I finally did The Traverse, a long mountain bike race in the Santa Ana mountains in Orange County. The traverse road follows the ridge of the mountains which demarcates the two counties of Orange and San Bernardino in Southern California. It climbs over 8000 feet, and those climbs are relentless.This year the fastest time was 3:58; The slowest time was 8:31. My time was 7:30, at least I wasn't the last one! Although my main goal was to finish. My step-brother Darren finished in 6:01. He is a much better rider, especially downhill.
BlackStar road to the first cutoff
The weather started out really cool. Probably 50 degrees, due to cloud cover. Of course at the starting line I had to go to the portapotty for a lengthy stop. Darren is outside telling me to hurry up and I was trying man. What bad timing. I got out just in time to start, didn't even get my sunglasses on; they were in my pack. I wanted to keep up with Darren for the first mile or so and I did manage to do that. But there was climbing and climbing and climbing. Soon Darren pulled away with the faster riders and I wouldn't see him until 8 or so hours later.
As we climbed the hill, we rose above the cloud cover.
I started out pretty strong. I knew that I had to keep my heart rate down and thus stay below my Lactate Threshold in order to prevent bonking. I did keep up with Darren for a while, but my heart rate was climbing too rapidly. It was hovering around 160.
My max heart rate for my age by the common calculation is 220 - 47 = 173. So 160 represents 92% of max for me which is really high. I was tracking my heart rate on a Garmin Edge 305. I noticed that the Garmin Edge 305 was the most common electronic gizmo in the race. A few people had the 705 which is much more expensive, but the most common was the 305.
Look at the graph, the red line is my heart rate, it wasn't synced up correctly for the first hour, but you can see that it was really high during the first half of the race. The second half I was fatigued and couldn't get anything out of my engine to even raise my heart rate enough. Although I didn't bonk, I really had a hard time keeping up with the pack. I met a lot of riders and they were all pretty friendly. One guy, Dennis, told me that we should be ok to pass the first checkpoint. The first checkpoint had to be reached by 11:00AM. I made it at 10:45.One excuse I have is the fact that my chain broke and it took me at least 20 minutes to fix it. Not only did it break, but it threw an 8 link segment onto the trail. The chain had really only broke in one spot, but the action of the break caused the masterlink to unhook as well. Then I weaved the chain wrong through the derailleur so I had to take it off and re-do it again. So that blew about 20 minutes off my time.
The rest of the race...
After that first checkpoint I really started to fade. Amazingly I didn't cramp and I didn't bonk, I just didn't have the energy to go fast. So a putted along like a turtle. At some point an older guy named Doug was passing me on all the climbs, but I was passing him on the downhills. He was riding a Niner Air, the scandium version of my Niner EMD. It is about a half pound lighter. I asked him how old he was, "65" he said. We traded positions for the rest of the race. I was ahead of him coming down Trabuco, but I made a wrong turn on an unmarked fork in the trail. I went left, which led me to a cliff edge. By the time I made it back to the fork, 4 riders had passed by, one of them was Doug. At the bottom of trabuco, I saw Doug getting his flats repaired. If it wasn't for that, he would have finished before me. Hats off to that guy.
Here's some video I shot during the race...
At the finish I hung out with Doug for about an hour trying to figure out where Darren was, I had no idea what time he finished, but I knew it was about 2 hours before I finished, later I found out it was actually an hour and a half. I finally decided that he might have taken the shuttle back to Blackstar, which was the original plan. "Oh no", I thought, " he is probably waiting for me there." So I hopped in the shuttle and went to Blackstar. He wasn't there. So I took a nap in the dirt on the side of the road. Later, a van showed up looking for me. Darren had sent the shuttle back for me, because he had driven back to O'Neil park for the awards.
Some interesting things I noticed about this race.
The Fastest guy, finished 3:58 and the next guy didn't come in until 22 minutes later. That's quite a gap. That first place finish was by a 27 year-old, the next guy to come in was 40 years old. Old guys do well in this race; the biggest age group was 31-45.
There were over 20 riders that did not finish.
What I learned...
Unlike the RAWROD ride two weeks earlier, I didn't dehydrate or cramp. But my time was slow and my body seemed to slow down starting at the 2nd hour. So I think the longer rides really fatigue me. It must be the training. My training rarely goes over two hours, so really how can my body be expected to perform better than it has. But who has time for those long training sessions? I wonder what the least amount of training I would have to do in order to put in a more respectable time of say 6 hours? And would that be worth the time away from my family. There has to be a balance and I sure would like to find out where that balance is.
