I’m back in flag now from my whirlwind tour of northern New Mexico.

The Double Boundary was one of the hardest rides I’ve done, that’s for sure. Not necessarily because of the riding part of it, but because of the hiking parts of it.

If I had to estimate, a good 4 hours of my ride (maybe more) were spent pushing my bike up some sort of hill or another.

Come to think of it, there were a couple times I was pushing my bike downhill because I was close enough to the next uphill that it wasn’t worth the time to get back on it and coast 20 yards before the next hike.

My GPS measured 11,000 feet of climbing in the 67 miles, and right around 10,000 of that was finished before mile 50. Oh yeah, and about 4000 of that was done by mile 10.

Did I mention there was a lot of climbing?

In the end, I did the 67 miles in 11 hours and 10 minutes, which was good enough for a second place finish behind Mr. Dan Durland from Colorado Springs. Lenny was right behind me, and the event organizer, Rich was in fourth. The four of us were the only full finishers, and Dan, Lenny and me were on singlespeeds.

Maybe the advantage was less bike to push?

The funniest part of the whole day was relating our thoughts at the end of the night over a few beers.

Dan: “I could’ve sworn one of you guys were gonna catch me, because I was walking every single hill”.
Me: “I kept expecting that Lenny would be rounding the bend behind me, because I was walking every hill”.
Lenny: “I was walking every hill, and thought for sure that Rich was gonna catch me.”

How much you wanna bet that Rich was walkin’ every hill too?

Classic.

If you want to check out the full results check it here.

I have to say, I’m excited to go back up there and do a bit more exploring on some of the other trails in the area, because a bunch of them were a lot of fun, and probably would have been pretty darn cool if I was a little fresher.

Then again, I guess that’s how these races work.

After grabbin a couple beers after the race, I made it back over to Angel Fire for the end of the Red Bull Burner. I think I mentioned it a few weeks ago, but in case you forgot, the Burner was a 12-hour downhill race. I heard from somebody that it only the second race of its kind in the world (somebody said something about New Zealand for the first one).

It was pretty cool seeing all the gravity crowd coming down the mountain and how psyched they were to be cranking down with lights blazing. In the end the race got pretty exciting, as the top three pro finishers were separated by less than 30 seconds.

30 seconds after 12 non-stop hours of downhill runs. 30 runs, to be exact.

It’s an interesting addition to the endurance racing scene, not only because of the crowd it gets involved, but the interesting twist it puts on how hard people end up going. You’re essentially taking a 6-10 minute run with a 16 minute lift ride in between each. It means you can eat, repair, or even take a leak in between runs without any penalty (as long as you can get all that done during your lift ride up). It also means that there were guys going full-on, all-out during every run down, since they had 16 minutes of rest heading their way after each one.

Made for some crazy racing, that’s for sure. I’m sure they’ll be doing again since it looked like a pretty fun time and there was quite the crowd there.

A good weekend of racing, without a doubt.