Sunday, August 4, 2013

2013 High Cascades 100: Suffering through the dust, heat and rocks with Doug


            Last winter, I decided that High Cascades 100 would be the big goal of my 2013 racing season.  I had done the race once before, in 2011, and it had absolutely dominated me.  Back then, the course was altered due to a major snow year and featured even more singletrack than normal for HC 100.  It was also 108 miles long, extremely hot, and I was relying solely on bottles for hydration.  This combination led to me taking around 2 hours longer than expected to complete the race and I was an absolute shell of a man once I finally crossed the finish line.  Once I recovered, I vowed to return and try to make a better showing in the race.
            Based on my previous dehydrating experience at HC 100, I decided to do this race with a hydration pack in addition to bottles.  For me at least, it is impossible to drink enough from bottles to stay hydrated while riding singletrack for 9 + hours.  I also decided to use an electrolyte drink instead of plain water for my hydration needs.  Lisa recently turned me on to Osmo hydration products, which are different in that they have more salt and less sugar than most other options out there.  Everything else I have tried, from Heed to water, has made me feel sick by the end of a 100 miler, so I thought I would give something new a shot.  The night before the race, I prepared 2 full 100 oz Platypus reservoirs of Osmo mix.  I would carry one from the start of the race, and the other went in to a cooler full of ice packs for the aid station at mile 50.  I stuffed both Platy packs full of assorted bars and other calories and got a few hours of sleep prior to the 5:30 A.M. start.
            We had no issues getting to the start on time, and I rolled out with a few hundred others once the clock reached 5:30 on the road from Bend.  I had ample time to chat with Dax as the MTB peloton rolled away from Bend on the pavement.  He has been crushing the races this season and seemed confident.  I was fairly certain he would do well that day.  I hadn’t been training super well leading up to the race due to work and lack of motivation.  My main goal for this race was to pace myself correctly and not utterly crack like I did in 2011.  Even if I wasn’t feeling quite as strong as in previous 100 milers, I felt like I had prepared better as far as nutrition/hydration are concerned than ever before.  Every race of this sort is as much an effort to survive to the finish as it is a competitive endeavor.  I was motivated to make it across the line alive, even if I wasn’t completely confident in my ability to slay the competition on the way there.
            Once we turned off the pavement on to the doubletrack climb, it became obvious that it hadn’t rained in Bend in quite some time.  There were several inches of “moon dust”, and the numerous riders in front of me were doing a fantastic job of kicking it up in to the atmosphere.  It quickly became very hard to see, let alone breathe.  In spite of this, I did a decent job of riding a solid pace, without pushing myself in to the red zone, up the climb that placed me in good company when we finally reached singletrack.  Riding down this singletrack was quite sketchy, however, due to the combination of low early morning sunlight and super thick dust in the air.  It was almost impossible to see where you were going.  The main thing I dislike about Bend riding is the fact that you can never trust a bermed corner.  What appears to be a berm may just be a dust pile, which will certainly not support your weight if you hit it at speed.  With the poor visibility, the berm/dustpile distinction was even harder to make, and several riders crashed hard.  Even last year’s winner, Barry Wicks, went down and broke his collarbone on this first segment of singletrack.  I stayed cautious and fortunately kept the rubber side down until things strung out enough for the dust to settle.
            Throughout the first few hours of the race, I worked hard to eat and drink in order to sustain me later in the race.  My goal was to have finished my 3-liter reservoir by the time I made it to the aid station at the halfway point.  The Osmo mix I was drinking was treating me well.  It didn’t tweak my stomach in any way, and the slight saltiness of it made it easier to drink a ton of it somehow.  I actually had to stop and relieve myself twice before the halfway point, which was a huge departure from the other 100 milers I have done.  I felt good that my hydration scheme was working as well as I was hoping it would.
            The climb to the halfway point of the race at Dutchman Flat seemed to go on forever.  I had climbed the Mrazek trail before, but there is apparently a ton of (steep) climbing above the top of Mrazek that I had never done before.  By the time I saw the “Aid ahead” sign, I was pretty tired and was losing focus.  I spaced out and managed to clip my handlebar on a tree, sending me face-first in to the dust.  Fortunately, the pinky finger that collided with the tree was the only thing that seemed significantly injured, although my knee didn’t feel quite right, and I was able to get rolling again shortly after gathering all of the items that had yard-saled across the landscape during my tumble.
            It had heated up quite a bit by the time I got to that aid, and the ice-cold Platypus pack that Lisa pulled out of the cooler for me felt amazing when I put it on my back.  There was still quite a bit of ice in the reservoir, and this was a godsend since the temperatures were already in the mid 80’s and were still climbing.  Having resupplied, I set off in to the heat and rocky trails around the backside of Mt. Bachelor.

Hot and miserable, but not cracked (note dust beard from faceplant). Photo by Oregon Velo

            These trails were quite a bit rougher that I was expecting, and my back and arms got pretty wrecked riding on them.  It got hotter and hotter, and I was really suffering when I reached the brutally long rocky singletrack climb away from Lava lake.  I had to hike-a-bike quite a bit of this, and even at my snail-like pace, I passed several riders who were worse off than I.  The heat was intense, and tons of dudes were cramping up.  After what seemed like an eternity, I made it to the top of the climb and began the descent to the aid at mile 80.
            This descent would normally have been pretty fun, but my back and arms were so tired that supporting my weight over the rocks and drops became even harder than pedaling.  My knee was also hurting after my wreck, and pedaling out of the saddle got pretty painful.  Ignoring annoyances like these is one of the biggest challenges of 100 mile MTB racing in my experience.  I usually deal with this by visualizing how good it will feel to cross the finish line and stop riding.  The faster I get there, the sooner the suffering will be over.  I was doing a lot of this kind of thinking for the last 20 miles of the race.
            I got to the final aid station and took two full bottles since the temperature had climbed above 90 degrees.  I was pretty sure that my Platy pack was running low and I didn’t want to run dry.  There were several riders sitting under the tents who had apparently been cracked by the heat and had abandoned the race.  I was tired, but not cracked, and felt reasonably hydrated and not sick.  This was a first for me at this point in a 100 miler.  I left the aid telling myself that it was mostly downhill for the remainder of the race.
            Shortly after leaving the final aid, I heard a hissing noise, stopped, and sure enough noticed a jet of Stan’s sealant shooting out of my rear tire.  I was NOT in the mood to fix a flat, so I rotated the tire so the hole was facing down, bounced it up and down, and hoped for the best.  Thankfully, Stan came through for me and the tire held air for the rest of the race.  What joy I felt for my tire sealing success was soon erased by the course, which went uphill quite a bit before going down on the tidilywinks trail.  Tidilywinks, which is normally one of the best downhill trails out there, was is pretty bad shape.  There were tons of braking bumps and blown out corners.  Combined with my fatigue these factors made tidilywinks no fun at all.  I was glad that I would be able to pop out and cruise down to the finish line on pavement once it was over, however.
            To my horror, at the end of tidilywinks, there was a sign directing us to the Storm King trail, not the road.  Storm King is also normally a blast, but not in 90 degree heat after 90 miles of racing.  I gritted my teeth and made it through, and finally emerged on to pavement for the final few miles of racing.  I locked out my fork, put my head down, and emptied the last few drops from my gas tank on the way back in to Bend.  I ran out of water with a couple of miles to go.  I drank roughly 10 liters of liquid of during the race, which was quite a bit more than I ever have before.  I finally found a hydration product that agrees with me.  Osmo is good stuff.
            It felt awesome to finally cross the finish line and put an ice-water soaked towel around my neck after around 10 hours in the heat.  The best part of every 100 mile MTB race is always the finish.  Everyone there is stoked to have survived the experience, and there is frequently cold beer flowing.  Once my body realized I wasn’t trying to destroy it any more, I got hungry and secured my free burger, which was fantastic.  Lisa and I hung out with Dax and his entourage for a while, enjoyed the atmosphere (in the shade) and had a couple of beers.  Dax did great in this event.  This was not a surprise to me coming off of his SS win at 6 hours of Mt. Hood.  He has definitely become a force in endurance MTB racing and is no slouch in the shorter events as well.  It has been awesome to watch him turn in to such a beast on the bike.
            High Cascades 100 this year was definitely not my fastest 100 miler.  I wasn’t super motivated going in to it, and even considered not signing up despite my winter plan to revisit it.  I’m definitely glad I did it in the end, however.  These ultra endurance races are awesome goals for a season of riding.  They never fail to motivate me to train, and finishing them never fails to give me an extremely satisfying sense of accomplishment, even if I have to endure a lot of agony on the way there.

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