Endurance Walking?

Photo Cred: Steve Sharp

The last round of Snake TT's for '09 has come and gone. Great weather and a semi dry trail finally greeted the 300+ racers from around the Southeast (and Ohio) showing up to toe the line. Having had some equipment failures lately, I was locked into a 34x18 gearing. Doable, but stout for Snake. Run what ya brung right?

The day turned out good for the Moots/Swiftwick crew. Meanjoe crushed 47 minutes off of his previous attempt and rocked in at 3:34! krs1 cruised by me with about a mile of trail to go and raced home to a 3:39! Dustin the pro finally was able to catch us old guys on rigid singlespeeds and had a 3:3x?? time too. Took him long enough to catch us though, heck I was walking for what seemed forever before he finally caught up.

The gearing proved manageable for the bulk of the race, however the last 5 singletrack miles of the final 8 miles was a bear. Meanjoe caught sight of me at the left turn of doom and rode with me for a while. Learning from past mistakes, he eventually went on his merry way motoring to the finish. krs1 caught up to me shortly before the towers and swiftly left me in his dust. I was walking and griping, not about being sore, tired, or cramped I was feeling great, but pissed that I couldn't ride the most fun stretch, I just couldn't turn the gear over in the uphill rocks and keep momentum. I felt like I had brought a road gear to a mountain bike race. Frustrating.

krs1 offered some words of encouragement, luckily it sank in. I dropped a few more psi in the tires hoping it'd help me crawl over the rocks and keep some sort of momentum without requiring leg pressing. I got to a short rocky grunt up and stalled out, track stand style. Two photographers happened to be right there clicking away and started yelling at me to "stop posing". A few weak pedal kick maneuvers and I was able to lurch forward and clean the grunt, I can't wait to see that photo run.

From there I just tried to keep the pedals ticking over, soon enough the gravel downhill was in sight and my gearing felt much better! I rolled across the line 3:42, my best time yet with probably the most walking I've done at a Snake race. Hodge said it best when I told him how much I had to walk: "That means when you were riding, you were really moving!"

Sub 3:30, you're mine next year.

Props to everyone. Thanks again for driving Meanjoe, and Jeffy for hooking us up to make the shuttle work.