Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, I give you:
Yee-haw. I finally put it together. April 14th, 2006. 300 miles of pure mountain biking. I can feel the hurt already.
The course is not 100% final yet. I need to re-ride some of the upper lemmon trails to see just how destroyed they are. If they’re out I will likely put the race on something like butterfly/crystal springs.
I’ve never done any event like this. I think ~3 days is a difficult length of time to race. But I won’t know until I try. I also am fairly certain that no one has put on a race that is this difficult. The amount of hike-a-bike is more than most riders can handle, and the difficult/brutal conditions inbetween are certainly not your typical 24 hour, 100 mile or even Great Divide fare. It’s gunna hurt. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
To me, one of the most appealing features of mountain biking is the synergy of skill and strength. Some sports are (almost) all strength/endurance and others are mostly skill. Few require a significant combination of the two. It’s an incredible feeling to clean a hard section of a climb that not only took significant technique, but also physical conditioning. I’ve always been disappointed that most mountain bike racing shys away from this key aspect of mountain biking. I can understand why many endurance (100 mile+) races have gone to easier race courses, but that does not mean this must always be so. The AZT 300 is an experiment in long distance [i]mountain biking[/i].
We’ll see how it turns out.
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Yesterday I rode around at Tucson Mountain Park with Chris. It was a good loop and a beautiful day. The streets of Tucson were as empty as I’ve ever seen them. With new year’s resolutions people were out riding their bikes and running.
Why an arbitrary date for signaling the start of the new year has anything to do with a resolve to take better care of oneself, I’ll never know. Resolve is much more permanent than that.
But I thoroughly enjoyed the lack of traffic.
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