Iron Cross Race Report

Iron Cross is a carnival of maniacs. For most people, 700c wheels were not made to go over this kind of terrain. For Iron Crossers, it's exactly what they're made to go over. Pushing bike and rider to the limit is the point. Mountain bikes are allowed but derided. Like going to a Halloween party with an Easter basket. Of course if you went to Iron Cross with an Easter basket on your bike, you'd find yourself in good company.

Courtesy G. Jakubek

Iron Crossers love bikes. They love them carbon. They love them steel. They love them Ti. They love lugs. They love mustache handlebars. They love tattoos. They love PBR, even at the 56th mile of a 62-mile cross race when you're deep into the business of surviving.  They hop barriers because it's a cross race and you have to. They hike their bikes for 15 minutes up a steep, craggy powerline because it's like no other cross race you've ever done. There's singletrack. The kind that would be perfectly enjoyable on a proper trail bike. But this is Iron Cross. And they're maniacs. I hung onto my brake hoods until my hands were raw. I jap zapped until I thought my wheels would break. I found myself going insanely fast down gravel roads, just one thread in a strand of over 350 riders snaking their way across the amazing scenery of Central PA at peak foliage under beautiful blue skies on 10.10.10.

Courtesy G. Jakubek

Before the 9 a.m. start of Iron Cross X.X.X. Edition, the course looked like a traditional cross race. Ribbons, barriers, tight turns and a short hill thrown in for good measure. Of course with a few hundred riders starting en masse, it felt more like we were riding a giant carousel of bikes, with waves of racers spiraling around each other, alternately running up and over the barriers, tackling the hill and pivoting around turns, dozens of riders at a time. Orchestrated mayhem in every conceivable direction. Thrilling, hilarious, and unlike the start of any endurance event I can remember.

Iron Cross puts most of its participants deep into the hurt box. If it were an actual box, and you could look inside it, you'd see the following: 6,000 feet of elevation gain over 62 miles; about 10% singletrack, much of it just barely cross-bikeable; a very strenuous hike-a-bike section that's a tad shy of being an actual cliff; a very long, relentless dirt road climb that takes away from you anything you have left in the tank; and a final hike-a-bike section that you would almost think about riding if it were mile 4 and not mile 54. Sure, there were a handful of racers who, no doubt, stomped the course. The rest of us were happy just to finish, come across the line, collect our Iron Cross medals, which were actually wooden, and devour the delicious burritos provided splendidly at the finish.

Iron Cross

Iron Cross in two weeks days!

First time doing Iron Cross. Not sure what to think? Think it's too late to be racing this long/racing period. Think it might hurt. Pretty sure it'll be memorable. Something like 62 miles on CX bikes. Stupidest idea on the planet? Think so. Race day 10/10. Report to follow.

Iron Cross

Chain Stretcher

Apologies for no report on the Chain Stretcher. Wasn't able to shoot video for the race. I'm confirmed for Iron Cross and still hoping to get into the VT50. Thanks for checking in, -NERaceRedux

Next race, Chainstretcher

The Chain Stretcher – event website

2010 Windham World Cup

The World came to the Catskills this past weekend for the Windham World Cup Mountain Bike Festival. Apropos to the designation of the event, my race preparation was world class, if by preparation you mean irrigating your glycogen system with hops and plundering the playground next to your hotel with your blitzed non-racing friends the night before. The course, befitting of its UCI status, was a mix of technical woods sections, grinding dirt climbs and fast run-outs to the base lodge. It was also, perhaps owing to my race preparation, seemingly entirely uphill. To muddle things further was my observation on Saturday that the elite pro class was traveling exclusively downhill. And while the prevalence of "rigs" and tattoos confirmed that there was indeed a World Cup downhill event running concurrently, I was reasonably sure that the pro XC riders were on the same course as the rest of us. I don't know if, in cycling-crazed Europe, the organizers let the plain folk ride the same course as the pros, but I found it to be one of the more compelling aspects of the weekend and one that made an overnight stay more feasible for the sheer entertainment value of laughing at my relative level of suck, which happened to be pretty high on Sunday.

It's tempting to think that Windham, New York is a lot like its fellow World Cup host towns in the summer in that it's kind of a remote and sleepy off-season place until a big event like the World Cup comes in. Of course, in Europe, they probably know Florian Vogel from Mathias Fluckinger. I'm a pretty regular reader of cycling and can't say that I do. In fact, it took me two laps to recognize that Adam Craig was wearing a Rabobank kit. I only hope that there were enough "informed" spectators who offered a little more recognition than, "Hey, there goes that guy who only uses three bolts on his disc rotor." That's partly due to the fact that, on course, these guys were flat out flying. I appreciate that even more after racing the same course on Sunday and spending a pathetic amount of time in the small ring. I also realized that there is no place better than in the middle of the woods at a big event like the Windham World Cup to watch people who are actually good enough to get paid to do this stuff. Oddly, there's also no better place to be more clueless about how the events of a race are actually unfolding than in the middle of the racecourse itself. I now feel better about never going to France to see the Tour.

Cat 1s did 4 laps around the 3 1/2-mile course. I thought about quitting every one of those laps. But the more times around the course, the more I got used to its punchy little climbs and fast descents. The course would alternate between straddling the resort's main slopes and cutting through its rocky, rooted woods. It was technical like you'd expect for terrain in the Northeast but not insanely so like the old National XC course at Mt. Snow sometimes was. There was talk about how the World Cup riders would handle a few of the bridges on the course. That prediction wound up being wildly inaccurate. I know, shocking, considering it came from the Internet. As it turned out, the bridges were too wide and grippy to cause the slightest shudder even among the first timers at the race.

The expo area was the expo area. Spent very little time there. Between the XC races, DH, four cross and trials demos, there was always a better place to spectate.

Hampshire 100k Race Report

Any race I’ve ever done that was longer than five hours has left me physically shattered. The Hampshire 100k was no different. 62 miles. 6 1/2 hours. Numbers on a page that represent the limits of my endurance. 100s. 50s. 24 hours. The digits attached to each of those are nothing more than data. Data don’t describe how good trails are or how deep you have to go to actually finish. For its part, the H100 had a fair share of very sick trails. It also had grinding hills and murderous power lines in abundance. Numbers, names and words help only to color the details.

They told us at the riders’ meeting at 6:15 on a foggy Sunday morning that the easy part of the course would be the first 20 miles. Either my attention strayed or they failed to mention that the easy part included an almost 2-mile stretch of dead flat, sandy road that wasn’t easy at all. It just wasn’t quite as hard as what followed. A little before that was a narrow string of trail along railroad tracks. A thin margin of error for a pack of racers strung out wheel-to-wheel in the infant stages of an endurance event. With railroad ties just inches away from our cranks and a shallow ravine to the right, it didn't take much to bring the train to a grinding halt. Not much more, in fact, than a rider in front of me stopping suddenly, presumably for good reason. I watched the lead group leave from the bottom of the ravine. Once righted and resigned to being out the back, I settled into a more measured pace.

I saw signs of the leaders once I hit the sand slog. Tire tracks were drawn in the sand all over the road. And not very straight ones. I tried hugging the gutter, Paris-Roubaix style, angling for the slightest bit of traction in the pine needles while getting slapped by the bushes lining the side of the road. A fairly successful experiment, but I still came off the sand with considerably less left in the tank for what lay ahead.

The climbing began for real at about mile 21. Riding was marginally better than walking due to the cumulative effect of elevation gain. Terrain was a mix of smooth dirt, rutted jeep roads, bony trails and steep power line climbs. Some sections favored the purely fit. The rock gardens, not so much. Trails went through public and private property. Some were blazed for race day only. And some were not really trails as much as just arrows through the forest. I broke, physically and mentally, during one of those at about mile 43. I'd officially entered survival mode. 19 miles to go. 2 more hours. What I didn't know was that the best trail riding lay ahead of me.

One of my leg-shaving roadie mates, Bryan Zieroff from Stage 1/FusionTHINK, enjoyed a similarly pleasurable experience:

My legs didn't feel like concrete anymore, mainly because I couldn't feel them at all. It was about mile 30 that the cramps hit. My legs looked like they were having their own grand mal seizure, so I used the 30 something mile rest stop to eat, drink and stretch. It was hard to watch racer after racer go by, but I just wanted to finish. I got going again, and around mile 37 I started to feel better and found a good pace. I started passing many of the people who rode by and got some adrenaline going. I was hoping to take that to the end.

The last third of the race is a blur. Water. Fuel. Cramps. Climbs. I was wired as much as I was worn. I'd sometimes wonder if I could be too tired to appreciate a sick stretch of trail and the answer is no. 45 miles in, even 55 miles in, I was still elated for every twist and turn over soft pine needles. Of course, I viewed any grade above 2% gravely. A light rain had started to fall on the forest canopy. It was a steady rain by the time I came around to the Start/Finish area. 62 miles. 6 1/2 hours. Oh, and 1 pint glass.

http://www.efta.com/PDF/results/2010/H100%202010%20results.pdf