Whiskey 50 Off Road 2022

I managed to capture within the first two hours. The start was fairly neutral up to the stop sign but I chose to sit in the front because watching others suffer in close proximity stresses me out. I had a momentary thought about what a waste of video and battery that was but meh.

I've been only doing base so far this year, I had no high hopes of kicking butt but I can ride solid and strong in punchy singletrack because I find it fun, so I planned to suffer through the first half steady and then kick it on at the end.

The brakes issue is entirely my own fault. I had been cleaning the pistons with rubbing alcohol which made things worse so I was told to instead clean and lube the edges with mineral oil. I did and it worked fabulously except I didn't scour the mineral oil off the outside when I was done. So overnight the mineral oil seeped around and contaminated my pads. Lesson learned.

You basically only see the first climb and then the first decent. I turned the camera off to conserve battery if it got uninteresting or slow. The brakes were crazy loud but once I got to the bottom of the second downhill towards skull valley I had a little bit of power back in them.

I had some of the 50 mile amateur men catch up on the skull valley climb but the issue for me came when I got to the top and our 50 mile race merged with the 30 mile race. Big time bad timing that could have easily been avoided by me being faster in the first half but once I got to the singletrack I was in with the mid pack 30 milers and the fun downhills were a crawl, foot down, folks crashing and stopping and nowhere to pass.

I tried to sprint past a group of 6 or so and cramped bad and had to full stop, then tried to pass again and flatted making a bad line choice. So I gave in to just riding with folks, super frustrating when you want to race (singletrack is where I do well so was hoping to make up time there). So whaa whaa complain complain what could have been.....whatever. At the end of the day I got in a good workout and if you ever need folks to clear a line for you in a race just start singing and they will ask if you want to pass. Especially if you sing badly and it's one song on repeat.

  / strava