24 Hours of Albion Hills

Raced as a tag team at this past weekends 24 Hours of Albion Hills. It was a fairly large race with about 1400 riders in all catagories. Our goal was to do 20 laps which seemed quite achievable at the start of the race. My partner started out first and turned in a pretty fast 1 hour lap. I went out and suffered a little bit on my first lap. I always do as my body gets used to the riding (read: no warmup) but turned in a respectable 1:03. My partner did one more lap and then I went out for a double lap so he could watch his son in the kids race. The 2nd lap of the double was a bit crummy but I was looking forward to my 2 hour break to eat and rest for awhile. When my partner got back from his double he didn't look too good. He said he wasn't feeling good and was going to stop. I went out and did my next lap (1st night lap) and when I returned he wasn't at our transition area. I rode back to our pit to find him in his street clothes. He was done. I lost motivation after that and took a long break. I was on my own for the rest of the race so decided to wait until morning to go out again. I put in a few more laps and felt pretty good, finishing with a fairly strong last lap. Needless to say we didn't do well but I still had fun and felt good for most of the race. The course was very tough with a lot of climbing involved. The other big problem was it was very sandy due to no rain for a long time. It created really bad ruts on the tight switchback downhills which became difficult to manage at night as it was hard to see them well.

Next race is Pauls 100km in September. I hope to break 8 hours (would be record for me) so I better start working on my climbing again because there is a lot of it on this course.

Steve