Quick summary – 1st place in a time of 31 hours and 48 minutes. I was hoping to break the record, but ended up about an hour and a half short of the record times of Chris MacDonald and Tinker Juarez who both had nearly identical times a year apart (2005 and 2006). Sleep issues late in the race were my downfall. I simply could not stay awake well enough to remember to pedal at the bottom of downhills. I’d concentrate just hard enough to make it down a hill safely, relax a bit and slow to a near stop. Just before losing enough momentum to fall over, I’d wake up and start pedaling again. This only happened a few times, but it gives you an idea of how much I was struggling with staying awake. Even so, I had a blast and learned a lot of important lessons during my first ultra-endurance race. My crew consisted of my wife Kristine and father-in-law Dale, who both had to endure sleep deprivation but without the physical exercise that helps keep you awake. They also had to endure me being very grumpy if they didn’t have exactly what I needed at the exact moment I needed. They did really, really well and as my friend Chris Shelton told me before the race – the hardest part of these ultra-endurance races is being a member of the crew. After having started at 8PM on Friday night with what I now realize was a completely unrealistic goal of being the first person to ever finish on Saturday, I rolled into the finish at the Colonnade at 3:48AM Sunday morning. I was discouraged after the finish thinking how much I was struggling with sleep after just 32 hours of racing — but then Kristine pointed out that I had been up since 6 Friday morning, biked to work, taught two classes, biked home, and then started getting ready for the race Friday afternoon with no naps. Altogether, I had been up for over 45 hours straight without sleep. That is really at the human limit of sleeplessness (I think!).
The maps and data
Even though this ride was only in two states, it did cross about half of each state twice. Along the way, I went through 16 different counties, hitting five counties twice for a grand total of 21 county line traversals (that’s a lot of sprint lines ;-))
ALABAMA counties outbound: Jefferson, St Clair, Calhoun, Cherokee, Dekalb. GEORGIA counties: Chattooga, Walker, Gordon, Murray, Gilmer, Gordon (again), Floyd, Polk. ALABAMA counties inbound: Cleburne, Calhoun (again), Clay, Cleburne (again), Talladega, St Clair (again), Shelby, Jefferson (again)
Annotated topocreator map of the 500 mile race, includes approximate timing station times (click to enlarge and view a 12 MB map, click a second time to zoom in on your browser)
Annotated iBike data for the entire 500 mile route. You can see the trends of decreasing power and heartrate. You can also see exactly where I started to struggle with sleep b/c I basically stopped pedaling all the time creating a wall of cadence lines where it would drop to zero and then back up to a slow cadence.I’ll save all the details for another post, but I wanted to get a somewhat quick post out here with the annotated data with a quick summary. I’ll leave the details and lessons learned for a post later this week as I work on piecing everything together. Thanks y’all for the support. Special thanks to Heather Hagan, Pat Casey, and Chris Shelton who all came out to see me off at the start. Also, huge thanks to Kristine and my father-in-law Dale who crewed for me and endured the same sleeplessness that I endured!
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