Wente 8 Hour Solo

[Mark Gibson]

This was the 2nd year Bike Monkey had put on their 8 hour race at this venue; after Boggs Mountain was destroyed by fire back in late 2015.  Wente is a ~2,000 acre Boy Scout Reservation just outside Willits.  It's a beautiful area, with surprisingly good trails which, for the most part, are shaded under Redwood and Fir trees.  The goal of the 8 hour race is simply to complete as many laps as you can and as long as you start your last lap in under 8 hours, then you are free to complete that lap as long as you do so in under 9 hours. 

My training for a long all-day event like this had been virtually non-existent.  Up to this point my season had been focused on XC racing, events which typically last around 2 hours and are flat out hammer-fests.  Basically my preparation for this endurance race was doing a 5 hour road ride the previous weekend and calling it good.  

The race started at 8am.  I got to the start line at around 7:45, and it was already 30 rows deep.  No problem, this was giong to be a long day, plenty of time to move through the field.  Thankfully the first mile or so is a wide fire road climb, and I slowly rode my way up to a better position to begin the first long descent.  Toward the top of the climb I noticed the rear tire beginning to feel a little squishy.  A quick look down confirmed what I feared.  I had a flat tire within the first couple miles of the first lap, and on a climb no less!  I recently invested in a Dyna-Plug, a really useful little kit which can be used to quickly plug up a hole in a tire.  Great if you can locate the hole quickly which I had a really hard time doing as I was not seeing any sealant leaking.  After a couple minutes I found the hole, put the plug in, used a CO2 to fill the tire, and joined what was probably somewhere close to the very back of the long line of riders going single-file down the singletrack.  I had lost maybe 6-7 minutes fixing the flat, which was not a big deal over the course of 8 hours.  The problem was that I was now at the back of a long conga line and passing was very difficult.  The pace at the back was slow and, as a result, I lost another 12-13 minutes on that 1st lap relative to the time I should have been clocking.  I came in at around 62 minutes for the lap, a full 20 minutes slower than where I should have been.  Not that I knew it at the time, but I was almost 17 minutes behind the leader in my category after that 1st lap, and was sitting all the way down in 26th place.  Sweet!

On the 2nd lap, my time was better at around 47 minutes, but still a little slower than I had hoped as I spent a lot of it just trying to work my way through the large field.  The leader, however, clocked a lap time that was over a minute quicker than mine, so increased his lead to around 18 minutes.

By the end of that 2nd lap, I had, however, made my way through a lot of the traffic, and was feeling pretty good.  A bad start had probably ruined my chances of a podium finish, but worst case scenario, this would still end up being a great training session.  I set off on the 3rd lap with a much clearer path, and put in a solid effort.  This was my fastest lap, at ~44 minutes.  I made up 2 minutes on the leader, so his lead was down to "only" 15 minutes, and I had probably moved up to somewhere in the top ten.

Conscious of needing to avoid going anaerobic, I focused on trying to keep up a strong steady pace.  Lap 4 was ~45 minutes, and I gained a full 4 minutes on the leader on that lap.

Laps 5, 6, and 7 were really consistent: all coming in at 47 minutes and change.  While I gained nothing on the leader on lap 5, I took 6 minutes off him on lap 6, and 3 minutes off him on lap 7.  I had moved up to 2nd place, and was now just a couple minutes behind the leader, and gaining on him every lap.

As I rolled through the start of lap 8, I was really starting to feel fatigued.  I was not able to push hard on the climb without going anaerobic, so backed off the pace.  On the rolling singletrack, I felt a few twinges of leg cramps, but was able to work them out.  I gained 2 more minutes on the leader on lap 8 and I think I started lap 9 in the lead. After the worst start possible, I now had a chance of winning.  

Lap 9 was the hardest lap of all.  The climb was excruciating, and the cramps started coming on.  Again I slowed it way down, knowing that I might get passed if I slowed but that I was guaranteed to get passed if I had to stop because of cramps.  This was my slowest lap at 52 minutes, but I held the lead steady, coming through the start of lap 10 with a very small gap.  The announcer said that the gap was about 1 second.  I looked behind me to see a guy in a green jersey, who I assumed was the guy I was racing against.  We went up the final long climb together.  I entered the DH first, and opened up a gap of maybe 20 seconds.  As we went into a fast flowy section, I told a guy up ahead that I would pass him on the left.  He stopped in the middle of the trail, causing a coming together and me to spill off the bike.  I re-mounted but green jersey was now right with me.  After a short climb we hit some more singletrack and I was able to gap him on the DH sections.  The last couple miles are mostly singletrack climbing, and green jersey was like the terminator the way he came roaring back at me on the climb.  How the hell is this guy so strong on his 10th lap??  I dug in like I honestly have never done before, and crested the climb about 2 seconds ahead of him.  On the short descent to the finish I held him off, coming in less than a second ahead of him, and the announcer confirmed I finished in 1st place.  

My last lap was around 48 minutes.  I later found out that green jersey guy had actually been racing on a team, and we had not been racing each other after all (except in my mind).  The guy I was racing for 1st place had started lap 10 right behind me, but fell back and came in about 2 1/2 minutes behind me.

So, I was pretty stoked with the result, having dealt with some adversity early on.

[Mark Ingwersen]

8 hours solo and a first place... incredible. Congratulations, Mark!

[Philip Mooney]

Great racing! Love that you kept digging hard even after a rough start.