The Silliness that Was

From the desk of Jason Stewart:

When I came to my senses, I sat up in the mud and started picking shards of gravel out of the thin skin covering my knees and elbows.  Ed was wheels-up in the brushy ditch nearby with some new scratches and a freshly emptied bottle cage.  We had just crashed, like so many times before.  We looked warily at one another, each feeling the sting of sudden and total betrayal.  “How could you?  Why?” went the wordless conversation.  “Jerk!” came the silent recriminations.

     

Crashing was nothing new to me and Ed.  In the four months or so that we had known each other, Special Ed and I had wiped-out, spun-out, powered-out, and  washed out on just about every type of terrain that West Virginia had to offer.  From craggy crevices at Coopers Rock to boggy Big Bear singletrack, we had wrecked them all.  I had dislocated several ribs on the end of an ill-placed culvert near the Iron Furnace.  Ed had left silver paint on most of the trees and rocks on West Run and we had both cursed the off-camber roots at ludicrous switchbacks at Watters Smith.  Over the handle bars?  Check.  Way, way, way over the handle bars?  Double check.  Name a beautiful stretch of trail within an hour of Morgantown and chances were good that Ed and I had defiled it.  Yet with all of those crashes under our belts, this one was very different.  This one was different because it was the first time we were on the clock.  It was my first race, and I had just crashed less than 20 feet after leaving the pavement.  Of course I didn’t know it at the time, but my already-crappy day was about to get much, much worse.

Joe, Jonny and I had been riding together for about a year when the inaugural 12 Hours of Creek to Peak race was announced.  It would be the perfect opportunity for me to try my hand at racing, Joe assured me.  The course was, to quote the organizer, “completely rideable, sweet singletrack with no hike-a-bike sections”.  Despite my knack for spectacular crashes I was improving as a rider and I was excited to go up against some competition.  The course sounded like a good fit for a newbie and in no time we were rolling down I-79 the day before the race, on our way to Putnam County.

 

Like most natural disasters, the 2009 12 Hours of Creek to Peak was preceded by signs.  Small disturbances in the natural world that a perceptive person should have picked up on.  Omens of things to come.  Bad things.   The most obvious was the sickly-sweet stench of death hanging in the air that greeted us as we pulled into the waist-high grassland where we were to camp for the next two days.  The Putnam County Parks and Recreation department had neglected to mow the area before the race.  They had, however, placed a dead possum in a metal garbage can right at the campground entrance and the Africa-like rain and heat had stewed it to perfection.

We unloaded our tents, stomped down a circle in the ragweed and began to grill some chicken just as the next sign of looming disaster descended upon us.  The skies opened up and comical amounts of water began to fall on the town of Eleanor.  Rain, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing.  Being wet can be uncomfortable, but with the summer heat we were under, the rain helped keep us cool.  At least that was how we tried to look at it.  Rain by itself would have been manageable, but one of the things the race promoter had failed to mention in his e-mail was the fact that the course was new.  Brand new.  As in “backhoe-still-a-runnin’” new.  Mix three inches of rain with twelve miles of freshly churned  Appalachian clay loam and you get mud.  Emmmmm.  Ewwwwwwww.  Deeeeeeeee.  Mud.  I have worked around drilling rigs for years.  I thought I knew mud, but I had no idea.  I would earn my Ph D in mud over the next 24 hours.

The third harbinger of doom served as our wake-up call after a soggy Putnam County night.  The Parks Department employees, probably distracted by the possum stank and exhausted from not cutting grass, had double booked the fairgrounds that weekend.  On top of the mountain bike race, a FFA clinic had been scheduled.  Future farmers from all over the area started arriving at the crack of dawn to have their prize goats, pigs, and cows vaccinated, I imagine against whatever disease had killed Bloaty the Possum.  I woke up to what sounded like the gates of Hades clanging open and shut.  “BAMbangMOOO…BAMbangBAAAAA…BAMbangMOOOOO” went the livestock trailers as they slammed over the speed bumps approximately 12 inches away from my dripping tent.

The cacophony continued through breakfast.  I ate my oatmeal and raisins and tried to talk race strategy with my teammates over the din of diesel engines, pig farts, and more “git-er-dones” and “I reckons” than you can shake a stick at.  The pre-race meeting got underway with a vote as to whether or not to “cut out the muddy part” from the final mile.  It was unanimous.  By all means, good sir, cut out the muddy part.  I’m not sure if it fits the definition of irony or not, but I think that vote sealed our fate.  By ignoring all the omens and then pretending to have some control over what was to come, we sentenced ourselves to a Sisyphean endeavor, but with mountain bikes instead of boulders.

Joe went out first and made it around the loop in a respectable time.  Though saturated, the trails had not yet seen heavy traffic and were still passable during his lap.  I went out next and dove headlong into the hardest two hours and forty-seven minutes of my life.

The first half mile of the race course was paved.  Having no idea what I was doing, I quickly pegged my heart rate in a mad sprint to the trailhead.  A short, slick bridge connected the singletrack and the road.  I made it about halfway across before sliding my rear wheel off the edge.  Boom.  Face down in the mud.  I got up, collected myself and pedaled about halfway up the first hill before I spun out and had to start walking.  I vaguely remember thinking “golly, I sure hope the rest of the course isn’t this bad”.

It was much, much worse.  The only parts I could ride were the perfectly flat stretches.  On the inclines my rear wheel would lose traction.  On the declines I would slide out of control.  I lost count of the wipe outs.  I pushed my bike for miles and miles until mud accumulated so thickly between the tires and the frame that the wheels could no longer turn.  Over and over I had to find a stick and dig out enough clearance so I could start pushing again.  At one point it was so bad that I had to dig mud out of the tire tread and frame just so I could push the bike downhill.  Pushing the bike downhill was hard.  Pushing it uphill required Herculean effort.  I grew frustrated.  Ed was in tears.  At least we were not alone in our misery.  Every few minutes you could hear racers on other sections of the course screaming out various colorful profanities.

I eventually walked, crawled, cussed, and cried my way around the course.  I slogged to the timing table, gave Jonny the baton, and plodded dejectedly on out the back to the wash-down hoses.  I was crushed physically, mentally, spiritually.  I had wanted so badly to do well in my first race.  I wanted to put up a good lap for my teammates.  I wanted to show that I could hang with these guys.  I wanted all the training to have meant something.  But no, I had failed miserably.  I might as well have chopped Ed up into little pieces, stuffed him in a backpack and carried him around the loop, no better than I had ridden.  All I wanted to do was spray off the mud and the shame, put on some dry underwear and go sit somewhere with a cold beverage or twelve.  Joe caught up to me and asked a couple of innocent, good-natured questions about the trails and my general impression of the venue.  “Joe,” I replied, “we’re friends and all, but right now I need you to leave me the #@$* alone.  I will be able to laugh and have fun again in about thirty minutes, but for right now, #@*% off.”  Joe stared blankly at me for a few seconds before busting out laughing.  He thought it was hilarious.  “See you at the tent”, he giggled before walking back through the timing area.  I sprayed mud and crud onto the ground for half an hour before joining Joe to wait for Jonny.

I cheered up soon enough to sit with Joe in front of the massive screen that the race promoters had erected.  The only redeeming quality about the Creek to Peak race was the live video feed from different cameras all over the course.  We watched rider after rider walk by; many had already taken their helmets off and were chatting wearily in groups of two or three.  Eventually Jonny came stumbling by.  He almost walked out of the picture before he noticed the camera.  He turned around, walked back into focus, and gave the crowd its biggest thrill of the evening when he spat in the mud and flipped the double-bird salute.  I know he spoke for me and I’m pretty sure he spoke for everybody else too.  An hour later Jonny came barreling around the last corner and sprinted towards the finish area.  Joe gave him the “slow down, killer” hand signal.  “Let’s talk about this”, said Joe.  “We have all done a lap.  We are not going to win.  Does anybody want to go back out there?  Me neither.  In the dark?  I didn’t think so.  Let’s go eat some chicken.”

 

And with that, my first race was over.  Other teams continued to send riders out, but by midnight pretty much the entire field had decided to quit.  We finished a distant second out of two teams in our division.  It was a rough introduction to the sport, for certain.  If there was a positive to the whole experience, I can say that it was great to get my suffer-meter calibrated early on in my career.  I’ve done a bunch of racing in the years since then and no matter how bad the conditions, I can always say to myself “at least I’m not in Eleanor”, and then things don’t seem so bad.