Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Stoopid 50


A few weeks back was the Stoopid 50, the first of the MASS Endurance series. The race was made mostly of the second half of the Wilderness 101 course and it was quite difficult, in fact. Over 80 percent of the loop was singletrack. Huge rocks, soft loamy trails with a little (8,000? ft) of climbing. Matt and I spent the night at Brandon's place in hopes of getting some quality sleep. Instead we stayed up til almost midnight and than rose promptly at 5 am for breakfast. Though we fell far short of the all-important 8 hours of sleep, I had high expectations for the day, being that Brandon and I had pre-rode the course the week prior. The start was somewhat mellow, Brandon actually waited for a full two miles before he attacked like a blithering idiot, forcing the rest of the pack to "throw it in the dog". Once he was out of sight I focused on keeping the rest of the field behind me. Wes and TJ Platt were both looking pretty smooth and it didn't take long to figure out that they would be the two main guys I had to hold off. I stayed pretty steady with both of them until we hit the most annoying part of the race, Sassafrass. All three of us were together on the 20 minute hiking section. At the top I decided to up the pace, I cruised the next 7 or 8 miles and reeled TJ in just before we launched into the second half of Sassafrass. I pinned it up the climb and put a descent gap on TJ by the top. The rest of the race went pretty smoothly, cruised a good pace, bonked pretty bad, and had a picture taken that made the race report on cyclingnews.com.


Brandon came in first somewhere around 4:17, I was 12 minutes behind him, and Wes rounded out the podium only 2 min. later. A side note: I had to pee for the last 30 miles/2.5 hours of the race. So bad that it hurt.

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