Careful What You Wish For....

Leading up to the Mt Washington Hillclimb race you wish for perfect weather. Low winds, mild temperatures. Perfect weather for a bike ride. Earlier this week I looked at an extended forecast for Mt Washington and it looked about as perfect as you could possibly ask for. Clear skies, low winds, temps in the 50's. I started thinking about whether or not I could achieve my goal under these ideal conditions. The goal I set in January was to hit 1:10, but my training for the year wasn't consistent enough for that to be realistic today. Life and a new business kind of get in the way sometimes. But in the last month I made a huge push to get my fitness level better than it's ever been. My conclusion (and the expectations I set for myself), based on the training I've been doing and the numbers I was able to hit on Mt Ascutney and the practice ride up Mt Washington a month ago was that, realistically, I might be able to get to about 1:14 with an outside chance of 1:12. This would make me very happy all things considered.

I woke up this morning at 5:30. Actually, I woke up at 11pm, 11:40, 12:05, 12:20, 1:30, 2:15, 2:45... you get the picture.. By the time I actually crawled out of bed I had spent the better part of the night tossing around like a sock in the dryer agonizing about how badly I needed to be sleeping. Whatever, this is nothing new for me the night prior to a race. I woke up with nasty butterflies, did a joint mobility routine, choked down about 600 calories worth of fuel, 20oz of water and 12oz of coffee. I had two hours till showtime and I was feeling nervous but strong. It was about 52 degrees outside with a forecast of 87. "Ummm, I hope they're not talking about the mountain. That would really suck."

The organizers pushed the start of the race back an hour this year to allow people more time to chill out in the morning before having to get all the cars up the mountain. Seemed like a good idea at the time. We got to the mountain, I got my numbers and made sure my bike was in perfect working order. The atmosphere at the base of the mountain on race day is like a festival. In fact, there was one woman there who must have thought she was at Woodstock as she stripped down naked in the middle of the field to get into her bike kit. That was a new one. Pretty sure the 12 year old boy a couple cars over from her broke his fingers texting his buddies about the peep show he just got.

I started my warmup ride with a guy from Philly named Jay that I had never met before. He was on a gorgeous Italian bike, a Colnago. I looked at his gearing and was a little surprised at the fact that he appeared to be riding with regular road gearing. I said to him, "Never did this before, or are you just really pissed off at your knees?".. "What do you mean?", he asked. "What do you have for gears there?". "34-25", he said....I laughed... "What?", Jay laughed back. OK, so if Jay was a pro, that would work. You can tell a pro when you're riding next to one. Jay was not a pro. "This isn't the type of mountain you ride with the gearing you would use in a crit" I tried to explain. We had a good laugh about it and he told me about all the crap his buddies gave him back home when he started talking about gearing down for the race and how he decided to "man up" and just ride the 34-25. I saw Jay later after the race and all he had to say to me was that next time he didn't give a shit what his buddies said, he's gearing down for the race. Still, he had a big smile on his face and was really proud of his achievement of finishing the toughest hillclimb race in the world.

The race had about 680 registered with a Men's 40-44 field about 120-130 strong. It was a massive field full of some of the strongest climbers around. They come from all over for this one. Colorado, Canada, up and down the East Coast, other parts of the world. This is an international event full of people who are willing to put their bodies into unimaginable amounts of pain to achieve a goal of getting up one of the nastiest mountain roads in the world. I got to the staging area early and positioned

myself right at the front of the field so I wouldn't get caught up at the start. Not that it matters much since you hit the climb about 200 yards into the race, but it probably saved me about 10 seconds, and every second counts.

At the start of these races I'm so nervous that a calm actually comes over me. It's like my body is buzzing and my head is in a cloud. My heart rate just sitting there waiting was at 90bpm which is about 45 beats over my normal resting heart rate.. The ideal conditions that I had expected turned into 70+ degrees at the bottom and getting hotter by the minute. I was sweating just sitting there, thankful that I took a sodium tablet before leaving the motel. Heat was not going to be my friend today.

My group was the third wave, we started 10 minutes after the "Top Notch" group which was made up of all the racers who were either pros or had done the race before in under 1:20. A select group of the top climbers around, a group that I was determined to join... The cannon went off and we blasted out of the staging area. I led the pack into the climb and then settled into my power zone I needed to stay in for the next 70+ minutes. Riders started passing me, but not many, and not for long as most of them would blow up from going out too hard. I was trying hard not to go out too hard which is tough at the beginning when you're feeling really strong and people are passing you. I just kept telling myself you have a power number you need to stay at. Go too hard and your day is done early.

Damn was it hot. I was 1 mile into the race and I could feel the onset of dehydration and my heart rate had already climbed to 173 bpm. My max HR is 179 bpm (as I found out at the top of the mountain) so I was already above where I wanted to be. To maintain my threshold power I do best when I'm at about 168-169 bpm. But it was really hot and my body was working extra hard to try to cool itself down. I was sweating a lot, which was a good sign, since it proved I wasn't too dehydrated yet. 2 miles in and we hit the first extended section of about 18% grade. Crushing. I'm under 5mph and I'm passing people. My heart rate is 174 and I'm maintaining 270W output. But I'm thinking that there is no way I can sustain 174bpm the whole way and continue to push the pedals this hard. For the life of me, there is nothing I can do to bring my heart rate down. I'm 3 miles in and I'm hurting. The only way to bring the heart rate down would be to stop. There are no breaks on this climb, it is straight up for 7.6 miles at grades that they don't allow cars to pass on in the Winter. At 4 miles I stop sweating. This is bad. My power numbers are dropping. I'm barely half way there and I decide that this is the stupidest thing I've ever done. I'm on pace to hit a PR, but my heart rate is pegged at 174-175 and it won't drop. My power numbers? They'll continue to drop. Mile 5 I hit the gravel section. 15-18% for over a mile. This is absolutely devastating. I'm going 4.5 MPH. I'm still passing people though. Everybody is suffering in the heat. It's excruciating. At this point we're completely exposed, we have about 2.5 miles to go, and I'm in as much pain as I've ever been in on a bike. Every time I take a hand off the bars to grab my water bottle for a quick drink, my heart rate spikes to 176. I'm about 45 minutes in and I have absolutely no idea how I've been able to maintain this heart rate for this long. At this point I'm passing people who are walking. I don't walk. My brain pleads with me to walk. But I don't walk. If I'm off my bike at this point it's because I'm dead.. Think I'm kidding? I'm not..... 6 miles. Geographically, I know I'm almost there. 1.6 more miles feels like 160.. At this point every second feels like an hour. It absolutely sucks beyond belief. Heart rate: 175. Power: 220 at best. I'm fucked. My goal is out the window. I'm completely blown up. 1:14 goes by.. 1:15 goes by... 1:16. Power barely hitting 200W.. I have under 4 minutes to get to the top before I lose my chance at Top Notch. I come around a corner and hear the screaming from the crowd. I look up the road and see Sandy with Jake. She's screaming at me to dig deep, telling me I'm so close. There's about 1/4 mile to go and I absolutely turn myself inside out. There...is....no....fucking.....way....I'm .... not ......getting..... Top.......Notch!!!!

The top of the auto road is a joke. It's a wall. It's 22%. I've been climbing for 1:18

and I see the wall. There's a guy in front of me who just passed me about 1/10th of a mile back and I was kind of pissed about it. My race has come down to this. This one guy. He wasn't even in my group, he started 5 minutes ahead of me and I caught him just like the 100 or so other people who started in front of me that I caught. But this last one had to be beaten. I put everything into it. I was absolutely gasping. People were screaming like we were sprinting for the win. I dropped him and kept pushing as hard as I possibly could. I see the timer and it's ticking up 1:28:57... 1:28:58 (it's 10 minutes more than my time because my group started 10 minutes back)... I'm getting Top Notch!! I come across the line at 1:19:06. I'm starting to black out. I can't really see, everything just kind of goes white and spotty. Two officials hold my bike up as I fall off and out of the way. It takes a long time before I get up..

Typically, it takes me weeks before I decide to do the race again. It's so miserable, so unimaginably awful, so brutal in so many ways. There's no good reason to ever do it more than once. This time I decide to do it again before I even catch my breath. I'm dissapointed with my time. I have unfinished business. I'm going to finish it next year, re-focused and re-committed. I'll be starting with the pros in the top notch category..

For the day I ended up 16th out of a field of about 120-130.. I was 95th overall out of 530 finishers and probably another 100 that DNF'd. I was 10th out of all the racers in the state of NH. The top times for the day were all off by about 4 minutes. Hardly anybody had a good day, and on average, everybody I talked to was off from where they thought they would be, or where they had been in the past, by about 3 or 4 minutes. It was my 5th time up the mountain and it was more painful than any of the previous times. My average heart rate was over 97% for the last 70 minutes of the race. I looked at my heart rate data and at the top of the mountain my heart rate hit 100% max at 179bpm.. The sprint at the top was the most pain I've ever been in under any other set of circumstances in my life. Next year will be no different in that regard. What will be different is the time on the board. Next year I'm hitting 1:10.

Here's a video that Michele took at the top. This is me turned inside out (in case you were wondering what that might look like)