There is a fear when writing about my goals that I will lose face if I do not end up reaching them in the end. Even writing about my goals on a blog which has no readers yet can be pretty scary. But I also feel that making the statement loud and clear (at least to myself), makes it more possible to achieve them. If I do not reach them, I want to be able to read about it after the fact and learn from my mistakes.
Last March 2016, I attempted the True Grit Epic in St. George UT. It is an 86 mile “100 mile” race which is the first of the National Ultra Endurance 100-miler series each year. This was my friend’s idea. We were on a ride together, probably sometime back in October 2015 and she had mentioned wanting to do this. At first I was like Naaah. Why would I want to travel all the way out to UT for a race? The terrain of the True Grit is quite technical and rocky and it brings some pretty bad ass competitors. There is no “sport” class. Every woman competes in the Open class which means I would be a sport-level 40-something competing against pros and gals who could hypothetically be my kids.
Then slowly over time, like all crazy endurance challenges, I warmed up to the idea and figured why not? It’s only 86 miles. I’ve done that before. What could go wrong? If I can continue to gain fitness before getting too old, wouldn’t it be awesome to complete the entire NUE series one day?
My goal was just to finish, and work on my pacing and nutrition. Being an early season race, it was pretty difficult to get the training done. The winter here in “sunny California” is our wet season, so big winter storms, downed trees and the fear of destroying my drivetrain (and the trails) still made putting in the time on the mountain bike challenging. We definitely have it easier than someone in Colorado, however. Other challenges were a crash in training which put a really deep bruise in my quad which took me out for a week and my trusty Ibis Tranny hardtail had some drivetrain and dropper post issues. So my training/race bike was checked in to the local bike shop at least twice, and in the interim I trained on my gigantic heavy Ibis Mojo HD which was also in a poor state of maintenance.
I didn’t finish the race. I fueled and kept my pace right where I wanted, handled the technical bits quite well I thought, for a non-local on a hard tail. I had to pass some guys on technical bits, and I even passed some guys on climbs. My pace was right where I wanted it to be, and my food intake was perfectly on schedule. I was executing my race plan well and was feeling great! However about half way through the race, my front derailleur was not shifting down to the smaller chainring forcing me to stop, get off the bike and manually shift it, and then my dropper post went haywire and became a bouncing pogo stick. I rode a pogo stick for 12 miles before reaching the next aid station to bail.
Aside from the mechanicals, I don’t believe my average speed according to my Garmin would have gotten me through the cut-offs in time, or it would have been very tight. So there are also some fitness gains that I need to make in order to finish this race.
Therefore, I want to give it another go! My goals for 2017’s True Grit are:
- To finish
- Get better at bike maintenance. Aside from the basic changing brake pads, etc. I now know how to adjust and fine tune my rear derailleur, next up on the list is front derailleur and suspension tuning.
- Increase my FTP (power threshold) to get up the climbs faster. To do that, my coach has me doing some pretty hefty power intervals on long climbs.
My next big goal is to finally finish the Cascade Cream Puff, my other unfinished business, in August.
