24 Hours of Big Bear

So this was the return of the Tecate Team I had last year at the 24 hours of Allamuchy.

Jay, Steve, Sid and Myself. We decided to do Sport and thought we could get a good placing in that group.

I got a ride up with Kent and we had some good talks, and stopped at this converted trailer that was a bakery. The food there was really good, it hit the spot. We were at the camp area on Friday and waited for everyone to get in. We had a good Camp set up with Jay's RV and we combined our area with my DCMTB/CityBikes team. It was fun to race and hangout with everyone.

The Race

OK so I Started our team out and had to run for the lemans start. Well I did OK running in my Carbon Cleats, and got on the trail pretty early. I went out fast, and around mile 3 Kent and Mike form my DCMTB came by me. I wanted to go into the finish with them, but they were just going too fast for me. I ended up with like a 1:17 lap and I was happy with that. For my second lap I really worked on trying to get a good lap time, and for me I did a 14:59 which I was really happy with. Now saying this our team was having troubles :-( Jay had his granny gear explode on his first or second lap. I have never seen that happen before. The First Lap Sid did he had a broken chain that he had to fix twice. For Sid's second lap he ran 4-miles to the finish. With all this bad luck, we were only 6 minutes out of 1st place! Steve also lost the baton as well which was a 5 minute penalty so we were 11 minutes out of first. I did my first night lap, and did an ok ride, I like riding at night, but not racing. I don't seem able to really push it at night. Steve put in a really good 1:25 night lap and that kept us in the game. Sid's bike blew up at night, so he was out of the rotation. Now it was just Jay, Steve and I to do an extra lap to make up for Sid. Going into the morning we were in 3rd getting close to second and I was up to do a turn. I was going really strong, and Mike K. was behind me and he can downhill really strong. I should have just raced my race, but I went down the hill like a maniac and at the bottom, I must have smacked my rear dérailleur and then my bike was gone!!!!! So I was at mile 6 and thinking what to do. I was going to DNF, but if I do that I will let my team down. Behind me a guy had broke his Kona HT in half! so he had it worse then me, he had to walk/run his way out. So I make my bike into a single speed. I had it in a easy gear, so I could do the climbs. Well when you make a geared bike into a single the chain will eventually go to the next bigger cog and eventually the chain will bind and break. My chain broke again, and then I put the chain on a smaller cog, I was able to get a couple of miles out of that. Eventually there was a ticking that was the signal of the end, finally my chain would not move. I ran the last 1.5 miles into the finish. I had told people to let my team know that I had broken down. Well that lap ended up being 2:10 or something, and we finished out the race, and were able to get 5th place! I was somewhat shocked about that, I think we would have won the sport class if we had not had any issues, but that is the beauty and pain of 24 racing.

This was a good time, I had my best time at any Big Bear/Snow Shoe race with the bigger base camp. Maybe next year Tecate will ride again and race expert?