Mohican 100K Sorta

Welp, the big day came sooner than expected, and before I knew it, I was scrambling out of work on Friday night to get down to Mohican asap.

I took off with my support crew / photographer / girlfriend, and she and I pulled into the Mohican State Park resort about an hour and a half later. Damn it was awesome there. Really beautiful scenery and bonus points for the building kind of reminding me of the Shining. I got to bed early while the special lady watched The Onion Movie.

In what seemed like no time at all, the phone was ringing. Five AM wake up call. Yuck.

So we rolled out of the hotel and I stressed my self out about getting lost en route to the race. Eventually I found where I was going with time (fifteen minutes) to spare...

Getting to the line was an amazing site, a few hundred people on bikes sitting in Loudonville town square. I was able to catch up with a few buddies of mine and bullshit for a minute, and before we knew it, we were off.

After bombing through downtown Loudonville, we started climbing up a hill to get us to the singletrack. There I learned the complexity of riding in that big of a group of people. A lot of people were keeping there legs fresh and spinning a low gear up the hill. I had to thread the needle about a million times weaving in and out of people. So after that we got into the singletrack, and it all was good from there.

The race was awesome. Conditions were perfect, the course was challenging but fun, my bike and body seemed to be holding up well. I stuck to the strategy of busting ass on climbs to gain time, keeping steady on flats, and trying not to kill myself in the downhills.

Everything was going great until...

A group of people I was with, and myself took a wrong turn right before the Gas Line hike-a-bike.

Granted we did not realize this until we covered an additional 10 miles GOING THE WRONG WAY. FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK.

So after coming to the realization we were ass-backwards lost. We eventually put our thinking caps on and found where we turned off. Piss. We finally hit aid station two, which was supposed to be at 24 miles. My computer was reading 34. Hmm.

The second half of the course was awesome as well. It seems like they ran out of singletrack and decided to say, "All right since you don't have any more off road stuff to ride, we're going to make you climb every steep ass hill we can find in the area." And climb we did.

When all was said and done, I ended up with 72 miles in 6 hours and 53 minutes. Thirteenth place 100K SS. I still broke my goal of sub-seven hours, but I think I could have knocked almost an hour off of my time if I wouldn't have taken the ten mile detour and que sheet read-a-thon. Oh well.

Besides that bummer, this ride was one of the most fun things I've ever done. I am totally jazzed on the whole idea of this kind of stuff, and next in my sights is a 100 miler. I'm thinking Wilderness in August and Shenandoah in September.

Good job to everyone who raced: Brian, Paul, Brett, Ernesto, Brent, etc etc etc.