Wildcat 100 MTB Race - In the Mud!

I'll try to keep this brief as I don't have a lot of pictures for show-and-tell. This race was a muddy piece of epic work, coming in as a very long tough day on the bike.

John and I drove up Friday night and crashed in a hotel in Poughkeepsie. We got up at 4AM on Saturday and drove to the race venue with plenty of time to register, get dressed, and do all other pre-race preparations. While it had been dry on the drive up, overnight the sky had clouded over and a steady light rain was coming on. The rain would continue on and off throughout the day, gradually turning already saturated trails into a mushy pile of peanut-butter consistency clay mud.

The race went off at 6:45AM prompt. There was the usual hustle to Get Out In Front, which I declined to participate in. I tried to keep a reasonable position in the pack so I wouldn't get stuck behind a lot of slow people, but didn't push hard to get up front as A) I knew I couldn't hang with those guys for 100 miles, and B) I wanted to go hard but not blow up right out of the gate.

The race course with elevation profile

We hit singletrack within 2 miles of the starting line. I made out OK, only getting stuck behind slow people a couple times, and was usually able to pass without too much hassle. One thing that may have helped is the fact that the field was very small - only 92 people registered in our category, and who knows how many of them did not start on account of the rain (any person with a few functioning brain cells knows that riding mountain bikes on trails all day in the rain is a Dumb Idea).

We went through some interesting microclimate cells where the temperature would abruptly drop by 20 degress, and then come back up to the nominal 60 some odd degrees. We rode through a giant cave, which was a really cool feature and something that I have never done before.

Within a half hour the pack had spread out and I was riding at a pretty fast but comfortable tempo pace with a few other riders. At one point, around mile 15 during the first section of singletrack, I hesitated to roll over a fairly big rock (they were really wet!) and just fell over. I slammed my hip and wrist into some rocks, and got pretty shaken up. It took several minutes to ride it off.

I felt like I was just riding stupid when we were on the single track; I don't know if it was the wet and muddy trail conditions or the fact that I'd taken the whole week leading up to this race off due to recovering from an epic training ride the previous weekend, but I felt clumsy and my hands and feet would verge on cramping up whenever I had to jerk my bike out of a poorly chosen line.

Luckily there were quite a few road sections, which I felt more comfortable on and was able to make up some time. Unfortunately, the race course was rife with bad marking practice - they failed to put up turn confirmation tape, and several turn signs were poorly placed or just completely missing. This was a huge complaint that many riders had and led to several groups making wrong turns (I made two or three myself).

On the plus side, the area is gorgeous. The climb leading up to the first aid station meandered alongside a sizable mountain creek, which lead up to a very big waterfall (it must have been at least 50 feet tall) cascading into a pool of crystal clear water. The track climbed up and around to the top of the waterfall and then continued to follow the creek to the aid station.

The waterfall we rode by in Minnewaska State Park (Photo cred: New Paltz.org)

The next memorable section was between miles 36 and 46, where we entered a park for 10 miles of single track. The first half was the mountain biking equivalent of trying to catch a greased pig - the trails were incredibly twisty and turny, covered with a slick coat of mud. They were so convoluted that although I could see other riders, I couldn't tell if they were in front of me or behind me, or how far away they really were. The second part of the singletrack was much more technical, with lots of rock gardens and wet, slippery off-camber roots.

Spaghetti pile of singletrack

I lost a lot of time during these 10 miles, mainly because I turn into a sissy on wet singletrack. I'm not sure why, but part of the reason is probably because I never ride when it's wet except for in races - it's bad for the trails and it's bad for your drivetrain. It probably took me an hour and a half to make it through this section, and it was took technical to eat, so I had to make due with snatching quick sips from my hydration pack. In retrospect, it would have been wise to stop for 30 seconds and eat a gel or a bite of food.

After the singletrack section we began The Climb - a 10 mile long, 1,700' tall thing that looked large and intimidating on the elevation profile. However, in person, it turned out to be not all that bad; when you spread 1,700' over ten miles, the grade is actually pretty gentle for the most part (not like those 1,500' tall climbs over 2 miles that I was doing in the GWNF last weekend). About halfway up the climb we hit the aid station, and then proceeded to ride into another extraordinarily beautiful area near a high-altitude (I hesitate to use the word "alpine") lake and some really interesting slick-rock trail surface.

You can see from the graph that I was able to keep my heart rate relatively steady throughout the big climb. The big dip about 2/3 of the way up is where I stopped at the aid station.

After the long descent down the other side of the mountain is where the rain really became a factor in the race, aside from making the technical singletrack slippery. The MUD, which hadn't been too bad so far, reared its ugly head when we rode through some farmer's fields on trails that were obviously brand new and not built to IMBA sustainability spec. Riding through 4 inches of sloppy, rutty, and grabby mud for hours on end is not a good way to try to make a finishing time goal. At this point I was getting pretty tired and just settled into maintenance mode, accepting that I was not going to meet my 8 hour time goal.

The race course went through some vast apple orchards which were still in bloom, which was very pretty. I started to get some cramps in my legs during one of these sections, and ate the last of my Endurolytes and chugged a bunch of water which seemed to help, although the cramps would come back to haunt me near the end.

Somewhere around mile 75 or 80 we got on a rail-to-trail, which provided a blessed opportunity to cover some ground at a (relatively) fast pace. This was a welcome relief from the soul-sucking mud, and I tried to milk it as long as possible until we made a left turn and rode some of the singletrack that we had hit in the beginning in reverse on our way towards the finish line.

The last two sections of singletrack were tough. The first of the two sections was fun, but painfully slow as my legs were completely out of gas. The second of the two sections was so muddy that I had to walk a lot of it - when you tried to pedal, your rear wheel would just spin and you wouldn't make much forward motion.

At last I crossed the finish line, in 9 hours and 6 minuted. The race director informed me that I "would get to skip the last 4 miles because it's getting chewed up back there"! Which would have had me ride PAST the finish line, do another loop up in the woods, and come back for the finish. This would have put the finishing distance on my GPS at exactly 100 miles, which would be longer than any other "100" mile mountain bike race I have done. While I didn't mind stopping, I did mind the fact that they tacked an arbitrary 27 minute penalty on to my finishing time for not completing the loop. It looks like I was the second person that they had cut short, so I was just barely too slow. I much rather would have ridden the whole thing and gotten a "real" finishing time of 9:33 than being assessed a penalty time.

I hosed off my bike and myself, got some food and a beer, and enjoyed the first real sunshine we'd had all day while I waited for John to come in. All in all, it was a really intense day and I had a great time despite all the shortcomings of the race organizers (of which there were many, this was one of the more poorly planned and executed events I've ever been to). It would have been much faster if the trails had been dry, and if this had been a "target" race for me rather than one which I was just training through.  A tough but good day on the bike!

You can see that I went out too hard for the first 30 miles, after which my average heart rate dropped down a peg until 60 miles, where the intensity dropped yet another notch as my energy level and motivation waned.

My chainring after the ride

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