Mountain Biking Up Mount Washington

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Outside Magazine September 2004

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Out There
Tribe of Pain (Cont.)

AT THE FRONT are the pros, including the men's and women's course record setters, Tom Danielson, 25, and Canadian Genevieve Jeanson, 21. I'm in the claustrophobic middle of the throng, flanked by Neil on one side and Ross Kennedy—a.k.a. Spamman, a 43-year-old financial adviser from Boston and a hero to the Forum junkies—on the other.

Spamman's presence is considerable. For the last three years, on weekends before the race, he and people with cybernames like Spankyman, Canoli, Way2Big, and Midlifecrisis have rendezvoused at other difficult paved climbs in New England, from Mount Ascutney, in Vermont, to Pack Monadnock, in New Hampshire. Afterwards, club members flood their Web pages with ride reports, details on gearing experiments, and pictures of postworkout pub-crawling debacles.

This year, Spamman has gotten serious. He's 37 pounds lighter than his 2002 heft of 205 (thanks in part to marriage troubles) and sits atop a rig that looks as if it's been filched from another galaxy: a gorgeous 13-pound Dave Lloyd track bike painted a deep admiral blue, stripped to a single, perfect gear. Bowing to the every-pound-costs-you-30-seconds rule, the bike is also brakeless.

"What do I need brakes for?" he had announced to his rapt public as we rolled off the starting line. "We're only going up!"

As Spamman knows, the effort to gain a mechanical advantage ascending Washington has a rich, if mixed, history. In 1861, horse-drawn wagons clip-clopped to the top of the newly completed carriage road in a plodding three hours. At the turn of the century, auto manufacturers like Mercedes and Stanley brought their fastest cars to the mountain and wheezed to the top in two hours. By the time the Hillclimb was introduced, in '73, the public's fascination had shifted back to human power. The first winner was John Allis, a three-time U.S. Olympic cyclist who completed the ride in one hour and 15 minutes.

Held in October that year, the race saw below-freezing temperatures at the base and a howling nor'easter above tree line, at 4,000 feet. The next year, under better conditions, Allis shattered his mark by almost 14 minutes. In 1980, the record fell again when Olympic road cyclist Dale Stetina finished in 57 minutes and 41 seconds, a time that stood for the next 17 years.

Then along came a kid named Tyler.

"There's B.T and A.T.," says Richard Fries, 43, a field reporter for the Outdoor Life Network and editor of The Ride, a regional racing magazine based in Boston. "Before Tyler, Washington was a good local hill climb. After Tyler, it has become the unofficial world championship of hill climbing."

"The last pitch THROWS YOU OVER BACKWARD," says one participant. "Without low gears, it is a series of TRACK STANDS AND WHEELIES."

In 1997, Hamilton, fresh from a spectacular Tour de France debut with the U.S. Postal Service team, arrived at Mount Washington and stomped to the top in 51 minutes and 56 seconds, obliterating Stetina's 17-year-old mark by almost six minutes. Afterward, Hamilton said the climb more than equaled anything he'd ridden in the Tour, a declaration that attracted international racers like French superstar Jeannie Longo.

Hamilton's endorsement also lured the best from the West, aspiring pros and climbing specialists who knew that a good performance on Washington could help launch a career. "Last year my agent e-mailed some of the teams we were talking with and told them I was going to break Tyler's record," Tom Danielson, a pro cyclist from Durango, Colorado, told me. "I was like, 'Jeez, what are you thinking? I've never even seen the course.' I was pretty uptight for a while." The last two winners—Danielson, who did set the current record in 2002 with a time of 49:24, and Tim Johnson, who won the Hillclimb in 2000 and 2001—both now race for Division I European teams.

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