[OHPV-list] Round trip ticket to hell

[Michael Wolfe]

Hi!

I'm back.  And I had a great race, just about everything I could have hoped
for.

Thanks everyone, for your support, encouragement, and interest.  I really
appreciated the kind messages everyone sent me before I started.

A few things:

Keith, you may be surprised to learn that my goals remained in pretty much
the stated order for the whole race.  Letting that competitive jones make
you do ANYTHING, especially in the first mile of the race, is a first class
ticket to DNF-ville, with stops at Loserdale and West GoHomeEarlia.  At the
very beginning of the race, riders went by me for pretty much the whole last
10 miles of the climb up San Fransisquito Canyon and I honestly did not bat
an eyelash.  The riders who jackrabbited after me because they couldn't
stand to get passed by a bent were the same riders who were nothing but
wreckage on the side of the road going up Salsberry Pass at 1 AM the next
morning.  I would be damned if I was going to let that be me.  And even
though I know what kind of performance I am capable of turning in on a nice
easy climb like that, all I was thinking was, 1) stay healthy and 2) finish.

Towards the end, when the various aches and inflammations began accumulating
and singing in 3 part harmony, I considered that I might have to swap goal 1
and 2.  As the RBA of Oregon Randonneurs, Susan France, said to a rider
contemplating dropping out of the Cascade 1200 because of various ailments,
"These are wounds that will heal."  The implication being that a DNF never
would.  Fortunately, with the help of my crew, I kept fighting the fires,
and managed to keep everything from reaching a crescendo where I would have
to choose between finishing the race and crippling myself.

Fun is really hard to talk about.  It is absolutely fun to *have done* the
race.  Actually *doing* the race was a big mixed bag.  There certainly were
fun parts, for instance, past TS 2 at Trona, going into Panamint Valley
(around 170 miles into the race), was beautiful and incredible.  The sun was
going down and setting the wrinkled hills ablaze.  I felt strong, and had
the assistance of a gentle downgrade.  And 6 PM meant that my support van
could start giving me follow support, and that meant they could start
playing music for me, so I got REM's "Orange Crush" and Outkast's "Hey Ya!"
to motivate me to the bottom of the climb up to Towne's Pass, and
subsequently, up it.  It was at that very moment that Chris Kostman pulled
up alongside me and took those pictures of me with that huge smile on my
face.  By the same token, though, there were plenty of mental low points.
Like the double-whammy of Jubilee and Salsberry Passes, where all I could do
was keep telling myself that the climb that I was on was not infinite, and
that all I had to do was keep pedaling.  If I kept pedaling, the climb had
to end.

As for kicking ass, now that I'm done, I'm really not even sure what that
means in this context.  I would have loved to have had a faster time than
Eric "Hedgehog" House, who holds the Men's 30+ recumbent record.  On the
other hand, he holds that record with a superstock bike, whereas mine was
stock, so depending on how much granularity Kostman wants to deal with,
maybe I did set a record (the Web site mentions that it is a superstock
record, so there's a good chance).  I would have loved to have been the
first or second or tenth bike across the line.  But given the broad and deep
pool of talent that this races draws its entrants from, that would have been
some kind of miracle.  The only benchmark that I ever dared to set for
myself was that I thought it would be good to get in under 36 hours, so that
I would only have to do one night ride.  I discarded that goal after I found
out how grueling a night ride could be on my 600k brevet -- I figured that
it was entirely possible that my pace would seriously slacken on Saturday
night, and I didn't want to potentially add the disappointment of missing my
goal to the heartbreak of watching the sun go down on Sunday evening while
still having a century and 6000' of climbing between me and the finish line.

As it turned out, though, I actually did manage to accomplish that goal.  So
that, and a 16th place finish are kicking ass of a kind.  But I'll tell you,
if I were the last person across the line, finishing at 47:58:30, I would
feel just as much pride, and have just as much of a sense of
accomplishment.  If not *more*.  I tell you, those folks who kept pedaling
not just through Saturday night, but all of Sunday night, who soaked up
every bit of hot and cold that the desert could throw at them, who lived
with the accumulating pain for every moment that I did plus *another* 12
hours, who subsisted on that godawful *Perpetuem* or whatever for another 12
hours, who reached the last time station outside of Amboy after the official
left and went home, and who still had 60 miles and a major climb left, and
who had to be wondering if they would push their bodies over the red line
only to come up a minute short of an official finish -- those people who did
*all* that and *still *didn't throw in the towel, those people are f***ing
badasses.

Here they are:

Emily "Archaeopteryx" O'Brien (Women's Fixed Gear, 47:23:23)
Sandy "Blandy Dragons" Mohr-Bader, Blake "Blandy Dragons" Bader (Mixed
Tandem, 47:22:02)
Steve "Giant Water Bug" Gray (Men's Solo, 47:55:50)
Mike "Red Wolf" DeNoma (Men's Solo, 47:55:57)

Complete badasses, every one.  These people know exactly where their limit
is, and aren't afraid to step right up and toe it.  That takes serious
guts.  And we should definitely add Patty Jo-Struve, from RAO to that list.

More to come.  I'll probably do a narrative.  And it'll probably incorporate
some of these thoughts, as they really encompass the experience pretty
well.  But you'll also get the story.

-Michael
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