PMBAR Report:

I woke up at 4:30am Saturday morning to the sound of rain on the tent. I did not get much sleep, due to anxiety, and now I need to get ready in the cold rain. YEAH!
That was pretty much my attitude the whole morning. We got to the Start tent, checked in, jotted down the off limits roads, and then proceeded to wait in the cold for the start. At 7:45am they called the rider meeting handed out passports and said “GO”.

See the pretty new white jerseys…(Foreshadowing)
We quickly plotted the check points and decided on a route and off we went up Black Mountain. I do not know if it was the lack of sleep, excitement, pour preparation, 35lbs of gear on my back, weather, or just plain bad day, but I was not feeling it. Jonathan was powering up the climbs and I was struggling the whole time. About 2 hours in I finally started feeling like my body had accepted its fate and riding was not a struggle, but I still could not keep up with Jonathan. He had his game face on today.
From the first check point, Club Gap, we went to the West side of Pisgah. From now on that area will be referred to as HELL. Check point 2 was Daniel Ridge. No problem, I have been there before and we were still feeling pretty good. From Daniel Ridge we took a right on Farlow.

This trail is legendary. I have heard of many descending it, but no one ascending it. I now know why. This was literally some of the nastiest single track I have ever been on.
1 hour of hike a bike that would have been really hard with hiking boots and no bike. This is where things got interesting. We climbed I don’t know how many feet, but it had to have been close to 40 degrees up there and we have been wet all day. Thoughts of hypothermia kept creeping into my mind along with how I am going to get out of this. We would stop to eat and get so cold that we would have to start riding again to keep warm. On we pressed. Finally at the top of Farlow lay check point #3. Check point #4 came quickly as it was just around the corner, but happened to be the farthest point from the Start/Finish. So I asked Jonathan how much further and how many hours. We where 7 hours in at this point and the cold was getting to me. He replied 4 hours. I could have died! So after some discussion about descending back down Farlow or taking the fire road we headed out. I am happy to say that we did not take Farlow back. I do not care to ever hike Farlow again. With different conditions I might consider riding down it. Never again UP! We took a bunch of fire roads back and up “Caney Bottom”, Cove Creek and back to the East side of 276. After 276 I could tell that Jonathan was starting to bonk. I can’t blame him. He pushed one gear hard all day long. It did feel good about not being the slowest any longer. We got up to Black Mountain and started our descent. This year we actually got to ride down while it was light, but we did not have any brakes. Metal on metal with the leaver to the grip is not a good feeling.
As you can tell the pretty new jerseys aren’t so pretty any more.
We managed to ride to Hell and back and enjoy some good beer and fellowship afterwards. It was an epic day on the bike that will not soon be forgotten. What a great race. 63 miles in 12.5 hours. We placed 31st out of 75 teams. Only 41 teams finished. Nutrition was right on. Not one cramp and felt consistent the whole time. I will definitely do this race again next year, but not in the rain!