Friday, June 4, 2010

Break in training for an adventure race

This past weekend I (Luke) took a break from raining for Ride the Rockies and competed in an adventure race in West Virginia. The Wild and Wonderful 24HR adventure race is put on by Odyssey Adventure Racing and is one of the funnest races I've done. I was competing on a 4-person team for TeamHalfwayThere.com. We started off with some whitewater rafting down the New River toward the New Ricer Gorge Bridge. After that it was 23.5 hours of mountain biking and trekking through the West Virginia mountains. The course was weighted heavily toward biking so I think it was a great training for Ride The Rockies. I even spent much of the racing towing a teammate up the hills when the terrain permitted it.

The hilghlight for me was a mountain bike time trial over thirteen miles of sinlge-track trails and fire roads. THe kicker was we had to do it at night after having raced for 15 hours. Riding technical trails at night is an aboslute blast and forces you to stay alert even when you are dead tired.

We had a wonderful race and ended up finishing 3rd in the co-ed division and 5th overall. The 3rd place finish gave us enough points to move up to 11th place in the CheckPoint Tracker standings and pretty much guarantees an invite to the championship race in Moab in October.

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