WEMS 12 Hours of Northern Kettles

It pays to know the rules.

Sean, Jessica and I drove to the heart of Wisconsin last Saturday to race the three hour solo WEMS Northern Kettles race. I went in feeling pretty optimistic about my chances -- I do prefer longer endurance events instead of shorter, sharper efforts. Good golly, though, was this a tough cookie of a race.

We started off with a Le Mans-style start and I was about the 8th rider into the singletrack. I was moving pretty well and riding reasonably clean over the "babyheads" that lay across most of the first half of the course. The track was pretty technical -- some of the more technical trail I've ridden and it demanded constant attention. A few times during the race, I'd space out and start thinking about things other than racing and I'd find myself running of the course into a bush or bank of dirt. About 10 minutes in, I snagged a good sized branch in my rear wheel and stopped to pull it out, which gave an opportunity for four riders or so to pass me by. That sucked.

What also sucked was that I started wallowing in the corners and riding sloppy. Where the first half of the first lap had me cruising and railing, the rest of the race I was a mess on wheels.

Oh, and my saddle kept on coming loose, forcing me to stop and tighten it up. This also caused me major discomfort because the Arione saddle I use on my MTB was now in a pretty bad position for riding.

And I was overheating like a pig and started running out of gas in the third lap, despite three bottles of normal-strength Perpetuum. I was coming off a cold, but I felt good enough to ride.

I was pulling in OK lap times. 45 minutes apiece for the first and second, 48 for the third. As this was a MTB race with a set duration, I was to do as many laps as I could in the time allotted (three hours). For some reason I thought that we were to continue riding as much as we could within the three hours, including going out for a final lap knowing that we'd finish after the three hour window. I was wrong. We were supposed to finish under three hours.

As I went out for my fourth lap, I saw the clock say 5:19, which gave me only 41 minutes to do a lap. If I wasn't riding like complete garbage and was feeling better, that might have happened. But the odds were against that and if I so wanted, I could have left the race at that moment and finished. But, I did an extra lap as I'm a glutton for punishment and I don't understand the rules.

That's OK, though, as I ended up 18th out of 34. Not as good as I had hoped, but not as bad as it could have been. I really do think I'll improve at the endurance MTB game -- apparently the Northern Kettles course was a real tough nut, an assertion with which I agree.

Afterward, we stopped at the Hamburger Haus in Dundee and met Scott, a forklift operator for Piggly-Wiggly, who broke the ice with us by asking if we ever shopped at the Bass Pro Shop in Chicago. He was a real awesome guy, just hanging out, eating his ice cream.