Misery Loves Company (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine May 2003

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The Hard Way
Misery Loves Company (Cont.)

SHAVED LEGS RIPPED with muscle and tattooed arms and sculpted asses and guys with earlobe plugs, goatees, and Oakleys, and girls with pierced tongues and spiked hair wearing Smiths, and Mick Jagger howling "Start Me Up" through the woods and banners wafting and strings of colorful flags popping. It's just before noon and a hundred of us are bunched together at the starting line at the base of the mountain, trembling.

For some perverse reason, my teammates have appointed me lead rider.

Having to saddle up a mud-encrusted bike and ride hell-bent in inky blindness is a dicey proposition. Night is when everything falls apart.

Now there's no music, no sound at all. A man is firing a gun in the air in front of us and then I'm running inside a riot of chugging elbows and horse-huffing chests—a 400-yard Le Mans sprint up through the trees and back to the bikes, all of us slipping like clowns in our cycling shoes.

Vaulting into the saddle, I start pumping, only to find that I'm already in such oxygen debt I can hardly stay upright. A rider falls against me and I hear the heart-sickening whoosh of a flat and just keep pedaling, astonished to discover that it was his tire, not mine.

It's uphill right off the bat. I concentrate on trying to catch the rider in front of me. Then we're all zipping downhill. Dippy curlicues through rocks and trees, over a bridge, onto the long, grueling ascent. Climbing mountains is not so different whether you're on foot or on a bike. I grind past one cyclist after another, knowing I'll need a good lead because they'll catch me when I start ejecting on the descent.

Miraculously, I'm bucked off only twice descending through the fishhook turns. I come rock-sliding through the gates, and Pat is there yelling and then he's snatching the baton and I'm fumbling to swipe my radio-frequency time card and Pat swipes his and he's streaking away and I'm croaking, "Go, go, go!"

I stumble over to the computer tent to check my split: 1:08:45. We're in seventh place overall, a mere 23 hours of riding remaining.

Walk jelly-legged a quarter-mile uphill to our condo, wheel my bike inside, flop on the couch, and stare dumb-eyed at my battered Trek. Try to eat. Drink four or five gallons of Gatorade. Get the bicycle up on the bike stand and begin tinkering with the messed-up rear derailleur.

My zombie movements amuse Nat and Dan.

"Great ride," says Nat, and starts hacking.

Thumbs up from Dan as he rolls his steed out the door. He's on deck.

Minutes click blearily by like seconds. Now Pat is walking in and falls onto the couch and stares at the ceiling.

"Flatted. Can you believe it! Borked my rim but rode it in."

"That's the way, Patty!" coughs Nat.

Pat lies there in wasted anguish as I did, attempting to eat and drink. We give Nat high fives as he pushes his bike out of the condo. I drop mine off the stand and Pat puts his up.

Sometime later, Dan comes in with a huge grin and dirt-blackened teeth. "Caught a lot of air," he exclaims.

A couple of hours fly by and I find myself back at the starting gate. Everybody is smiling and whooping as each rider comes in, and the friendly buzz of it all soaks into me.

Because Nat is sick, I expect to wait, but suddenly he's blasting in, handing me the baton, and we're swiping our time cards and before I can even take a full breath, I'm rocketing uphill again.

It's a good lap: a cracker uphill and only one endo on the descent. Back in the condo, I find Nat has tacked up a page with our lap times. Scribbled at the bottom: drink lots! eat-fix bike-rest-race-repeat. We all have fast second laps, and Big Daddy Meats holds on to seventh place as night arrives.

Mountain-bike racing is by nature gritty and grueling, but having to saddle up a mud-encrusted bike and ride hell-bent for leather in inky blindness is a dicier proposition altogether. Night is when everything falls apart if you don't have the right lights.

Granny Gear posts testimonials to such nocturnal hardship on www.grannygear.com:

"Candles are not a reliable backup system; it takes 231 sparklers to do a lap."

"Anybody can ride hard during the day, but in pitch black and cold, over treacherously technical terrain, everything changes. I vastly underestimated the amount of shit-dialing necessary to ensure sufficient candlepower."

"Spit forward so you don't lose sight of the trail."

"Christmas lights are stylish but eat batteries."

Nat and Pat had been crash-testing different lighting systems for two years before deciding on Light & Motion, a Monterey, California, company. Their ARC handlebar lights and Cabeza Logic helmet lamps are our salvation. With a backup supply of spare batteries constantly turbocharging in the condo, the 13.5-watt bulbs are so powerful, it's like riding with motorcycle lights.

More light means safer, faster laps, but at the end of the long, shadowy night, we're still pretty beat-up. Pat has endoed over his handlebars at 25 miles an hour and re-sprained his bad ankle, and none of us has slept much. We are too tired to sleep; the adrenaline and anticipation gushing through our systems make it impossible to calm down.

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