This past Sunday I participated in a race I have not done before, a six hour mountain bike race.  Basically the race consists of you hoping on your bike and riding as many laps as you can in six hours. The race was hosted by Heather Rizzi, a pro rider now riding for GT Bicycles.

The race was at the trails in Schenectady’s Central Park. If you have not ridden these trails recently you really should get out there and give them a spin.  A full loop is about 5.5 miles.  At a race pace, the really fast riders can do it just under 30 minutes, I was able to ride a loop around 35 minutes.

There are lots of fun technical features on these trails, you get to experience bridges, logs, skinnies, and a small jump you can take which gives you a nice advantage over the easier but longer ride-around.

I decided to sign-up for this race about 3 days prior to the event.  I figured it would give a good indication of my fitness level for the upcoming Half-Ironman Race.  It didn’t really hit me what I got myself into until 15 minutes before the race started.  After the Lemonds style start (that is where you have a quick run to your bike) we headed into the woods to start the laps.

The first 2.5 hours things were going great.  I felt awesome, my lap times were good, everyone was happy.  Then I heard the sound…..psssssssssssssssssss.  Yup, flat tire.  I started the race on my hard tail and was riding light, I didn’t have all the tools I need to fix the flat (that was stupid looking back on it).  The person in the pit next to me happened to be right behind me at the time and offered me a tube and tools but unbeknownest to him the tube he gave me was for a kids bike.  After messing with the tire for a few minutes and realizing the tube was the wrong size I decided to hike-a-bike back to the pit area to grab my full suspension.  Luckily were I broke down was only about a 5 minute jog back to the pit.  I grabbed my other bike and I was off.  All told I was off my bike for probably 10-15 minutes, but it really threw off my rythym.  I don’t know if it was the running with the bike, getting flustered or generally just starting to get tired but my lap times started to slow down from that point forward.

Mel came by and brought me a much needed PB&J sandwhich at the 4 hour mark.  By this point my laps had slowed to around 40 minutes each.  I rolled into the pit area after my 8th lap with 10 minutes left on the clock.  The way these bike races work is that as long as you start your lap before the time expires the final lap will count.  I was beat, I was not going out for one more lap.  I sure did get heckled though by other riders (they had ridden in teams or two or three and were already drinking beer) and fans to head out for one final lap.

I was really getting an earful from everyone but I didn’t take a final lap, which I am ok with.  At around 5 hours, 59 minutes and 30 seconds I see about 3-4 people suddenly emerge out of the woods from the final turn and head down to the finish area.  They were the smart ones who hid in the woods knowing they didn’t want to do another lap but also avoided the crowd’s banter.

Overall I am happy with my performance, I feel my cardio is right where it needs to be for the Tinman race.  My body took a bit of a beating from the trails on the MTB bike which I won’t have to deal with for the Tinman.  Here is Heather’s blog posting with the final race results and recap.

Tags: exercise, mountain biking

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 8:43 am and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.