2008 PMBAR

In late January or early February, on a post Christmas holiday fatboy ride at the Chapel Hill Highschool Trails, my friend and soon to be PMBAR teammate, George Scott, asked me if I wanted to be his teammate for the soul crushing 2008 Pisgah Mountain Bike Adventure Race at Pisgah National Forest just outside of Brevard, North Carolina. Immediately my skin got cold, my heart raced, and skeletons I thought I had finally buried were dancing in front of me, laughing and taunting me, daring me to return to Pisgah to redeem myself of my first ever DNF in cycling. "I haven't raced in four years" I thought to myself. "What's worse? Quitting and not returning? Or or a second DNF?, I have knee surgery scheduled in early March..." In fact, my DNF at Pisgah was my last race because graduate school had become too demanding to train my body and my mind. Not to mention that my teammate and I had a falling out after checkpoint two in 2004 when she said she was done and going home....I had a hundred seemingly valid reasons to bail, not to mention that sitting on the couch always appeals to me. I thought hard for a couple of moments though and dug deep inside. Finally, I looked George in the eye and said, "I don't care if we sleep in the woods that night, we're not coming home until we have our checkpoints!" George laughed and said "right on, man!" We shook hands, and Team GS was formed- Greg Schuster and George Scott.

Even though my great friend Sarah had inspired me to start riding again a year earlier, I had A LOT of work to do. And a lot of work I did! Riding, running, yoga, weights, spinning class, hours in the gym on the bike, on the treadmill, when it was raining, when it was dark, and when the the trails were too wet to ride.

So the weekend came- May 2-4. George showed up at my house on Friday morning around 10:30 in his Jetson-esque gas-sipping Prius. A vacant bike tray lay over the passenger seat just waiting for my Redline Flite Mono, er, Multicog 29'er now appropriately named "Bloody Bessie". We loaded up my gear and headed to the hills listening to the Beastie Boys and talking strategy and nutrition for the race. We got to Davidson River Campground around 4pm, checked in, went to K-mart to buy some random crap, set up camp, and went through our gear together for the last time. All good. We repacked, compared the weights of our packs, and set out for our pre-race burger and beer at some cool little place the George knew about in downtown Brevard.

Friday night came and went too quickly. We were up at 5:30am getting ready to race. By 615 we were at the starting line for mandatory gear check and to mark our maps with the out of bounds roads and trails. Shit! We can't use one frickin' fire road! Is this guy trying to kill us?!? The rules have changed since I was up here last for sure. The only thing I recognized from my previous PMBAR experience was the part I feared the most (and remembered the best), the mandatory 6-mile climb up Thrift Cove to the most convenient mandatory checkpoint at Turkey Pen Gap.

At 7:45, Eric Wever, PMBAR inventor and genius, and my vote for Time Magazine's Bad Ass of the Year, read the rules out loud. Damn, ignorance and illiteracy would be no excuse! At 8am the race started and we got to open our passports. Most teams spent 5 minutes looking at the checkpoints and took off. George and I, being less familiar with the forest, spent 20 minutes plotting all of the checkpoints, anticipating a route, and off we went. Up, up, up, climbing in granny gear with no end in sight.

I actually felt better than I've ever felt before on that climb. George, being less familiar with Pisgah, was warming up a little slower and a little more cautiously. After an hour and a half, the mountain leveled out a little bit. I, driven by redemption, started pushing a little too hard and ended up endowing on a small downhill to avoid a competitor that I was trailing too closely. I landed on my back (and camelback) and the pressure from the impact blew the hose out of the bottom of my water bladder. I ended up losing about half of my water only an hour and a half into the race and I was soaked. I slowed my pace and we made it to CP1.

On the way to CP2- Laurel Creek- I was still feeling ok but paying the price for heading out of the gate so hard- George was still getting his legs under him but we got there without incident. I filled up a bottle from the creek to replace some of what I had lost, sterilized it, and we headed on. I decided that was my emergency water and ended up drinking half of it toward the end of the race. No problem.

On to CP3- Cantrell Creek- It started to drizzle and the temperature dropped as a cold front moved in. The rocks and roots were icy slick. My skeletons I had been carrying for all these years were like wings on my back though. Dammit, I'm going to finish this race if it kills me! Unfortunately my wings were the wings of Icarus that would eventually cause me go down in flames. I had another very careless crash. I slipped on a wet rock because I chose a poor line (if it was even a line) and fell over a boulder sliding down the side of the mountain. I got the reprimand I deserved on this one when George basically told me to calm the fuck down that we had another 30 grueling miles to ride. I now had two busted up and bruised shins that I was going to have to deal with for the next 5 hours. What's just a little more pain, right? The trail over to Cantrell creek was treacherous with wet rocks and roots all the way. I couldn't ride for more than a hundred yards without dabbing and slipping all over the place. We finally made it. CP3!

On to CP4- Club Gap- Leaving CP3 was fine. Nice smooth contour trail winding up and down the mountain. Awesome trail. We started descending towards South Mills River and I had yet another crash; this time on a pretty simple switchback. Goddammit I thought! When I grabbed my rear brake heading into the turn nothing happened...the rear brake pads had glazed over or something and I crashed again!!! No major damage though, just a bruised ego and some more frustration. I didn't have any back brakes for the rest of the ride though. Maybe George is right, I thought; start slow and finish strong??? Starting too fast has always been my weakness in racing. We got to the river crossing at South Mills River, crossed the suspended bridge, and started our long climb out towards the top of Club Gap. Must've been two hours of climbing but I'll never know. Granny gear, nose down, using my helmet visor to block my vision beyond about fifteen feet. it was a smooth, steady, sandy climb that felt like riding on chewing gum. Well, that finally changed. Hiking, pushing, cussing, silence. My legs felt like carrots. George and I hardly spoke while we were hike-a-biking up Club Gap. What's he thinking? How's he feeling? I'm not going home without this fucking checkpoint and neither is George. Who's idea was this anyway? How long is it going to take us to get back to the finish line? I'm ready for beer. What if we take the highway? It's not a DQ; it's a 5 hour time penalty or something. Could I live with that? Hell no!

We finally arrived at Club Gap after seeing so many people who were doing an out and back to our last CP. Very few of them spoke to us but finally one of them said, it's just a tenth of a mile away. We were there within five minutes. Upon arrival we ran into some of our more favored competitors that we had met that day. They were discussing, instead of an out and back along Club Gap, a trip down Avery Creek to the fire road for a 900' climb back out to Thrift for the final 2-mile downhill home. It didn't really matter because it was a 900' hike-a-bike back in the direction we came from and I'd really rather be riding. We agreed to continue on down Avery Creek trail instead of hiking out the way we came in...it couldn't be any harder.

Back to the finish! We screamed down one of the rockiest downhills of the day banging and bouncing and choosing lines based on better or worse; not good or bad. Somewhere where the trail flattened out, I hit some roots and spun out. My left hamstring locked up and felt like it was on fire. My leg felt like it was all of a sudden three inches shorter. I shouted for George that I had to stop and our comrades kept racing without us. It took about five minutes to straighten my leg out again. George and I started riding towards the finish again, and riding, and riding, and riding...Is this right? Were we supposed to start climbing again? Wasn't it only a mile and a half down the hill to the turn? Are we going the right way? Exhausted and pushing our bikes uphill again, we stopped and looked at the map. We were "lost". We couldn't reference our position on the trail to our position on the map. (Rule #1- Never lose your position and you'll never get lost) The trail ahead still looked freshly used so we kept moving forward. Finally, the fire road! George exited the trail first and stood in front of me pointing at the trail marker with frustration. What now I thought? Clawhammer?!? WTF????? Were are we? How did that happen? We looked at the map. It doesn't look too bad I said. It doesn't look real good, George mumbled...We had just added about 6 miles onto our route and had missed the turn somewhere...back there. Where my leg cramped? Who knows. Who cares? That's past tense. We just fucked up big time (and that's present tense). Well at least we're at the fire road and we're still headed home. We climbed fire road in granny gear for what seamed like an hour; winding in, out, and up with Black Mountain always around the next bend. Finally the scenery became familiar. Is this where I was dreaming of BoJangles just nine and a half hours ago? It was!!! And there it was...Thrift Cove! Three hundred yards of hike-a-bike separated us from two miles of sweet ass downhill and two kegs of beer. Ain't nothing but a broken bone stopping me now I thought! We pushed the last climb with one team in front of us. Then, there it was- the home stretch! I'll see you at the bottom G!

9 hours and 47 minutes later we were rewarded with warm burritos, cold beer, and sights of civilization. A successful ride. A FINISH! What had haunted me for 4 years had now been laid to rest. A DNF now a successful finish. Now I knew what it felt like to finish PMBAR. Now I knew what if felt like to ride 60 miles of Pisgah. For the rest of the night, we got to sit in the grass with all of the other finishers, drinking beer, making new friends, sharing our stories, our pain, and our victory! The skeletons are finally laid to rest. To the guys from Cincinnati, great ride and good hanging with you after the race. To the girls from Youngblood Cycles. You two were awesome and rode like champs! Thanks for the smiles too. To the girls from Biowheels...lighten up! Don't you know it takes like 14 muscles to smile and 250 to frown??? Not an efficient use of energy!

I learned a lot in this race. I learned a lot from myself and a lot from George. From myself, I learned that you should not ride or race to prove something to yourself or anybody else. It's not fun, it's not in the spirit of competition, and you will get hurt because you are driven by ego. That being said, there are exceptions to every rule and this race was mine. I went there to prove I could do something and I proved myself right. From George, I learned that a race like this is totally mental. You've got to keep a clear head to read the map, to communicate, and to not get lost. You've got to pace yourself. You've got to ride smart, and you're responsible for your teammate! It's not about feeling good and being the fastest rider for the first 20 miles if you don't finish. It's about feeling as good as you can for as long as you can and finding your pace that supports that. There is no point in going out of the gate hard in this kind of event.

So, I finished PMBAR. I cussed. I bled. I suffered. I even got mad at myself. Next year, we're going for all 7! Am I crazy? Hell no!