Silver Rush MTB

I will be back in Leadville next year, again competing in the Silver King. This year I haven't pushed myself in training much. I only rode my bike twice from September until the early spring, perhaps March. That was fine and I enjoyed having more time to read, do house stuff, and eat crappy food. But I miss the feeling of accomplishing a tough training day, I miss having a drive to excel -- not merely finish -- during a race. So I will take the lessons I learned competing this year to enhance my training and hopefully (although I don't know if I'll ever be strong enough) contend for the Silver King win next year.

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The mountain bike race was a blast. I pushed my current envelope a bit on some of the descents, often feeling out of control momentarily and then dialing back my speed until I again felt safe. (It was hard to brake gradually enough so that I didn't drastically altered my weight distribution aboard the bike -- the urge when feeling out of control is to brake hard, but that just causes more problems.) On some of the tougher and longer descents I lost ground, but only ground measured in seconds, not minutes. There was one steep, off camber decent where half the trail was rutted out, leaving oncoming riders no option but to squeeze onto a narrow section of the trail in competition for space with the descending riders (of which I was one), where I was lucky to get through unscathed. For the rest of the ride, though, my technical skills were not much of a limiter. That said, there's always room for improvement and having more than a handful of mountain bike rides under my belt next year will make crashing less of a concern.

Moments before the start.

And we're off! Look closely at some of the faster climbers to see just how steep that hill is.

Passing Printer Boy on the way out.

Feeling good halfway through

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Almost done!

While I managed to safely traverse the course, the climbing got the better of me. Signing up for the race 6 weeks beforehand did not allow me adequate time to prepare, and by the fourth hour of the race my quads had about had all they could handle. I didn't help that I run a 1 x 10 set up (which for those unfamiliar with bike gear means I only had one chain ring on my crank instead of the standard 2 or 3 rings that most people have, leaving me without much of an "easy gear").  Oh small chain ring, how I missed thee! Often I was stuck plugging along at 50 rpm for long periods at a stretch. Before the race next year, I'll ride recon on the entire course to determine whether my fitness will allow me to handle a 1 x 10, or whether I'll need to reconfigure my chain ring set-up. Gearing, though, is no substitute for fitness. Exhibit A: A petite 40-49 year old female passed my on the final long ascent riding a single-speed and turning her cranks a super slow 40 or so rotations each minute. How someone so small could produce so much torque, I know not. I was a bit in awe.

Another issue that may at least partially be solved with different equipment is the vibration induced hand pain. The race ends with a long, fairly gradual descent on a rocky jeep road. Pretty early on during this descent my hands started to hurt. I made sure not to grip the handlebar with much pressure to reduce the magnitude of vibrations transferred from the bike to my hands, but that didn't help. I even made fists and only rested the portions of my palms nearest my writs on the bars, but even this didn't stop the incessant pain in my knuckles. At times the pain inhibited my steering, and I took sections of the descent slower than I otherwise would simply because I didn't want to hold onto the bar with enough force to adequately steer myself. My solution will be to run my tires tubeless next year, allowing me to drop my tire pressure from ~30 psi to something in the low 20s. Hopefully the lower tire pressure will better absorb the vibrations that caused me so much pain toward the end of the race.

You can check out my Garmin file here (an average of 154 bpm for over 5 hours of riding, ouch!) and the results should soon be available here. I finished around 110th out of about 1,000 entrants, but was crushed by triathletes that I had been fairly competitive with when I was training harder.

I was depleted at the end of the race, and I only had just over half a day until I had to be back to run. How would my now-thrashed legs hold up for the run? Would I recover much with just 14 hours until the start of the run? If biking over all those climbs was tough, how in the world am I going to run 'em? I downed a few thousand calories and rested in back at the campgrounds contemplating those questions. At 4:30 AM the next morning I had to be up and ready for an even longer day.
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My pre-race song: