Another successful race in the books.

I couldn’t have really asked for saturday to go any better. If you’re one of those people that reads the last chapter of a book first, the results are posted here and there are a few pictures up from Chad and Steve on Chad’s Blog.

11 people started the race at 7 in the morning at the Willow Springs Road parking lot. It was another cold start with the sun just barely starting to appear. Just like last weekend, the race started with a nice little roll out to the starting point, and just like last weekend, my hands and feet were numb by the time we got the the neutral start (I even had windstopper gloves this time!). We rolled into The Station in Oracle about 5 miles later where we took some pictures and the caffeine junkies of the group got their fix (and my hands and feet were reintroduced to the concept of “bloodflow”).

At 8:00 sharp, the race began with the descent east out of Oracle to the turnoff on Tiger Mine Road. By this point, the group had already started to split, and I think we were down to 5 or 6 in the front group. The guys with gears pulled out ahead and the racing began. As we rolled down the Arizona trail off tiger mine road, I quickly realized that although it was technically a maintained trail, there were several sections where it was less than obvious where to go. I was glad I had my GPS in tow, and glad there were a decent number of cairns to help along the way.

I passed a few people on the singletrack and rolled onto the pipeline (in 4th place at this point).

It’s worth taking a moment, at this point in the story, to bring to everyone’s attention the concept of time bonuses on this race. There were three places on the race where you could make up time by doing a little something extra. The first was the pipeline. If you cleaned the pipeline (meaning: don’t put a foot down on any of the climbs), then you got an extra 30 minutes taken off your time. Later in the course, if you dropped your bike and ran up Antelope Peak (about 3/4 mile and 400 vertical feet round trip) you got 75 minutes. Finally, if you added in a lap on the 24 hours of old pueblo course (~14 miles) you got an extra 90 minutes. These time bonuses become very important at the end of the race, because the person who comes in first may not actually be the winner depending on what bonuses they did or did not get (hint: foreshadowing).

I would like to think that I didn’t get the time bonus on the pipeline because I was riding a singlespeed with my 34×17 gear ratio on it. In reality, I think I probably could have gotten the bonus (it’s always easier to say that now, right?), but I totally forgot about it. I may have known at the beginning of the race, but once I actually got there I knew I still had a lot of miles to go, and therefore had no problem walking some of the hills. In fact, I even passed Chad on the pipeline and he said to me “Is it clean so far?”. It didn’t even register and I made some remark about not cleaning some of the switchbacks (not part of the pipeline). In hindsight, he was probably very confused, and I was very much oblivious to the real meaning of his question.

I proceeded to catch TopoScott on the singletrack, and had a little conversation with him about the Antelope Peak time bonus. I realized that I knew we had to get to the top of Antelope Peak, but there was no trail, and I had no idea whatsoever how I was supposed to do that in the most efficient manner. Therefore, I decided to let Scott set the pace for the rest of the singletrack in hopes of him leading me to the summit of Antelope Peak.

That turned out to be a good move on my part. My overenthusiastic nature would have probably sent me bushwacking for a very exorbitant amount of time, and possibly not even reaching the peak after the Cholla’s had their way with me. Instead, we spent about 25 minutes gaining a 75 minute time bonus. Good decision.

It was during that climb that I also realized that if Scott was even with me at that point, and he got the 30 minute time bonus for cleaning the pipeline, that meant that I had about 35 miles of racing to make up 30 minutes of time on him.

Oh yeah, and he had 18 gears (no big ring).

And it was mostly dirt roads on the way back.

Luckily, we did see Max on his way down Antelope Peak, so I had some idea about how far he was ahead of us when we re-mounted the bikes. It was about 15-20 minutes.

He, as well, had gears. Unlike Scott, he DID have a big ring, and judging from his speed when he left Antelope Peak on the road, he had every intention of using it.

I made it onto the road even with Scott, and soon pulled ahead of him. I did a quick recap of the situation to myself, which went something like this:

“Alright Nathan, you need to put 30 minutes on Scott. You need to gain 20 minutes to catch Max, and you have but one gear to do it with, against their collective 45 gears. Never mind that some of them are redundant, they also have four legs between the two of them so they will make good use of those redundant gears. This is going to hurt, don’t even try to fool yourself that it won’t. In fact, if it doesn’t hurt, you need to go faster.”

Yes, that is exactly what was going through my head.

I proceeded to drop the hammer. And by dropping the hammer, I mean dropping my head, and spinning my brains out for the next 15 miles. I glanced at my GPS during this brutal road spin a couple times, and every time I looked at it, I was going between 13 and 15 MPH. A quick calculation reveals that my cadence would be somewhere in the vicinity of 85-95 rpm. I guess for a road bike or a geared bike, that isn’t really that unreasonable, but for a singlespeeder who likes to climb hills with cadences closer to 1/3 of that, it was pretty freakin fast.

~15 miles later I got to the beginning of the 24 hour course, and had told myself if I didn’t see max by the time I hit the course, I had no choice but to crank out the 24 hour course as quick as I possibly could to try and regain whatever time I could squeeze out of it.

Just to give some perspective, we were doing about 90% of a 16 mile course to get the 90 minute bonus. Last year at Old Pueblo, the course was only 14 miles (they added some new singletrack this year), and my fastest lap was right around 1:13 (my first lap). This time, I had almost 55 miles behind me, and was also doing around 14 miles.

I pulled onto the course at 1:01pm. I pulled off it at exactly 2:06pm. That’s 1 hour, 5 minutes for those of you who aren’t interested in the math.

I finished the last of my water at 2:07pm, put my head down again, and busted out the last 6.5 miles of willow springs road in 24 minutes.

That’s 16.25 mph. 104 rpm, average. No wonder I was sore on sunday.

I kept looking down at my water bottles as if something would appear in them. Nothing ever did, so I just kept pedaling.

I rolled into the finish line at 2:30 exactly, wrote my name down, and cracked a beer.

At this point, Max was cursing to high heaven that I was sitting there next to him.

He had rolled in at 1:30, and had skipped the 24 hour course, figuring there was no way anyone would make it in before 3:00 who did the course.

He cleared the pipeline, but I gained 30 minutes on him from the 24 hour course and my rage up the road, which put us both at exactly the same finish time.

Now, the only thing to do was wait on Scott, and see if he came in less than 30 minutes behind me.

I was about halfway through my beer when Scott came rolling in 16 minutes later. I put 16 minutes on him, but it was 14 minutes too slow.

In the end, I guess I had the fastest time for the full 74 miles, but that time bonus from the pipeline did me in for the win. Honestly, though, if you asked me 2 weeks ago if I would even be thinking about coming close to winning a 74 mile endurance race on my singlespeed, I would have probably fell over laughing. And now, I was a mere 15 minutes away from it.

Craziness.

More importantly, I had a great time, rode some awesome new sections of trail, and met some super-cool folks. I can’t wait to see whomever makes it down to Old Pueblo in a few weeks, and (hopefully) the whole bunch of them at the next AES race I make it to.

It’s good to have friends to suffer with.

Oh yeah, and I said that I would take more pictures than the SingleSwizzle. I did. I got one picture at the top of Antelope Peak. Maybe next time I’ll take 2 pictures. Always forward progress. . .

To get some other perspectives, here are some associated blogs (in case you didn’t catch them up above) who do/will/should have some good race reports up:
Chad’s Bike and Tri Blog – Event coordinator extraordinaire.
Diary of Scott Morris – TopoScott, the GPS guy, and winner of this year’s APC.
Endurance Junkie – Max, my podium companion in 2nd place.
Rockin’s Blog Site – Steve from Oregon. He flew down for a ‘business trip’ that happened to be the same time as the APC. Watch his site if you’re from the Pacific Northwest, he’s getting together an Oregon Endurance Series. Might have to return the favor and fly up for an event when he gets it mapped out.