Have fun this weekend

Whatever you do this weekend, The Burn, The Giro, mow the lawn, or just slob and dribble on the couch...

do it with a little glee.

Shan, pre Cincinnati Marathon

But don't fool yourself into thinking it's all fun and games. I went back and dug this up - a little race recap from The Burn 24, 2008.
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To call racing The Burn 24 Hour Mountain Bike Event the next logical step for anyone might seem like a contradiction of terms. Logic doesn’t account for much in the sub culture of mountain bikers who stay up all night racing for 24 hours by themselves. Nonetheless, The Burn 24 was really just that for my brother, Shawn: the next endurance race in a line of endurance races that seemed to fit together in order of ascending difficulty, building upwards in such a deviously easy way that might suggest the sky is the limit. But the sky is not the limit. Or so it didn’t appear to be at 1 AM on Sunday morning, the day before Memorial Day.

Moths sputtered around the lights we had hung in our pit, our trailer situated right beside the course where Shawn could stop and refuel every lap as he came through the transition area. Cicadas moaned on the wooded hill above Jason and me, Shawn’s pit crew, as we swapped bikes for him every other time he came through to head out on his next lap. Clean gears and fresh bottles seemed to help him, at least mentally, as he trudged around the 7.5 mile course that had seemed so fun and easy 12 hours ago. It gets strangely quiet at a 24 hour race around this time of night despite the hundreds of people occupying this makeshift tent city outside of Wilkesboro, NC. The hum of generators was punctuated by the occasional gear shift as racers continued to go out on their laps into the cold and darkness. Shawn came in from his 15th lap on the bermed, rollercoaster course and limped his way through the transition area to our pit. He looked completely beaten. Shelled, they like to say. He was shocked by the difficulty of trying to race a mountain bike for 24 hours in a row.

It all seems simple enough. Get on your bike. Ride around an 8 mile course that starts and ends at your tent. Eat something. Repeat as many times as you can in 24 hours.

“I still think 30 laps or so might take it,” I remind Shawn, as he eases into his chair. We’d calculated this a hundred times in the past week, how many laps it would take to win. 30 laps would mean something like 225 hard mountain bike miles within 24 hours.

“I need a minute,” the past 13 hours of racing had chased all the blood from his head, and his face had turned the color of a bone. He looked skinny in a bad way. He’d taken only one other break, a brief 10 minutes in the pits around 10 PM while Jason had wrenched on his bike and I’d plied him with pop tarts and cool water. He’d come away from that pit stop dazed, but he looked relatively together still, maybe even better than the few laps before where nausea and fatigue had been wearing him down around the track. But his next lap took nearly 1 hour, then he turned a 1:05. Steadily, his progression around the course was slowing while his condition worsened. He came in from lap 17, almost completely blown. He was dejected, ““They’re just better than me,” he murmured.

Not much better, but yes, maybe he was right. At that point, his chances of making up 3 laps on seasoned endurance racers like Santa Cruz Syndicate’s Mark Hendershot were growing small. It was cold. He was exhausted and only marginally lucid. I did my best to reason with him, “No, they went out hard. They’ll fold. Keep riding your race and good things will happen.”

It amazed me how fast the frontrunners had gone out through the 80 degree sun when the gun went off at noon. Hendershot, in particular, was cool and collected, steadily churning out 45 minute laps past nightfall, laps that I thought were sure to break him eventually. But they didn’t, and Hendershot rode on while Shawn paced himself back to 7th place in the large solo division, just trying to keep moving.

The evolution of an endurance athlete who is hooked on this kind of racing can be a rapid progression. A few years ago, Shawn and I raced the Shenendoah Mountain 100, a hundred mile mountain bike race through some of the best trails in the George Washington National Forest outside of Harrisonburg, Virginia. We finished together, at 10 hours and 50 minutes and change. I liked it, felt like maybe it was the sort of thing I would do again if I really felt strong. Shawn was hooked, and he wanted more.

Much more. Last year, Shawn raced 4 different 100 mile events. At the Cohutta 100 down in Tennessee, he placed 34th, only 1:30 behind the winner, Trek’s Chris Eatough. If Shawn had needed additional encouragement, that would have done it – but he didn’t need it. Thankfully so, because later in the season he crashed or cramped out of 3 other 100 milers. Undeterred, he placed well at a 50-miler Endurance race in West Virginia, and then he took 2nd at The Paranormal, a 6 hour local event in Earlysville.

The stage was nearly set. Shawn was logging hundreds of miles per week, riding at night, getting daily feedback from a coach online. The endurance bug had bitten him hard. Then the 18 hours on the Farm got delayed from August until November, and on a bitter cold night in early November, for 18 hours, Shawn raced and won the solo category there in Goochland.

We talked about it on his last lap at the Farm, 16 hours into a cold race with the sun now finally out and the temperature climbing. “I’ve got more to give,” he assessed.

24 hour racing was the only logical next step.

Eddie O’dea, race director of The Burn 24 and an accomplished racer himself (He won the 24 hours of Conyers solo category this year the week before The Burn 24), gave me his perspective on this progression, “I used to think a solo 12 hour race was crazy back when I raced cross country. Then after I competed in a 12 hour, I thought a 24 hour was just nuts....then I raced one (well 10 now). Now I don't know what's next, but whatever it is I want to keep pushing my limits.”

Eddie definitely knows a thing or two about putting on a great endurance race, as The Burn 24 has become one of the most popular endurance races in the Southeast. “The Dark Mountain trails are some of the best in the country. The Brushy Mountain Cycling Club does a fantastic job building and maintaining these trails, and it's an honor to be able to host the BURN 24 here as well as help support the BMCC.”

Asking around the event, there was a general consensus about The Burn being the premiere 24 Hour event in the Southeast. Registration prices are lower at The Burn than many other 24 Hour events, free BURN energy drink and post-race barbeque, and a fun atmosphere gives most participants all they’d need to return. But the course itself is even better, and as one racer could only describe it, “out of control.” 90% singletrack. 20 or so gigantic berms. 35 and 40 mph speeds were regularly clocked by riders with odometers as they whizzed around the 7.5 mile track in as little as 35 minutes, despite the 800+ feet of climbing. That’s fast on paper. It’s faster in person. For more information on the Dark Mountain trail system, visit http://www.bmcc.us/.

Eddie explains the appeal of his event further, “This is a grassroots event at heart, and I have tried to hold true to that experience while providing all the amenities that you would find at a world class event.” And it shows. Where Conyers only had 6 participants in their men’s solo race, The Burn 24 ended up with close to 50. Maybe that’s a testament to a really great race, but maybe more so it’s just an honor for an all around good guy who puts it on. “I really enjoy directing,” Eddie confirms. “It's as hard as racing, but a little different. It's very rewarding to create a positive experience for so many riders.”

“Positive experience” is not how I would have described what Shawn was going through at 3:50 AM. He’d been gone for over an hour, and Jason was pacing back and forth in front of our pit. The rattle and metallic grind of other racers shifting into bigger gears as they accelerated out past our tent started giving me the idea that maybe he’d had a mechanical. 3:55 AM, maybe his lights are out. I mentally count back the hours to the last time we changed batteries, and I struggle with the math. 3:58, our buddy Mike comes through the transition, leading the Open Duo category with Scott like they did last year, like they do every year, and I run to him and ask him if he’s seen Shawn.

“Yeah, he’s right down by the lake,” Mike confirms. “He looked awful when I came around him.”

Right at 4 AM, I see Shawn’s HID’s crest the hill into the transition slowly, like an old man into an elevator. He eases over to the pit, and slumps into a chair with his feet up. “I need a minute,” he slowly breathes.

The good news at this point is that he’s 16 hours into the race, and he deserves to be tired. The bad news is that he’s got 8 hours to go still, a big race by itself, and with his position he’s poised to either break into the top 5 or slide away into the teens. He can’t afford a rest.

He’s nauseous, barely holding down anything to eat now, and I check his water bottle from the last lap and he’s barely touched it. I’ve raced with him for years and never seen him in this much pain, and as his brother it’s difficult to know what to do. Should we help him up and stuff him back on the saddle? Allow him a brief rest and hope he’s better for it? His head keeps lolling back and hitting the back of his chair, and his helmet has fallen off. Jason and I opt to give him a minute. Two minutes. Ten minutes later, and despite the blankets we’ve piled on top of him he’s visibly shaking from the cold. The temperature has fallen down into the low 50’s, and he’s drenched from racing all night and now frozen in place. He knows he’s got to get changed, and he’s got to do it quickly before his body burns too much energy trying to keep warm.

It’s not the passage of time you’re fighting at this hour of the night – the tick of the clock is actually your best friend, a drop in the bucket towards finishing. The enemy, instead, is the inability to keep going. Shawn looks right on the verge. I jump into the trailer to get his next set of clothes, and I’m worried we’re looking at the end of the race for him. He’s mentally beaten, physically exhausted, and without any real hope to catch the leaders. What else is there to drive him on?

I turn around with his clothes, and to my surprise he’s on his feet, climbing into the trailer behind me. He’s shaking badly now, very cold. He strips, leaning against the wall of the trailer for stability, and he looks down where we laid his sleeping bag out for him before the race started in case he might need it. He stares at it.

“I’ll get a chair,” I reason with him. “You can sit down and get your gear on.” I duck out of the trailer and grab a camping chair then jump back in and put the chair behind him. He looks at the chair, looks at me, and then he stands up as straight as he can and pulls his dry socks and chamois on.

“If I sit down,” he says flatly, “I’m not getting back up.”

He’s not pitying himself and he’s not grieving how difficult this is, just stating the facts. But there’s a toughness in what he’s doing that I can’t fathom, and I realize that it’s that toughness that a 24 hour racer digs into when there’s nothing else left to give. That toughness is both a boon and a curse, because it hurts to quit but it hurts to proceed. Regardless, Shawn is digging deep for it.

Out of the trailer and back into the cold, I can’t believe he’s going to do it. He drinks a little coke and eats half a pop tart, stares blankly out across the transition area. “Give it until 8 AM,” I promise him, “This will get better.”

“I hope so,” he says. Without reason, he limps back onto his bike, clicks on his lights, and rides back into the darkness. It’s 4:30 AM Sunday morning.