12 Hours Of Winning!

The 12 Hours of Papago is a race I have been looking forward to since moving to Arizona. The course is cool for several reasons. First it's located right in Tempe, a rather hip area of Phoenix. The course is in a public park, surrounded by city on all sides, and contains some extremely unique rock formations. Also included was a 175 long tunnel, a few miles of canal bike path, a public road crossing, a technical bridge over the canal, climbs, descents, rocks and cactus. Oh,...and the transition area was located on a paved road under an overpass.

L.A. and I arrived just in time to make our own parking place around 6 a.m. It was still dark and the bridges over Tempe Town Lake were lit....I had a good feeling about the race.

The start was cold and dark, about 45 degrees. We ran to our bikes and then out onto the course. I started for our team, named "Hole in One" and managed to be one the top 10 into the singletrack. There were 170 or so teams. I followed another rider who had a light through the first little canyon and then rode blindly for a couple minutes until we were in a more open area. The twilight was giving just enough on the high ground to see and it got brighter every minute.

I was highly motivated to take advantage of the open trail ahead of me before it became clogged with hundreds of lapped traffic. Also I was very rested and filled with adrenaline since it was my first mtb race in months.
Within a few minutes I was out front and thinking to myself "dude, this is going pretty well!".
I was totally time trialing, mildly concerned about using too much to soon, and zoomed onto the pavement and through the underpass/transition zone in 1st place, laying down what would be the fastest lap of the race, averaging 16 mph on that lap! One more time around and it was L.A.'s turn a couple out.

Earlier that day we awoke to her front tire completely flat. Actually spent quite a bit of time jerking with it and knew it might be an issue during the race. Both our bikes were well worn and we knew mechanicals were a strong possibility. So of course she had a flat on the first lap, and of course it was not easy to fix as the tubless valve had been completely jacked in the rim.

Limping back to the transition I did a "relief lap" while she finalized repairs.

Back out on the course her enthusiasm got the best of her and she came back after an extremely "hot lap". Explaining that she went so hard that she made herself sick. I was sitting around chowing down, totally not expecting to go back out on the course yet...but I did. I was starting to hurt at this point and there was still about 8 hours of racing to go!

L.A found her mojo on the following lap, putting down her fastest lap of the day. We were behind at this point but slowly crawled back into 1st about mid day. Between laps I was using zip ties to hold both my shoes and my derailer together. But we remained mechanical free and took the win with 22 laps! Rules stated that each teamate had to do a relatively equal number of laps so Lee-Ann finished up the race for us in the dark, putting down yet another of her consistently fast laps.

It was a textbook endurance race, it had extreme temps, mechanicals, drama, and some very close competition....Oh and free beer from the local brewery!

The award ceremony and after party were totally rockstar! I drank half a beer and was wasted.