12 hour mountain bike racing

I don't know why I decided to do it but I talked a couple of friends into joining me on a three person team for an endurance mountain bike race. It's a 12 hour race that starts at midnight and goes until noon the next day. Some people do it solo, some people will trade off laps with one partner, some trade between three riders.

If you think about this for a second, you will start to realize a couple of things. First, the race starts at midnight, this poses a couple of problems.

1) It's dark at midnight.
2) I am not usually awake between 12 and 6 AM so why is it a good idea to ride a mountain bike in the wee hours of the night?

The dark part isn't so bad. There are some pretty good light systems out there that are made specifically for mountain biking at night. Being a gadget-guy I have a couple of sets and for the most part riding at night isn't much harder than riding in daylight. It's a little rougher because you can't adapt a prepare for the finer details in the trail, but sometimes that's better.

As far as riding, I'm sorry, racing, in the middle of the night when you are usually asleep that is a killer. I don't do well in general with sleep deprivation. My stomach gets all irritable, I can't focus, etc. So you can imagine what this means when it's 3:30 in the morning and I am trying to negotiate tight twisty trails with wet roots, rocks, logs and streams while trying to keep away from the guy behind me and catch the guy in front of me.

After that lap is over, you have to get out of your dirty (and probably wet) biking clothes, clean your body, clean your bike, fix anything that you may have broken on the previous lap, make sure you eat something so you will have energy for the next lap and then you have try and get some sleep because it's all going to happen again in just a couple of hours.

I was able to get a short nap from 12:30 to 1:00 and another one from 6:15 to 6:45.

I didn't take any pictures since I forgot my camera, but I'll try to find some and post them when I get a chance.

In the end Megan, Mark and I did pretty well. We all turned some pretty strong lap times to get a total of 12 laps in and we finished around 12:40. It came down to the very last lap but we won our category and I think we placed pretty well in the overall standings. The most laps completed by any of the teams was 13, so 12 laps for a trio of riders that decided to do this race only two days earlier is not so bad.