12 hours of Tsali race report

What a great weekend!  My Hunny & I drove up to Bryson City on Thursday and moved into the little mountainside cabin that would be our home for the next few nights.  The weather was perfect & the views were magnificent.  Friday morning, after a big pancake & French toast breakfast, we headed up to the trails at Tsali for a bit of a ride.  My wife, who has limited singletrack experience, did great on the trails and had a blast.  She only fell a couple of times, & those falls were more related to the clipless pedals that I had recently installed for her.  We ended up riding the entire 11 mile race course backwards which was a bit more than we had bargained for, but she was a trooper & hung in there.

The day of the race was cool and very dry, giving rise to some very dusty trail conditions.  That's better than mud in my book!  I had some friends who were doing a 3 person team and since I was entered in the 6 hour solo division, I set up my pit with them.

The Lemans start was 400 or 500 yard uphill run to the bike drop area.  I knew that as a non runner, I would not gain places with a strong run, but I sure could burn a ton of matches.  Needless to say, I was the next to last one on my bike!

The course started with a long gravel road climb and I tried to keep the heart rate down.    I was passing some riders and feeling pretty good.  After I topped the climb, I heard a course marshal say to go slow as they had a rider down.  I did go slowly and as I passed this huge mogul on the downhill I saw a rider laying on the ground.  A volunteer was checking them.  I kept a steady pace for the rest of the first lap and stopped at the pit just long enough for some chain lube.  The dusty conditions were making my chain squeak & I hate that.

Just as I topped the first climb on my second lap, the medical ATV pulled out in front of me and the medic guy said that they had a rider down.  I stayed behind the ATV for most of the descent until he came to the same spot that the rider on the first lap had crashed.  I later heard a helicopter overhead and I assumed that he had been airlifted out.  The next lap I saw that they had taped off that mogul and detoured us around it.  That was a good idea.

I kept up my steady pace, reeling off three laps, all at about 1 hour each, including pit stops.  I was being conservative on the climbs but letting it hang out a bit on the descents.  Man that is one fun trail! 

Just a few minutes after leaving the pit on my 4th lap, my chain started skipping.  I couldn't figure out why it would suddenly start this.  In my mind I was thinking that all that had been done was a little lubing of the chain.  How the heck could that make it skip?  On the second big climb (the one that was like a V shaped drainage ditch) I found out what could make it skip when my chain broke.  It didn't break with a "snap" like a chain usually does; it just kind of fell apart.  When I looked at it, the links were fine but the pin was gone.  It was then that I remembered getting a stick caught in the spokes & I guess that did it!  Anyway I whipped out my trusty bag of tricks, put in a quick-link and was on my way.  I figured that the incident cost me about 8 minutes.

I finished that lap, and by the time I started the 5th lap, I was feeling the day's efforts.  I had noted on my last trip through the finish line that the cut off for going out on another lap was 4:40.  It was now about 3:40.

I was starting to struggle on this 5th lap. I would go through periods of feeling like total crap, and then I would feel good for a few minutes, then feel like crap again.  I kept plugging along & finished the lap at about 5:46 or so.  I missed the cut off by just about the amount of time it took to fix my chain!  I was ok with that though, as I was toast anyway.  One more lap would have probably turned into a death march.

All in all, this race was a blast!  I'm really starting to get hooked on this endurance thing after Yargo & Tsali.  I'm looking forward to Dausett this fall and maybe next year I'll be ready for a 12 hour.  Right now, I can't even imagine doing 12 hours.

I sure hope that the riders that I saw injured are ok.  If anybody has any info on them, please pass it along.  I'm sure that they are in all of our thoughts today.

Ed