP. But I think the VT50 has to take precedence because it has pictures. Lots of them. 

The Vermont 50—a big ole mountain bike race/fundraiser/event—has earned a reputation in recent years for miserable weather. It was clear during packet pickup this year that, barring some freak, biblical-style flooding event, things would be just dandy as far as the weather goes.

This year’s start had been bumped back about 15 minutes, to allow things to wrap up in at least nominal daylight. I’m told the effort was successful, but the flipside of the equation was an even more abominably early start time than normal. I had the clock set for 3:45am, but having abstained from caffeine the previous day, popped 3mg of melatonin before my 10pm bedtime, I was fresh as a daisy the the marimba chime dangled.

Less awesome was the translucent, blue-tinted Pac-Man I found floating where my left contact lens should have been a few minutes later (there’s way too much uncorrected data outside my lenses to race off-road in glasses). Fortunately, the half-shredded lens still sat well enough in my eye, though unfortunately, it had a tendency to float around, blur, and itch mercilessly.

Driving the 30 minutes from Rudy’s House in Norwich to the race start was a bit of a challenge, since I had to make sense of blurry, itchy, headlight visuals against the absolute darkness, but the lens had mostly settled by the time I arrived in the parking lot. Prepping in the nowhere-near-sunrise was a little interesting to say the least—all the more so because this was my first mountain bike race in, oh, about half a decade.

The prepwork’s actually a bit easier than road racing—at least in the Sport category— since everything just gets shoved into a Camelback. With all the waiver/reg work taken care of the day before, all I had to do was give my number and listen to a fellow named Zeke explain that I should keep to the right on the roads, follow arrows, pay attention for X’s, avoid W’s and let runners know I was passing.

Despite the sheer darkness—especially during a brief failure of the lighting in the big registration tent—there was a tremendous line for portapotties. I couldn’t understand it, and judging from the steady coming and going of racers from behind the row the tupperware commodes, I was not alone in this regard.

The actual start of the race—Expert waves—occurred under a lightening, but definitely dark sky. Granted, the first few miles are on roads and in the open, but for the dudes without lights, my deepest sympathies. Things did begin to get lighter rapidly thereafter, so I think the earlier start really did work.

I was a bit distracted by live-tweeting the beginnings of the race, and wandered into my wave a little too casually. When announcer hollered “go”, it became clear that I was surrounded by people not racing, or at least saving it until 20 miles in or so.  And riding a single-speed (while still registered as Sport—I tend to avoid separate SS categories), it was a near impossibility to make up ground on the downhill roads.

I do wish I’d had a cadence meter, to capture the 10 seconds all-out spin, rest, 10 seconds all-out-spin pattern I rocked until the first climb, but we do have heartrate and GPS data that shows me pinning it up to and past threshold on the first few climbs. Unlike GMSR, I was feeling pretty darn good.

I can understand why Colin—a “real” mountain biker—found this race so frustrating. There is a lot of dirt road and snowmobile trail, and even the first couple downhills are straight-ahead. I currently lack health insurance, and descended like it, but even if I’d been taking risks on Aetna’s dime, the Western-style dust clouds kicked up by the hundred some-odd dudes in front of me were a new wrinkle—and one that I’m still trying to pick out of my eyes three days later. 

(via SkiPix.com—can you tell?)

Even with arid weather, the trails were holding up—I think I ran across one or two loose dirt sections, but they didn’t pose much trouble in terms of staying upright. I got one foot out on two occasions to avoid crashes, and lost a few spots on one or two fast downhill fire roads (32/18 ain’t gonna get it done) but was otherwise just drilling it and eating up places.

After skipping the first couple rest stations, though, the effort was all starting to add up. It’s rare that I put in more than 90 minutes at a time in on the MTB, and I’d been keeping pretty macho about walking as little of the course as possible. I’m also a bit older than I was when I decided to be a one-gear guy, and on one particularly steep, extended climb, I thought I could feel parts in my knee rubbing against each other that weren’t supposed to be rubbing.

So I took a bit of a breather at the 18.3 mile aid station—which is why you have the fantastic picture featured above. I lost probably 10-12 places, but it let me cool down from CX mode. I also realized, after barely being able to sip the aid station water, that I’d been just guzzling my Camelback and stuffing in energy bars on the road sections.  The view you see above is the top of a long, sweeping descent and was a nice, chill intro to the rest of the race.

I dropped a lot of roadie tactics on the uphills after this point, and just tried to keep the HR around 160. Feeding was cut back essentially to sips of Gatorade. Anything even suggesting it might be too steep got a hike, and I made up a lot of space just running the last few steps and cross-mounting over the tops of hills.

I generally don’t consider myself fancy on the bike, but had some slick moves through the woods—which were getting much more MTBish at this point—including one move where a guy in a Univeral Sports kit rolled up to a three-foot-high downed log like there was some magical way through it while I dismounted and vaulted past him and over the log in a pretty classic bit of CXery.

As the course got progressively twistier and more single-track focused, I found myself the victim of a dude running a Niner with a rigid carbon fork going the wrong way at an intersection (only a few seconds lost) and another guy who looked to be running some sort of Monstercross setup absolutely losing it on a steep dusty patch. After some more of this winnowing out, I found myself running across the same group of riders—dudes I’d lose on the bigger climbs or less-tricky single track, who’d pull me back on descents.

At about 35 miles in, the singletrack really made a transition from sweeping to tight and twisty, and I found myself forced to go with a 140bpm, low cadence rhythm, because frankly, that’s all my skills allowed. The trail was awesome—nice berms and rideable—but there was a lot of time to be had knowing exactly how hard you could corner and how little you needed to brake, and while I made progress, I was getting eviscerated by the guys who could really ride.

At this point, the physical beating was also starting to take a toll on me. I like my old, pieced-together hardtail, but the OEM Manitou Spyder came out of the box with 70mm of travel, and has only been losing spring since. Plus, even at a relatively svelte 165lbs, I think I’m exceeding the designs intended weight. My forearms and fingers were feeling really beat from the braking and pummeling, and the constant ache was not helping me relax on the technical stuff.

At about 40 miles, the trail became really masochistic. Not hard, really, but just requiring more attention as it rolled over big exposed rocks, around off-camber, probably-don’t-want-to-fall-here corners, across dips and rises just obtrusive enough that you had to put in a hard pedal stroke to get over them at low speed. I’d also been cutting down on the feeding—sips of Gatorade, occasional bites of bar, and was experiencing some fairly noticeable brain fade.

I had a rough near-crash where I ended up hugging a tree around a tight corner, and took a little break to get off the bike, eat a bar, and generally regroup. It probably cost two minutes, but only three or four riders came by, which gives you an idea of how spread out things were getting.

Fortunately, the trail sort of plateaued after this point, before a sensationally fun twisting descent into the foot of the final climb on Ascutney. Two riders—one guy on a full-suspension rig and another on a garrish, titsed-out, definitely-trying-to-compensate singlespeed—came by me, but at this point, I was pretty much on on “finish the race” mode and too engaged in enjoying the scenery.

Thom P makes the last climb up Ascutney seem awful, but in the dry, it’s really quite nice—if you like that sort of thing. It was definitely a grinder, but one I happily embraced. Basically, you get to this point in the race, there are miles-to-go-signs, and it’s just not a huge mental effort to just keep your butt on the saddle and grind out the biggest (or in my case, only) gear you can.

I gobbled up the full suspension guy and left him in the dust, and had the other singlespeed in reach at the top of the climb, but with a flat out downhill finish, I wasn’t going to be able to get enough distance to stay ahead of him. At any rate, I was having trouble holding onto the bars and didn’t want any excuse to do something dumb.

(more SkiPix.com. You can order this and then they’ll color correct and crop and everything).

I finished in 5:26, which was good enough for 5th in the Sport category for my age group. A suspiciously large number of Masters-aged racers in the Sport category went much, much faster than we did, leading me to think that once one is accustomed to sandbagging, one loses the ability to do anything else.

 It was a little disheartening to roll in to a barbeque still-being-set up and no evident source of beer, but I wasn’t going to let that detract from the quality of the event. My legs did feel pretty awful afterwards, but a few minutes propped up against a fence and several slices of watermelon later, I was feeling good enough to hike back up to my car and change, before finally tasting the victory of a freshly prepared pulled-pork sandwich.

It’s a great race—gorgeous, well-organized, well-marked, well-controlled, full of spectators and absolutely stacked aid stations. A lack of technical skill is really no barrier to entry, but at the same time (and unlike Colin) I think there’s plenty of fun sections where real off-road ability will score you time.

The urge to do it faster (because I definitely feel like I could) has me considering gears and parts made after the Clinton Administration, but I’ll wait until next summer before taking any serious steps in that direction.