Taking the TMP Rock ‘n Road Challenge

1/14/09

It was pathetic. I couldn’t program my way out of a wet paper bag. Couldn’t code “hello world” world to save my life. That was yesterday.

I sat down at the computer this morning and tried to jump back into it, but I could sense I was still in that rut. An idea flashed through my head (http://tmprocknroad.azmtbchallenge.com/). Why not spend the day listening to my tires, rather than to frustrated hands trying to click and type my way out of the rut?

It was 9:55am. I opened up Rob’s GPX file. 6:38 moving time, 7:30 total time. Darkness fell in eight hours and I was not at all ready for an epic.

I thought about it for about 30 seconds, then started preparations. Upload the GPS track, fill up the camelbak, fresh batteries for my light, rummage for some portable calories. What am I forgetting?

Less than an hour later, I was on the trail, not really sure what I was doing. I had seven hours of daylight. I had just installed a new shifter, new cables, new grips, and new tire. I was out of Stans, so I recycled what was in my worn out tire and added ~1oz of Super Juice I had lying around. I was confident it wouldn’t hold.

I started hungry. Both literally and figuratively.

Doubts were silenced a few minutes up the trail. I felt top. Listening to my tires was exactly what I needed to be doing today. If I finished the loop, great. If not, great.

Smooth = fast was my mantra. Sometimes ugly = fast, too. After turning off Rock Wren I carried too much speed on the jeep trail and the only way I could keep it on the trail was by hitting a three foot drop around a corner. Totally unintentional, it could have been ugly.

I had a few moments of disbelief at the route and the possibility of stringing it all together. Purely mental limitations, a product of the automatic, conditioned mind. I’ve ridden here so many times, suffered so much out here. If I were going where I was going, I wouldn’t be going this way.

I’d look off into the distance at a well known pass or mountain, thinking “it’s going to be a while before I’m over there.” Knowing there was a much shorter/easier way to get there.

The new trails at Robles were fun. Hidden turns off jeep roads, but right where the GPS says they are supposed to be. I’d never ridden some of it before.

I did not clean the rock stairs Golden Gate, though I did try. Same goes for the descent. Feeling groovy, but not that groovy. Lower Golden Gate onto Prospector and the “Sweet” trails was the highlight of the loop. I felt like I was just getting started, but thinking about all I’d ridden thus far blew my mind.

My major goal for the ride was to keep stopped time to a minimum. I wasn’t getting any good pictures from the bike, so I decided I’d try some video for fun. This isn’t the most exciting video in the world. It’s mostly my ugly mug rambling about the desert, whining about wilderness, traffic, cholla in my knee, dead end roads, how much Sweetwater hurt. Whatever was going through my head when it was smooth enough to hold the camera.

But it tells the story of the rest of the ride pretty well. I didn’t feel like I rode all that fast through all the singletrack at the beginning, but thinking back I’m not sure I could ride it much faster. Once I got onto the roads it was hard not to switch into “race” mode and dig into the pedals. I chased down three cars on the Bajada Loop road, using them for motivation. It was easy to burn it up Picture Rocks Road, just to get the hell off it as soon as possible.

I felt the first threads unravel on the gasline. Thought I was going to clean one hill and ended up hobbling instead. The roads afterward were more mentally (route) challenging than physical, so I slammed a barf-o-licious “apple pie” clif shot and recovered a bit.

I was surprised to see where I came out on Camino del Cerro. I rolled into the Sweetwater Preserve and directly onto my worst wrong turn of the day. Just had a different idea of where I thought the course went. Flipped it all the way back to the parking lot, this time heading for the correct trail, Red Rollercoaster.

As I said in the video, climbing the Lost Arrow trail hurt. I was neither smooth nor fast through there. Just couldn’t get my bike to do what I wanted it to do. Made me smile that it was in Sweetwater that I suffered most.

I hadn’t looked at the time the entire ride. But I could tell by the height of the sun that I was going to finish well before I had expected. I punched the last hills back to the trailhead just for good measure. It came out to five hours twenty six minutes, which as you can see in the video, was a bit of a shock to me.

This is quite the loop these guys have put together. I hope other people get out there to do it even faster. I love the concept of this “race.” You get to do it any day/time you choose, even on a whim, like I did. You ride at your own pace, unaffected by others. Route finding and self support are paramount. It was fun to imagine racing not only those that rode the route before, but those in the future.

I hope to see more challenges of this nature cropping up. This is mountain bike racing, version 3.0.