I was washing my mountain bike Friday when I noticed that my rear wheel was dragging pretty bad. I thought it might be time to service the hub, and that left me with the drop bar hardtail (Cravel) for the race. That was not a good idea. My hands hurt so bad that it is hard to write this  a day later.

I hadn’t been on these trails since the last time I did this race two years ago, but I remembered them being pretty smooth and flowy. And they were on race day, but it was also super dry with a nice fine sandy surface in every switchback. I had plenty practice with sandy switchbacks the past two weeks at Oak mtn.

Cravel did good to only slide out in the sand twice in four laps. The suffering came from almost no suspension (redshift shockstop stem), and the hand positions on the drop bars. On the uphills I was on the hoods, and in the flats and downhills I was in the drops. There weren’t a ton of rocks on the trail, but bombing the descents in the drops had me shifting which parts of my palms were touching the bottom bar to spread the bruising.

Halfway through my fourth lap I decided my hands could not take it anymore. It was 100 degrees and I had 3,000’ of climbing in so far, but it was the hands that did me in. I kept thinking about finding a lot of gauze and making giant padded bandage gloves so I could finish, but I was ready to call it after the fourth lap. I ended up with blisters on the inside of my index fingers from the hoods, bruised palms and a barely useable right thumb.

Fun Comparison from last weekend’s race to this weekend’s race:

Wheeler Rally 9 Hour – 7h36m, 115mi, 1,316’ Climbing, 118 Avg HR, 3,200 Calories

AOSH 6 Hour – 3h37m, 37mi, 3,200’ Climbing, 148 Avg HR, 2,700 Calories  

Both were total suffer fests in the heat. Huge thanks to Chase, Wes and the Chainbuster crew for putting on another top notch race in AL. It was great seeing all of the usual mtb racing fam.