Diabolical And Sadistic

Those two words describe not only the course but the race organizers of the PCPP to a “T”. But first the first of the story.

I don’t know if Kenny is more excited for the race or because Natalie let him wear her daisy dukes.

Racing the PCPP for Team Fatcyclist required that we smile. We really have no idea what we are in for. The last time you’ll see us smile for over 8 hours.

I had a goal of finishing under 9 hours and beating Kenny. My plan was simple, start easy for the first few hours and then burn it to the finish. It worked out reasonably well until it came time to light the matches and they were all wet.

At hour 4 I was done, all the climbing was taking its toll. I had nothing left and had to stop and take off my shoes and walk around for a few minutes just to ground myself back in reality. For what lasted an hour but seemed more like days whenever the pitch was steeper than flat I was forced to get off my bike and walk. That course was never flat, ALL uphill. No descending, none, just climbing.

You know how you get so tired sometimes that you can’t clip in or out of your pedals? That’s where I was. So tired that you start crashing into everything and don’t care at all? At one point I fell over between 2 trees and got my rear wheel jammed between them so bad that I couldn’t get it out. A couple racers had to hike it around me.

What do you do? Keep moving forward no matter how slow. After an hour of despair and darkness the heavens opened up and light shined down on me and lit me on fire. For the next 3 hours I was superman and did nothing but pass racers, I was on fire! I was sure I was going to catch back up to Kenny.

Here’s my pre-darkness look at aid station #1 after a nice hard rain, just enough to soak my gloves and shoes clean through.

As if the race wasn’t hard enough at about mile 73 you end up close enough to the finish to hear the announcer and music blaring and you think the suffering is over. Of course it just has to be over because you can’t pedal another revolution, it’s all downhill. Wrong! Those sadistic diabolical race organizer bastardos make you climb another 1,000 feet right before the finish just to make sure it was hard enough. Thanks a lot. I really appreciated that.

I never did gain back all the ground that I lost but finally, a smile again. Judging how clean Bart and Kenny are you can probably guess they both beat my sorry ass.

The fast guys porch. This is as close as they’d let me get.

Just like I predicted Friday night and even the right order, your top 4 finishers overall. Alex, Bart, Chris and Kevin. Congratulations!

Here’s Sonya Looney having had better days and just moments before she gave me the bird, too bad I missed that shot. She did awesome and came in 4th overall in the Women’s Pro class just behind my favorite CarboRocket addict KC Holley, better get on the CR Sonya!

The overall women’s winner and 5th place overall, Pua Sawicki posing with Race organizer Jay Burke. Huge applause for the efforts Jay and Shannon and their army of volunteers for putting together a 1st class awesome event that will be around for a long time. Thanks!

The SS class proved to be one of the tightest (and best looking) races of the day with the top 3 all finishing within 7 minutes of each other. Next year Kenny, next year.