Atlanta Cat 100 (mebbe 103 but prolly 115?)

I can only hit you with highlights and mebbe lowlights.  The full narratives are lost in a kudzu haze.

The "racers meeting" goes something like this:

"Thanks for coming.  We got 130 people signed up for this.  If you think you're fast, you can go ahead and start..."

Gazes are exchanged and riders scurry off.  I look at my fellow Charlotte compatriots (Bill Nye, Dr Mike, and Türd), and try to to communicate that it's best to head out with fast'ish locals knowing that even if you can't keep up, you'll fall back into more locals. 

Get out of "town" and the sequence of events from there is muddled.  I'll do my best based on this map and some Ride With GPS warnings and points of interest. 

Riding along on some muddy single track in what I'd guess was Sugar Creek, and I come across some riders just standing in the trail and looking down.  Apparently, we are at the "Steep Concrete Chute!"  It is exactly that.  Oh... well, actually it's a "WET Steep Concrete Chute," and it seems these people don't know what to do about what's in front of them.  I yell something like "we ain't getting anywhere just standing here," force my way to the entrance, squanch down on my ass with my bike in front of me, and proceed to slide down it like it was a snow field at the July edition of the Breck Epic.

The Trash Trails.  Pretty sure that's where I come across the first person heading to the hospital.  Broken collar bone or some such.  Plenty of riders staying with him, so I roll on.

Come to the entrance to a long and slippery boardwalk, and there's another rider down.  Broken ribs or something.  The guy staying with him says "it's very slippery, go slow."

I slow down to a crawl.

"That's about how fast he was going when he wrecked."

Thooper.

I'd caught up to Türd at some point, we rolled into the first aid station, and on the climb out, he leaves me.  I see him in the distance when he follows some noodle bar folks on what I'm pretty sure is a wrong turn.  Sigh.

Magically teleport to the second aid station.  A quick stop for some beverage and lube, and head out into the state of confusion.  Riders are going all directions on the trails.  Head units are audibly protesting all the decisions that are being made. 

"It's an out-and-back."

"We were wrong, it's not an out-and-back."

"We missed something."

Türd is in this decent mix of riders (some locals with a clue of where they are at, some with an active route still working, and the rest of us clueless), as well as former ATL resident Nico, so I glom onto their wheels as my computer has decided it has given up on being a navigational tool.  Somewhere out there, I'm pretty sure we hit some good trail, as well as some abandoned railroad tracks (honestly, the 32" wheels crushed here), active railroad tracks, old service roads, kudzu fields with stomped down "paths," and Tunnel Beach (iTs a fEAtuRe!).  I decide at some point to just turn off my route to see if I could restart it.  I lose all the mileage cues, but I regain the little bread crumbs I so desperately need.  Nico was having the same issue, so I stop to help him reboot the route because I would so love his company the rest of the day.  Once again, having a small sense of direction, he and I started stomping on the pedals and found ourselves catching and passing our former exploration group.  We rolled out of aid three together...

And then slowly, I sadly pull away from Nico to go on the rest of this journey mostly alone.  The good news being, I can think for myself.  The bad news being, I'm the guinea pig poking my nose around all the various and vague intersections, only to be caught over and over by Nico and others.

We come to a railroad crossing, and there's not just one train stopped on the tracks, there's another one rolling to a stop on the adjacent tracks.  I can't see one end of either train in any direction.  Some random guy walking his dog tells us there's a trestle down this gravel road that we can use to get under the tracks, so left without a better option, I went for it.  Down the hill, under the tracks, and scramble back up the steel hillside to ride next to the stopped trains...  and ahead of me, I see a human pop out from between the cars... turns around... a bike is handed out to him... then another... then another human.  Nico successfully teamed up with someone, and they bucket brigaded their way through the stopped trains.

I can't remember how much longer I was with Nico, but one second he's there... and then he was gone forever.  

Sad.

Around a gate, through a kudzu stomped path, over two downed trees that are over waist high (on me) that I don't really think I needed to go over, but... bread crumbs?  I come to a spot where I know I'm close to the velodrome, and I should be entering from the southern side.  There's what looks like a game trail to the right, and two tiny culverts to the left.  I go up and down the game trail twice, and my data acquisition device protests every time I go up the trail.  The culverts look big enough for a human, and it seems like an obvious "lol option" on the part of the route creators, so I just go for it.

Push up the steep and slippery (just the theme of the day) end of the culvert, pop out into the daylight...

"Dicky?!?!" is called from the distance.
 

Yeth, I popped outta one of those tiny holes.

I'm now inside the velodrome but not from any direction the aid station guys up at the top expected someone to come from.  FWIW, the rest of the evening, the story spread that "someone came into the velodrome from the culvert," and I had to say "it me."

Grab a couple bottles of go-go juice, some more fig newtons, and head out into the lonely place labeled "YOU'RE F__KED!" on the map.

The miles roll by slowly, and I finally let myself look at the time.  It's 4:00pm, which means... I've been out here for 9.5 hours?  Jeebus.  As long as it's mostly road back, I should finish in an hour or so.

Except...

It's not mostly road on the way back.  More path finding, wrong turns, a decent trail system at Southside Park, a heinous rocky climb out of a hole, an argument with an off-leash dog walker about the legality of bikes in Constitution Lakes Park, a steep push up a landfill, a beautiful view of downtown that I enjoyed for all of five seconds, some super steep descending, and still even more insult to injury "trails" to the final grassy climb up to the finish tent.  Oof.

Seventh place overall.  First single speed.  11 hours 37 minutes out there futzing about.  

Out of 128 starters, only 39 souls finished before midnight.  Yeth, midnight.

That hurt.

I'd do it again.

* Late edit. Won a sweet belt with my name on it.

Ch-ch-ch-changes... again

The Vassago TKO noodle bar garvel bike is built and ridden, and the Crux has been sold to a happy local person over the past week.

Sorry for the shite pic, but the grass is still wet outside, and I'm still in my underwear.

Mebbe you notice some pieces-parts on this bike that don't seem to jive with things I've done in the past.  I have to admit, I deferred to Tom's judgment (Vassago Tom) when it came to things of a garvel nature.  When we started talking about the build back in February, I didn't know all the options, and I didn't wanna do my own deep dive into the subject.  I wanted something that would be optimized for 15% of the riding I do, but in a way that doesn't make the other 85% suck.

I built it up on my own over the course of many sessions, aside from the bottom bracket install because I didn't have the tool (yay, another standard!).  I'll get to owning a BBT-47 eventually and add it to the half dozen or so other bottom bracket tools on my pegboard.  I will say that it was a tedious assembly for a few reasons.

I don't have internal routing tools, other than some sewing thread, a pick tool, and a hair scrunchy...

I've never worked on SRAM brakes before.

I've never installed a Transmission type drive train (was actually easy tho).

Learning how the whole SRAM AXS ecosystem works, in terms of programming things, hierarchy of setup, etc.  Just ask me how to screw it up and then unscrew it, because I have that knowledge now.

Noodle bar/lever/stem spacers... gotta get close to ded-to-nuts on with shortening the brake lines when it comes to the cockpit setup.  There's not much room for error.

Other forms of self-sabotage.

Yeth, I wanted internal through-the-headset brake routing.  Sorry not sorry.  It looks so clean, and I put a lot of trust in the Cane Creek Hellbender bearings in the headset.  In as many years as I can remember, I've never pulled back the seal on a Hellbender bearing and seen any contamination... just a slight pain in my brain for bothering to take everything apart to have a look.  I'm guessing this will last my lifetime.

That said...

Cutting the hoses, figuring out how to plug them to prevent fluid loss while futzing with the length and getting it routed through the fork, measuring the steer tube (four times) and cutting it (twice), getting the lines to go through the very tight ports on the HCR headset whilst sliding everything together also whilst keeping an essential and cantankerous o-ring in place, plying the lines into the spacers and the grooves in the Zipp XPLR bar also also whilst keeping it all in place and getting the stem's faceplate on...

I needed about seven more hands than I had.  I constantly reminded myself that there would be a reward for the work I was doing.  That said...

I see why mechanics hate fully internal, and if you don't do this work yourself, you owe them every dollar they charge to do it.

Oh, the self-sabotage thing?

Long story short, in an aim for perfection that defied my ignorance, the lack of steadiness in my hands, and too little forethought, I not only dropped a rubber plug into the frame, I also lost a tiny screw that holds the metal cable frame ports in place... also inside the frame.  I coulda let the rubber plug go, but if I could even hear the screw jangle inside the frame once, it would essentially be a whole Tell-Tale Heart situation (read a book, kid).  I lost forty five minutes of my life contorting the frame in space, listening to the screw travel through almost every tube in the frame (not kidding, bottom bracket shell, top tube, down tube, head tube, and one chain stay at the very least) before it finally fell out to the floor.  Bonus points that the rubber plug met the same fate about fifteen minutes into the process.

I've got about 160 miles on the bike so far, with one proper garvel ride.  I'm beyond smitten.  This thing rides on rails and is everything I wanted it to be... gotta get used to all the buttons tho.  Never thought I'd use that 46 tooth cog, but I'd also never ridden up a 12% grade on a saturated Roseborough Road either.  It's a fighter plane on descents with "Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta*" playing over and over in my head.  I have no regrets other than not adjusting my brake lever reach before bombing down gravel at 30mph+ in the chilly rain.

And finally, I'm going to have to say goodbye to the Vertigo Meatplow V.7 soon.  The only reason I could possibly hold onto it is sentimentality, and I don't buy into that concept. If I did, I'd still have an '87 Suzuki Samurai in my driveway collecting dust. As much as it hurts to part with it, it hurts even more to see it forgotten on a hook in the Pie's office with almost flat tires.  Going forward, if I was going to grab a rigid single speed, it would be the 32" Maximus.  If I wanted a bike with front suspension, I'd take the Optimus with 130mm of travel over the Vertigo with the Fox Stepcast 32 up front.  I can't stomach the thought of downgrading it to a bar bike/grocery getter, which is the current purpose of the more limited Stickel (27.2 post, 2.2 rear tire clearance).  The Vertigo will make someone very happy, and I have future-proofed it pretty hard by buying extra wheel bearings, a backup external dropper post, seals for the Stepcast fork, etc.  It will pain me, but it will also being me as much joy as when I see my old Moots at the Whitewater Center being piloted by Eric Van Driver or that time I ran into the owner of Meatplow V.1 in Greensboro or...

Point being, it deserves to be ridden.  I thought I had room for six bikes in my world, but they all have to come off the hook often enough to justify their existence.  Although I thought I'd keep this bike forever, that was true... until 32" wheels became a thing.  Sigh and also sadness.  I've made so many memories on this bike in twelve years, so here's hoping someone else can make at least twelve more.

So... changes indeed.

Atlanta Cat 100 this weekend BTW.  Still undecided which bike I'm taking tho, but I know at least one bike that is not on the list of options.

* As much as an almost 57 year old male Caucasian garvel dad lord can feel like a "gangsta" 

Ridge Runout Gravel '26: Edition Uno

Kinda sorta like when I got my Optimus built up days before Pisgah Monster Cross 2024, thus making it not an exciting time to have a new mountain bike, I faced a similar but different situation last week.  My frame and sundrious parts all showed up for my new garvel bike, but I was never going to get it built by Friday night... and I'd committed to doing the Ridge Runout Gravel thing-a-doo Saturday.

It woulda been a fine day to ride my "dream" garvel bike, but since it was sort of a race (kinda), my brain only races single speed (but down the road... the garvel road... who knows?).

I put aside fantasies of getting this bike race ready, tossed the Aspen STs back on the 32er, and headed to WNC avec Türd.

Flashback to Wednesday night...

I was doing all the easy build stuff on the garvel bike as soon as I could get to it.  The Pie had Boppit preoccupied, so now was a good time to mount the gravel tires as well as shod the 32" with Aspen STs for Saturday.  He hates when I work on bikes, and the thing he hates the most is seating up tubeless tires, bike pumps, air compressors, and the pssssssssssst sound in general.  I swear, I swear, I swear I took my time to make sure I did it all perfectly.

Türd shows up at 6:30am to pick me up...

"You know your front tire is on backwards."

Unnngh.

At least when we get to Wildhaven, Bad Brian had a compressor and whatnot, because I'd rather not look down at a backwards tire all day long.

There were more riders than at the pilot event last year, and something like six single speeders... a few that I didn't know.  We did the neutral rollout, some climbing, and then the mega-long descent fifteen mile (not a typo) garvel descent.  At least one single speeder had gotten away from me, and somehow I wasn't catching him with my big wheels (obvs slow acceleration and handled like a tractor).  Once again, I mistrusted the Wolf Tooth tire pressure calculator... even tho I specifically said to myself "TRUST THE WOLF TOOTH TIRE PRESSURE CALCULATOR" after the Bootlegger 100 just a month ago.  I got the ever-loving shit beat outta me on the descent with too many PSIs, but lolz.

I spent my only time with one other rider for a short bit after Barlow caught up to me... after stopping to pick up his ejected bottle and smartly dropping his tire pressure. 

Once we got to the bottom and hit the pavement, it was all adios muchacho as I watched him ride off into the distance.  I got to the flat-ish gravel of Brown Mountain Beach Road... and that's when I finally dropped my tire pressure.  

Oh.  Totally shoulda done that sooner.

Now comfortably pedaling down the road, I could see that I was catching the lone single speeder ahead.  I woulda rather caught him on the nine mile climb back towards the finish, but whatevs.  Rode all the way up by myself for something like an hour... to finish first single speed.

Sorta.

It's a race but not a race but podiums last year but this time?

Dunno.

I'll take it as a first.

And, yeth.  I woke up Sunday and spent way too much time building a bleep bloop bike with internal through the headset routed brakes, and I didn't throw any tools or parts across the room or cry (on the outside).  Got to head out on a test ride at 4:00pm, and... it rides like a bike.

Rolling stones gather no mas

Gonna be a coo coo cachoo week.  Too much all at once.

I was outta town over the past weekend, and got what might be the last three rides on my Crux.  The highlight of those rides being a solo excursion in Charleston, WV whilst camping with my son and the son of my son.  

Planning a route on Ride With GPS is both a blessing and a curse.

I passed a fair amount of very underbikeable trail on Middle Ridge Road because I thought I had a lot of gravel riding ahead... until I came to the bulk of my route... which was all on very private property as I came to find out.  Never seen a whole-ass purple gate before.  West Virginia being the South Carolina of the Virginias, I knew better than to hop the gate.  

Your guess is as good as mine?

Losing as much as a third of all my planned route, I went ahead and rode over the steep ridge, outta the forest, and down into the city.

Sights that I've seen but worth seeing again.

Rode back outta the city and over the river on some pedestrian infrastructure that tested the limits of my acrophobia.  When I got closer back to the Kanawha State Forest, I went back to my OG route that wasn't quite what I intended.

What I thought was a road turned into a "trail" that was really just a leafy ditch on the side of a cliff.  I've never seen burgundy on my elevation profile before.  WV, you so funny.

I very wrongly assumed the boundary road would be kept clear'ish.  I was wrong.  I rolled the poison ivy dice on this one getting around it.

I would do it all again tomorrow if I could.

Topeak E-Booster Digital Mini serves all the purposes.

Anyways, it was a good memory to make before putting the Crux on the market* because this is showing up some time this week:

For me, this will be a semi-daunting build.  Almost every aspect outside of pressing the headset in will be kinda new territory for me.  Like, pull up all the Youtube videos and watch along while spinning wrenches kinda shit and also pausing a lot to mumble swear words to myself.  Bleep bloop robot shifters and droooper and a power meter (because YOPMO), and internal rootings and all manner of using my phone and apps to make the bike rideable.  Vassago Tom says he can build one of these up in about forty minutes, so I'm shooting for fewer than forty days.  TBH it takes me forty minutes to wrap my bars.

Also, these showed up over the weekend:

So... yeth, I had (still have, need to sell*) brand new Hydra II 32" wheels built back in January, but these are the sorta unreleased (yet) and basically unannounced (still) SOLiX 32" wheels from Industry Nine.  To silence the "32 inch wheels and tires are going to be at least two pounds heavier" cynics, here are some weights for you:

Hydra II 32" (32 spokes): 1,760 grams
SOLiX 32" (24 spokes): 1,520 grams
SOLiX UL 29" (24 spokes): 1,400 grams

And speaking of my SOLiX 29er wheels, mine are the UL (Ultra Light) that were one generation ago, but as of this past weekend, two generations ago?  I didn't see that Industry Nine snuck in a new line up of wheels until I started writing this post Monday morning.  Anyways, as of Monday morning, the I9 site was kinda clonking along, but mebbe the new 29" SOLiX system wheels on Whisp rims might be 1,520 as well (AI thought so), so my 32" wheels ain't all that heavy.  All together, wheels and tires... about 240 grams heavier... so just about a half pound... which ain't two pounds.

So, gotta get busy building a gravel bike that I've been dreaming about for months, but really doubt I'll have it ready for the weekend, and if I decide to do the Ridge Runout gravel event on Saturday, I'd do it on the 32" wheel single speed, and that would mean I'd need to mount the Aspen ST tires to the new wheels, so they are sadly sitting in stasis unshod of rubber meats, meanwhile I'm contemplating going to Girona in September to ride gravel, but I don't know if my internally rooted noodle bars will fit in my travel bag? 

Who even am I?

* Yeth, I need to sell some bike stuff to strangers, my joie de vivre.

PMBAR 2026

Long story told in incredibly short form...

I got what I wanted, much needed time with my good frand.

Longer version:

I was able to get up to Pisgah in time to knock out a Lower Lower Black and Sycamore loop with Nick before meeting up with Watts at The Hub for a beer or two. From there, we had so much free time that we stopped at Ecusta Brewing with enough daylight left to get over to Oskar Blues to hook up with Dr Mike and get back to the hotel before dark.  That's some kinda record for us.  Then there was the delight of four mostly grown men in a hotel room crowded with bikes and gear trying to prepare themselves for a solid day in the woods.

I can only choke down one tiny pie with my coffee before we roll over to the start.  The predicted rain seemed to have went away, and there's a palpable excite in the air... although rumors that Eric "PMBAR Honcho" Wever has decided that last year's checkpoints were too easy, so...  

The mad scramble for the passports begins at 8:00am sharp.

all photos: Icon Media Asheville

Contemplating my approach to the passport scrum... if only there was a better way.

Open it up, and... it's just a fake passport with the location of our actual passports, oh... some twenty five miles or so away.  That means we will be at least two and a half hours of going up and down from knowing where the five checkpoints are exactly, so lots of time spent with Watts with not much to do except ride and talk but not have any in depth conversations or contemplative soul searching.

I haven't had enough quality time with Watts lately.  We'd fallen into quite the rhythm of PMBARs and Mountain Cats and Watts Fappenings and Horny Cats and occasional van life trips over the past few years.  With Watts having a lot on his plate lately, bike cycling has taken up the whole back row of a passenger van.  He promised he would be present for PMBAR this year, and I promised four checkpoints and low expectations.  I just wanted to hang out with him for a weekend.

Suffice to say, we got a lot of "quality" time together.  Long story made less short, the passport and checkpoints that it revealed in tiny font lived up to the hype.

Me telling Watts "we need to go here and here and here and here," and him saying "what, where... what does that mean... whatever... fine."

Just quitting right then and there when the little book gave you all the information needed to push you into giving up meant close twenty one miles back to your car if you left the forest and headed down highway 280.  I couldn't come close to extrapolating the anticipated mileage or time for four checkpoints, but we have an excellent ride hitting some premium condition trails in the North Mills area trying to make the most of it before heading down into the Pisgah Butthole.

Whence there, we experience all the PMBAR classic hits.  Getting passed by one of the fastest teams who's obviously one checkpoint ahead of us already.  Taking a wrong turn, but for an all new reason.  Seems like nobody's used to going that way on Bradley Creek, and the trail marker that said we went off track was hidden behind some mountain laurel.  Ha ha and also tee hee.  Then the always incredible but never expected trail fairies that delivered to us vast quantities of pizza and beer and some reprieve from the sadness that we're only two checkpoints in after more than six hours of time in the woods.

Watts and I beginning our joyous exodus from the clutches of the Pisgah Butthole.

I decide to switch my computer to maps only so I could no longer mark time or mileage.  Doesn't matter at this point.  We have to do what we have to do. 

After our third checkpoint, we took the Wheelchair Ramp (proper) to Buckhorn Gap leaving the Pisgah Butthole in our rearview mirror.  I gave Watts the breakdown.  It was going to be a four mile out-and-back with a fair amount of hike-a-bike on Upper Upper Black to get the fourth checkpoint AND the climb up Maxwell Cove AND the descent down Lower Lower Black to finish... or we could just fly down Clawhammer to beer, burritos, warm dry clothing and a big, fat, hard-fought DNF.

"I'll be fine."

Me at our fourth and final checkpoint getting our passport stamped asking, nay insisting not to be told what time it is.

Watts was correct.  He was fine.  Not like that dog drinking coffee in a room consumed in flames tho.

These images were not taken towards the end, as I no longer had arm warmers, but I'll be diddly dong damned to tell you where we were.

In the woods, riding on some rocks, before some roots... I guess.

Eleven hours after we had been handed a passport-not-passport, we crossed the line.

My annual "thanks for playing the game" moment with Eric.

I don't know how Watts managed to pull off an 80+ mile PMBAR with almost 10,000ft of climbing essentially off the couch (relatively speaking, for a guy who normally has crisp bike dork tan lines in April), but he did.  Our conversations might have been limited to "how you doing?" and "I'm fine" for the last few hours, but there's no one else I'd rather have that conversation with.

Good times (sorta).

Lorb willing and the creeks don't rise (literally), we'll be back with great'ish anger and flurious vengeance in 2027.

That's twenty two PMBARs for those keeping track*.  I know Yuri is, and I apologize for not being able to answer that question at the finish line in my addled state.

* The real question is, how many more to go?

I will walk five hundred miles, and Watts will walk five hundred more

PMBAR is this weekend, so it's time to put away childish things.

Which is less than perfect timing, now that I recently got a chunky tire for the Vassago Maximus Ti Meatplow V.11 (don't expect me to ever type all that out again).  I guess I need the break tho*.  I've put over 550 miles on it already, and that's the most rigid miles I've done in such a short time since I used to be stupid enough to do it all the time.

Let's just say, I'm feeling it.  Granted, I'm not letting off the gas when I ride this thing.  It wants to go fast.  The other day, I almost got a PR after standing inside the start of the segment for @20 seconds (duh) to give Dr Mike a gap in front of me, still caught him towards the end and had to slow down... and only missed it by two seconds.

Assuming one invests any thought into whether or not PRs and KOMs on STRAVA are real because it always seems like someone has the KOM on a trail with a glitchy 37mph average that's never been disputed.

It's just that good.  This is giving me the future forward dilemma that when proper forks come out, do I get a stock Maximus Ti and swap the parts over OR get rid of the 29" Optimus (swapping all compatible parts over)?

Dunno.

Oh, but PMBAR...

Watts has already forewarned me that he hasn't been riding that much lately.  He's now in that wonderful season of life when you finally get to do less parenting of your children, and you shift to the glorious and very glamorous parenting your parents.  I think life gives you a six month to two year gap just so you can see how awesome this life can be before pulling you back into the muck of it all.  I think we're both looking forward to a day of dealing with the struggles before us in the woods to include finding water, dealing with the weather conditions of a temperate (and sometimes temperamental) rain forest, and deciding when to get off our bikes and hike (a lot).  This might just be a four check points and let's go drink beers and commiserate and just "celebrate" a finish year.  I'm fine with that.  We can't always expect to fall backwards onto the podium every year. 

From this Friday to Sunday, PMBAR and frands are the only things that matter.

* I'm hoping to have my mitts on my semi-dream build Vassago TKO garvel bike soon.  The best way for me to get somewhat fitter is to not be doing back-to-back mountain bike rides and get some longer hours in the saddle.  Sunshine, sweat, and mebbe a brewery stop kinda days.  This will help me do that.

Bootlegger 100 (85?) '26

My inability to not succumb to peer pressure (when it relates to bicycling type activities) would be the very reason I voluntarily hopped into the front seat of Türd's car at 6:07am for the one hour and twenty five minute drive to the Bootlegger sign in... which closes at 7:30am.

Do the math.

I'm not one to do the whole "late thing," so I got fully dressed in the passenger seat before we got to Lenoir, and pulled a "One Manbun After Another" leap out of the car to snag our number plates while Türd sought out a parking spot.

At least my heart rate was already hummingbird'esque enough that the limited time to warm up probably wouldn't matter.

The roll outta Lenoir is not single speed friendly, something I seem to allow myself to forget or else I'd probably never come back.  We really don't hit a super meaty climb until mebbe mile twenty, so legions of gravel dad lords (many only doing the 58 mile event) fly by me in groups of two, seven, or a billionty.  I eventually found some pleasant company in fellow single speeder, Andrew, although it brought back memories of the Southern Cross race I did a million years ago.  John Karrasch and I rode side by side, chatting for many miles and discussing how stupid it was to not share the workload and draft off each other... only to have Kelly Klett blow by us at the last aid station to take the win.  I shared this story with Andrew, and regardless, we just did the same thing anyways... regardless of the fact that we knew there as at least James up the road.  Mebbe more.

So there we are, negative racing, knowing that mebbe if we work together, we could close the gap up to James, but...

Photo cred: Icon Media Asheville

It's only negative if you're positive it's not positive.  Andrew wasn't sure, so mebbe?

When we finally got to the sausage meaty 1,400 foot climb, we found a rhythm... and whaddaya know?  We also found James.  

Andrew asked me if I thought he should bridge up to James to let him feel our presence. 

"Yes, you should totally do that."

So he did.  I don't know how, but he did. 

And then he came back to me.

"James says there's another single speeder ahead, some guy who pulled the battery outta his rear derailleur or something."

Good.  I have a good record of finishing off the podium here, and I don't wanna blow it.

James blasts away, and when I get to the first long descent, holy shit balls.  These new tires are amazing.

Oh, did I forget to mention that someone at Maxxis totally came through, and I was rocking the new Aspen ST 2.15 tires (55m in garvel speak)?

I did.  Thorry not thorry.

My only regret was not believing the Wolf Tooth tire pressure calculator app, over-estimating weight (bike + rider + gear... why bother getting out the bathroom scale?), and not factoring the high temps of the day.  I coulda went with a lower PSI, but despite that, I had PRs on climbs and descents (although my overall time was slower than last year, more about that in a bit).

By the time I got to the bottom of the Polecat Knob descent, I could no longer see Andrew in my rearview mirror. This blows, not only because the next thirteen or fourteen miles is probably an average of 1% downgrade, but I'm now lonely. I'm flying solo, spinning along at 16-18mph for forty something minutes before finally hitting the punch in the dick known as Maple Sally, or as I now think of it, Maple Sisyphus... assuming someone was beating him in the legs with an axe handle as he pushed his boulder up a mountain.  It was here that all the previous mistakes of the day really reared their ugly heads.

It's getting hotter than balls, and my lack of proper hydration is becoming a problem, as well as not putting some scoop of some powder in my water bottles at mile 34 or wherever.  I've also blown through my four gels*, and had only eaten a half a grilled cheese, so I resort to throwing vanilla cookies in my cargo bibs before hitting the hardest part of Maple Sally... er, Sisyphus.

Sidenote: Being parched and trying to use dry cookies as a source of nutrition is almost as pleasant as eating pollen sprinkled sawdust. 

I'm feeling mentally toasted, and I drink every ounce of liquid in my bottles (taking the lids off to sip the un-get-at-able remaining 1.5 ounces at the bottom... do better, Specialized) before getting another PR going down Staircase Mountain.  Hitting the pavement, and getting that "cow in the barn" feeling, I met my next foe, head wind.

Aid station four.  Coke.  Clemmer tots.  Good idea?  Who cares?

Holy schnikes.  I'm doing all I can to get "aero," but I'm having to pedal to go downhill.  Much sadness and also regret as I realize one bottle of Gatorade at the last aid station to make it all the way to the finish was no buenos.  Lid off and licking the inside of the bottle time it is...again.

But I didn't die, so okay.

Awesome time, and gotta say, the big stupid wheels were rolling like they were fueled by Pink Bike forum haters tears. 

Assuming I do another gravel event down the road (single speed, natch), I'll definitely be taking this bike.  No questions.  Although I was ten minutes slower this year than last, I can easily chalk that up to multiple nutritional/hydration mistakes, unseasonably warm temps, a nasty head wind for most of the final sixteen miles to the finish, and mebbe spending too much time being a Chatty Cathy with Andrew.  Wasn't too hard to look at all the PRs and scroll across the map to see where I lost time (lost 1/3 of the time in the head wind). 

Oh well.

Yay, garvel.

* So yeah, duh.  I was planning on grabbing a whole bunch of The Pie's leftover Gu gels (she's swapped to Honey Stingers), but there were no more Triple Berry, Banana Jizz, or other fruity flavors, just Vanilla Bean, Caramel Sticky, and Chocolate Enrage.  I don't like those flavors, so I only grabbed four.  Also, I figured I wouldn't have time to eat (or bother with) my usual sour gummies, so I left them behind.   I ended up starting the race with 444 calories of CarboRocket Half Evil, four gels, and two mustard packs... for @6 hours of saddle time.  I figured I would "live off the land."  Four cargo bib pockets and three jersey pockets... and that's all I thought to carry.  Stupid.