Almost 12 Hours of Stanky-ness

Walking the kids to the

bus stop up the street

Having lunch with Eric at his school

          Last weekend I had the pleasure of visiting my family for four whole days. Better yet, there are less than two weeks remaining of my temporary assignment to Georgia. And as for the title of this post, Heather was kind enough to allow me to enter a 12 hour mountain bike race! So I arrived home late Thursday night and kissed all the kids goodnight without waking any of them. Which means that I was able to surprise them on Friday morning with pancakes, one of our favorite family traditions! Well, usually it's a weekend tradition, but I figured that with my race being in Saturday I'd better get in a slightly less healthy breakfast while I could. After seeing the kids all off to school, Heather dropped me off for a preride of Stanky Creek Bike Trail and then we met the kids for lunch at school. However, our real lunch was much more satisfying as Heather and I spent it at the Flying Saucer, a place that I'm surprised that I'm only just now finding out about!

Heather enjoying elementary school
lunch were our two Tauruses

          So I got to bed kind of early since I knew it was going to be a long race. Little did I know how long it was going to be. It rained practically all night! And no, the race wasn't cancelled. My Saturday morning it was predicted that it would rain two more times throughout the day. Not a good omen. After lugging all our gear to the starting line and with the kids looking like the world's shortest band of gypsies (except Emma, she's a stinkin' tall kid!), I began my race prep. This included preventing Eric from tearing into my Hostess Crumb Donettes, a favorite mid-race binge food that's covered in "crunchy flakes of real coconut"!

Trying to figure out why my disc rotor
no longer fits inside its brake caliper

          At 8:45 am we all started lining up and at 9:00 am we did a mass start. If I'd been paying more attention to the race start directions and spending less time using Heather's van keys to pry open my frozen front brake that Eli managed to compress during the short car ride to the trail, then I might have realized that it was a mass start and not staggered by category. So I got stuck behind some slower riders than I would have chosen, but quickly fought my way into the front ten or so. That wound up being the prudent choice because when I did manage to break free it only resulted in my crashing hard about five times in the first two laps. Only eight more to go... Fortunately, my various lumps and bruises enlightened me to the fact that a trail that's been rained on all night might not be the best place to go all out. By lap four the trail was getting pretty dry though and I decided to starting ratcheting things back up.

Last minute hydration
before the start of the race

You should have seen the
other guy...

          Key the first scheduled rain of the day (yeah, that one that the cursed weatherman had mentioned earlier).  Also, key my sixth crash of the day. Good thing I didn't decide to make the jump to a carbon fiber frame this year. This time it only took me one crash to realize that slow is smooth and smooth is fast, as least when racing in the mud. I continued to drive on and by the end of lap seven I caught the race leader. This gave me  the impetus to shorten my pit stop and we continued to jockey back and forth for the rest of the race. Fortunately for everyone the race was ended at nine hours rather than the prescribed 12 due to the horrible weather. The second "light rain" that we were supposed to get had turned into an Ark-worthy event and no rainbow was in sight. If it was out there somewhere then the falling darkness quickly extinguished it. Fortunately more me, the ever depending mud starting clogging up everyone's drive trains and I was able to scoop up a last minute win, literally in the last 100 yards of what became a grueling 105 mile controlled (and often uncontrolled) slide through slimy Memphis mud.

Emma, Erin, Eric, and Eli enjoying
the awesome Fall weather. So much
better than the hot Memphis summer!

          My fantastic pit crew met me at the finish line and we got everything as clean as possible so we could evacuate the misery of the mud as soon as the awards ceremony ended. Fortunately for me, the fantastic crew at Stanky Creek Cycling had a garden hose to clean my gear off, canopies to shelter under, and some awesome BBQ chicken sandwiches to chow down on. No sooner had the last award been handed out than the rain started coming down for a third time. So thanks to my awesome wife Heather for her support and to the Stanky Creek crew for putting on a great race and knowing when to shorten it a little.