Fat Cyclist

Close But No Cigar, Part II: Fatty Has Fun, Works the Crowd, and Gets Cocky

08.13.2007 | 9:50 pm

A Note From Fatty: I am happy to announce that today is Susan’s and my 19th wedding anniversary. Yep, nineteen. Pretty darn cool, if you ask me. Those of you who think about this kind of thing (i.e., women) will most likely note that this means I have been away from my wife for nine of our most recent eleven anniversaries, either racing in or coming home from the Leadville 100.

And yet, Susan and I remain married. This must be because I am such a wonderful husband.

You know what’s cool? Riding with your friends during an epic race is cool. I had almost forgotten how cool this is, because I haven’t done it in years and years. All my friends are either much faster or a little slower than I am.

This year, that changed, at least for a while.

After — as I mentioned yesterday — I passed Kenny, it occurred to me: Of all my riding buddies, only Brad was ahead of me. And I could see him no more than ten yards ahead of me (Brad’s sleeveless Fat Cyclist jersey made him easy to pick out of the crowd).

By the time I descended the pavement of St. Kevins and rode along the brief paved flat section, I had caught Brad, too.

Yes, that’s right: for an all-too-short moment, I led all of my friends, including the crazy-fast ones.

Two minutes later, Brad passed me. And then Kenny passed me, politely saying, “On yer left, Fatty,” as he went by.

Downhill
Frequently looking at my bike computer, I could tell: I was doing great. I had climbed so well that even with a conservative descent down the treacherous Powerline section of the trail (where, unbeknownst to me, Floyd Landis had turfed it earlier in the day), I’d hit my target first split time of two hours at the Pipeline aid station.

I felt good on the downhill. Loose and comfortable. Didn’t mind the rigid at all. And in fact, when I got to the bottom, a rider came around and thanked me for riding a clean line for him to follow. “I don’t know if you noticed,” he said, “But the guy right between us was trying to do an aggressive pass around you, caught air, nose-wheelied, and totally wrecked,” he continued.

Yikes. I hate to think that I ended someone else’s race, especially unintentionally. All you had to do was ask for my line, whoever you are. I would have pulled to the side.

Riding With Sunderlage
As soon as I reached the bottom of the Powerline Descent and started motoring along the flat section leading up to the Pipeline aid station, Rick Sunderlage (not his real name) caught up to me and joined the paceline that was rapidly forming. “That is one sexy jersey,” Sunderlage said, as he took his place in line.

I should mention here that the paceline I was in was — very briefly — a perfect machine. Though few of us had ever ridden together, most of us knew how to pull and then drop back. And since we were all pushing it, everyone pulled strongly — without surging — on the way to the front of the line, then pulled smoothly over to the right to drop back.

It was a perfect clockwise rotating paceline. Which lasted only maybe two rotations before it disintigrated. Oh well, nice while it lasted.

Eat Up
I’ve been using a very effective eating strategy on the bike, lately. I’ve set my Forerunner 305 to beep every half hour, which I use as a signal to eat a pack of Shot Bloks. I started with the Cran-Razberry flavor, which are nice and soft, though they do require you to hock up one monster loogey after finishing off a packet.

After the first couple hours, though, I switched to Margarita flavor, figuring all the extra sodium would do me good.

There was a little problem with this, though: I hadn’t considered how difficult it would be to eat something that salty in very high altitude, in very low humidity. As in, it took ten minutes to chew and swallow a pack of Shot Bloks. By which time, the inside of my mouth was completely mummified. Pickled, if you will.

That was foreshadowing, by the way.

Work the Crowd
Rick and I continued riding and working together as we flew through the Pipeline aid station. Two hours even. Perfect.

It was here, as we flew through the crowd, that I exercised a trick Jolene had told me about:

I yelled at them.

Specifically, I yelled, “Huzzah!” and pumped my left arm into the air (I’d have pumped my right arm, but my shoulder probably would have popped out of its socket).

The crowd, to my delight, went wild.

For the rest of the race, any time I went through an aid station, I’d either shout, do a trill-shout, or otherwise make euphoric, loud noises. All worked equally well. It turns out, the crowd — who cheers everyone on — really loves a racer that cheers back at them.

The next time you’re racing, try it out. You’ll see what I mean.

Hi, Brad
Rick and I continued working together, and the one relatively flat section in the race just flew by. Before long, we caught up with Brad, who was incredibly happy to see us. “Dude, we get to ride together! How cool is that?” wondered Brad.

Too cool for words, that’s how cool.

Rick, Brad, and I rode together as we neared the Twin Lakes Dam aid station — the spot where Susan was supposed to be meeting me — so we arrived within just a few seconds of each other.

Meanwhile, Bry was catching up, so he dropped in at the same time too. The net result being that four guys in Fat Cyclist jerseys hit the 40 mile aid station within a minute of each other.

That, my friends, rules.

I Freak Out
We hit the second aid station (40 miles into the race) in perfect time with my target splits: right at 2:45.

There was just one problem: I couldn’t find Susan.

I could see the area where Susan was supposed to be. I could see all of my friends’ crews — many of them wearing the Pink Fat Cyclist jersey. I could see everything but Susan or my truck.

Was something wrong with Susan? Was I on my own for the race? Was she too sick to come out? What was going on?

“Where’s Susan? Where’s Susan?! Where is Susan?!” I started shouting at everyone.

Looking alarmed at the foaming, screaming maniac I had become, several people pointed. “There she is. Calm down.”

It turns out Susan was right where she had said she’d be, and had my stuff all set to go. In my adrenaline-fueled rush to keep moving, I had simply just not seen her.

As I slugged down a can of Chicken soup, Susan emptied the debris out of my jersey pockets — noting, approvingly, that I had eaten everything I was supposed to — and swapped out my water bottles in record time.

No seconds lost. I was back on my bike in no time.

Brad, Rick, Bry and I all left our crew at about the same time.

At which point, I suddenly realized: I was still wearing my arm warmers.

Crap. The day was getting hot; I didn’t want to wear those for even one more second. So I tore them off with my teeth, bunched them up, and then — the next time I passed a random crew’s tent, I tossed my very nice Castelli arm warmers to a surprised, confused person. “Free arm warmers!” I shouted, and kept going.

It was time for the Columbine Mine section: 10 miles that would take me to 12,600 feet. I was feeling strong, climbing well, and hitting my conservative split times. How could I not get that sub-9 time I had been focusing on so obsessively?

Well, that’s where I’ll pick up the story tomorrow.

PS: Bob gives an incredibly engaging telling of his race over at his blog. It’s so good, I read it twice.

PPS: Give it up for Dug. He was every bit as excited for this race as I was, but got crashed out of it by a nervous rider who exactly misinterpreted what “On your right” means. I’ll post his story soon, but meanwhile, I think he’ll be glad to know that of every picture taken at the Twin Lakes Dam aid station, I’m certain that the one Susan got of him was the very best:

Comments (40)

(Sort of) Close, But No Cigar: Fatty’s 2007 Leadville 100

08.12.2007 | 9:44 pm

This is going to be a tricky story for me to write, for a number of reasons:

I’m pretty sure that anyone who is interested already knows: I finished the 2007 Leadville 100 with a time of 9:14:13 — 14 minutes and 14 seconds too slow to hit the goal I have been so publicly striving for. It’s not easy to write a suspenseful story everyone already knows the ending to.
I’m dealing with some pretty intense, conflictingÂ emotions right now: disappointment in myself, pride in my wife, happiness for some of my friends, empathy for others (and for one friend, both happiness and empathy — I’ll get to that).Â And battling all these emotions is this really overwhelming urge to make excuses and rationalize for myself. Which — whenever I catch myself doing it — I will try to erase and rewrite.
Unlike most years, I haven’t got a good conclusion set in my head, the part where I say, “Next year, I’m going to do better by . . . .”
I am not certain I am a good enough writer to do justice to the incredible bratwurst / Italian sausage feast Fish put on after the race.

So you know the ending, you know I’m pretty worked up, you know I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do next year, and you know I like a well-cooked brat.

But I think there’s a pretty good story in between. Some of it’s about me, some of it’s about Susan, and a lot of it’s about my friends.

It might take a couple days for me to tell it.

The Buildup
I look forward to the Leadville 100 every year, and the reasons why become a little more clear each year. It’s four days away from my computer. It’s a tiny town — so small that you can’t get lost and you feel like a local within twenty minutes. It’s where all my biking buddies — many of which I only see at this one annual race — catch up with each other. And it’s a great tradition, something that you can rely on to be the same, more or less, fromÂ year to year. Like Christmas or Thanksgiving, but it lasts four days. I like that.

What made it even better this year was that my wife felt well enough — or at least said she felt well enough to come along for the trip. So we dropped the kids off with Grandma on Wednesday night and then took off to Leadville Thursday morning, where we proceeded to do nothing but relax.

It’s weird — you have kids long enough and having a full day toÂ relax feels downright weird. And good.

ByÂ ThursdayÂ evening, lots of my close friends — more than a dozen — had arrived.Â And thanks to this blog, I got stopped several times on the streets by people wishingÂ Susan well.Â At theÂ hotel, the manager rushed out upon seeing me and gave me a big hug, welcomingÂ me back.

Seriously, she did.

The Leadville 100: It’s like Cheers, but bigger.

At the Starting Line
With 1000 registered riders this year, the field of starting racers stretched out more than a city block, with areas set up for everyone to place themselves — by honor system — where they thought they would finish: under nine hours, between nine and ten hours, and so forth.

You’ve got to be early to get yourself a good spot in the starting area. I got there about 5:30 — an hour before the race began. By muscling other bikes aside, I was able to plant myself by Rick Sunderlage (not his real name) and Brad. We hadÂ boldly set ourselves in the “under nine hours” area. Racer had set himself in the same area, but further up the field.

Kenny was in the special area reservedÂ for the elite first 100 finishers the previous year.Â Jolene, too.

Dug, Bob, Lisa, Nick, Linde and Bry had set themselves further back in the field. Everyone had a time or objective in mind, and everyone was serious about it — at least I believe they were, because I just can’t imagine doing this race as a lark.

All of us were wearing Fat Cyclist jerseys of one color or another. It made me so happy I thought my heart would burst. Or maybe it was the altitude that gave me that heart-about-to-burst feeling. Either way, I thought it was pretty cool.

I looked around, trying to find one particular face: Dean. Dean’s easy to recognize because he has the most outrageous lambchop sideburns you’ve ever seen. These are not sideburns one grows on a whim, these are the product of years of hard work and dedication.

Anyway.

Dean and I have done the Leadville 100 the same number of times, and usually with eerily similar results: out of ten tries each, neither of us had ever managed to break the nine-hour barrier. So we’ve been exchanging email this last year, encouraging each other, telling each other this is the year. And I think we each believed it was.

So when I found Dean and shouted his name, he waded toward me, shook my hand, said, “Let’s get this done,” and handed me one of those rubber bracelets that are so popular — you know, the kind the yellow LiveStrong bands made famous. Except the one Dean handed me was black and said, “Harden the F— Up.”

Good advice.

Go
Very early in the race, threeÂ things I would never have expected occurred. First, I felt invincible in the first climb — St. Kevins. My gearing felt a little tall, but not too bad, and I rocketed by dozens of people. Then I looked down.

I was climbing St. Kevins in my big ring.

Oops.

I shifted down to my middle ring and continued to pass people all over the place. And here’s the first unexpected thing: I was feeling no pain whatsoever.

Bry was way behind me (I assumed). Rick S. was nowhere close (as far as I was concerned). And there, not too far off ahead of me, was someone I would never have expected to see: Kenny Jones.

And then — here’ s the second thing I would never have expected — I passed Kenny. He had had to get off his bike and push (because he was on a singlespeed with a tall gear) and I whipped by him without so much as a how-do-you-do.

It was an exquisite moment.

And then, after finishing the hardest part of the St. Kevins’ climb, the third unexpected thing happened: I caught Chris Carmichael — yes, the honcho of Carmichael Training Systems. Chris was redfaced and at his absolute limit, while I was feeling fresh and somewhat chatty. He was, essentially, a captive audience.Â It was a glorious opportunity.

Briefly, I considered saying, “Hey, you’re doing all right, Chris, but what you need is a really good coach. I highly recommend Lofgran Coaching.”

But I didn’t. Because when it comes down to it, making people feel angry or bad isn’t really my thing. Usually, anyway.

What I did say was this: “Hi Chris. I know you’re hypoxic right now, but I’m hoping you can tell Lance Armstrong something the next time you see him. Tell him that at the Leadville 100, you rode with a guy who said that the Lance Armstrong Foundation has done his family a lot of good. OK?”

Chris nodded yes, and I rode on.

Eventually, I would be glad I did not tweak Mr. Carmichael as originally planned, because he and I passed each other probably half a dozen times and rode together for probably an hour of the race — in fact, he and I were probably more closely matched than I was with anyone else on the course. It would have been kind of embarrassing if the whole race I rode with a guy who I had made a snarky comment to before I had had a chance to see how strong he really was.

And besides, in the final fifteen miles of the race Chris would eventually pull away from me and beat me by nine minutes.

Tomorrow
Tomorrow I’ll continue this story. I’m not too sure how far I’ll get. There’s still a lot to tell. I mean, I haven’t even gotten us to the first aid station yet.

Comments (74)