Everest Challenge 2009
I raced the Everest Challenge last weekend. This year I wanted to see what it was like to race with the leaders, and I was hoping for a better placing, so I raced in the 4s instead of the 45s.
On the first day I hung with the lead group of 8 til a bit past halfway up the first 6000′ climb. Then I had to back off a bit to save something. They were pretty close for the next 3000′ climb, but on the flat section before the last 6000′ climb my stomach was feeling really bad. I ate, drank, took more electrolytes, but nothing worked. By the first feed zone up the last climb I was in really bad shape. I stopped and got a feed from Laura, then tried to go on, but I just felt too bad. I didn’t think I could make it to the next feed, let alone to the top. So I turned around and pulled out of the race. I got a ride back to the motel, puked and took a nap, then started eating.
The way the EC works you can race the second day even if you DNFd the first… you just aren’t competing for the overall so you’re not really in the race. I felt better in the morning and rode well on the second day. I think I finished 9th and was closing in on some of the lead eight. My time was about 17 minutes faster than last year. I’m pleased with that but bummed about not finishing the race.
If I’d finished both days, I would probably have placed better in the 45s than in the 4s. I didn’t like being a group all that much, so I will probably go back to the 45s next year… then they’ll go back to being faster than the 4s again.
Gory Race Details-
The group was really mellow on the first day’s neutral rollout. We even stopped to pee. I used it as an opportunity to get near the front. After the neutral rollout we still went slow. When the climb started there was a stiff headwind coming down the slope, so no one wanted to be on the front. I pulled for a while when we were in the lee of a cliff but for the rest I sat second to fourth wheel. Every once in a while someone would go to the front and go fast, everyone would get on his wheel, then he’d realize that he was doing more work then he needed to and would stop pedaling. Then we’d all have to swerve to the side to avoid hitting the rider in front. The speed up, slow down was kind of annoying and let the weaker riders keep up, so we were still a large group by the time we hit the top of the small descent about half way up. I’ve never been with the lead group by this point so I really wanted to hang in. I was fifth wheel at the top. As we started down there was a car a ways in front of us. It braked hard for a turn so I thought that the turn was sharper than it really was, so I braked harder than I needed to and left a small gap. Once we got back on the climb it looked like the riders in front would take off, so I worked hard to close the gap. I got back on just in time for them to turn it off and slow again, which let everyone else back on too. That was a waste of effort.
Near the top of the first half of the climb, where you ride on highway 395 for a mile, one guy (Matthew Younkins- Racing Greyhounds) rolled off the front. I was second and didn’t feel like chasing, and no one else did either as no one came around. The guy next to me said “he’ll be doing that all day. It’s what he did at Challenge last weekend.” “Can he hold it?” I asked. “Nope” was the reply. Reading his race report after the race, it sounds like he was caught later on the first descent. On the descent I worked with a couple guys from another field but they both got away from me on the short flat part before the second. The second climb I did at my own pace, passing riders from other races.
On the 10 mile flat part before the last climb I was feeling bad. I got caught by another 4- Alex Lugosch, Bike Nut (a shop in SF)- but I was too busy fishing electrolytes out of my jersey pocket to get on his wheel to work with him. I was feeling bloated and my mouth was dry like I was dehydrated.
We had a small mix up on the feeding- I’d expected Laura to be at the start, and was out of water when I got there, but she wasn’t there. I had to stop and beg for a fill from someone else’s support. The wind was about 20 mph so the next five miles up a very gradual grade before the real climbing begins was a miserable slog.
Once on the real climb I was in trouble. I was getting caught by riders instead of catching them. A couple from my field passed me and I felt too bad to race so I just let them go by. A couple public or tourist class riders I caught wanted to talk, but I felt too bad to be able to say anything.
Laura was at the next feed zone, which was up the climb a ways. I stopped and asked for different food than she had, so she had to run over to the van for it. I didn’t care about lost time at this point. I shoved down a rice cake and ate some other food but it didn’t do any good. I tried to keep going but I was riding at about 4 mph and feeling really bad. After a half mile or so I turned around and went back to the feed zone. Michael had already abandoned and was sitting there looking dejected. We loaded my bike up in his car, and he took me and another cat 4 who was abandoning back to the start and into town. I don’t normally get car sickness but I was really concerned about puking in the back of the car.
When I got to the motel room I did puke but there wasn’t anything coming up. I took a nap, then ate something. Then I ate some more. Some of us went out for pizza, which went down well, and then I ate some more when I got back to the motel room.
On the second day I was feeling back to normal. The race started slow again and started pretty slow up the first climb. I was bored. Lugosch (Bike Nut) did a slow-mo attack and the guys on the front (all from the previous day’s group of eight) loudly said “dont’ worry about him, he’s not going anywhere”. And he didn’t, dangling out there for a while before coming back in line. Then Younkins put in an actual attack and was ignored. Maybe 10 minutes later someone else made a move, and then Chance Whittacker (Swamis), who’d been one of the main drivers the day before, went to bridge and a lead group of 11 or so went off. I let them go as I was on the “riding my own pace” plan.
On the descent I managed to catch Lugosch and another guy near the bottom. We worked together on the flat part before the second climb. They told me they were 10th and 11th on the road, and I told them that I hadn’t finished the first day and was thus not a factor in the race. They stuck with me for a while on the next climb but dropped off the pace. Farther up I caught a Platinum rider who said we were 9th and 10th. I told him that I hadn’t finished the day before but he still wanted to race me. He wound up a ways ahead of me at the turn around, and I had to stop to refill my bottle of HEED (most of the turnarounds were not handing out bottles like last year). But I went fast down the descent and caught and then dropped the Platimum rider. I was pretty happy with that as I have had a problem with descending in this race before- in the past its been me that’s been dropped on the descent.
On the last climb I was trying to catch some of the leading 8 riders. A couple times I thought I saw them, only to find out it was someone else when I caught up. But Kevin finished just a bit in front of me and said he’d passed a couple fours right before the finish, so I was close to some of them.
As far as why I got sick-
I heard there were a number of people puking on the side of the road and/or pulling out near the end. One of my teammates had really bad food poisoning. I don’t know for sure if it was the cause but I will avoid the pre-race pasta feed next year.
The pasta feed was supposed to be vegetarian (I have been vegetarian for the last 20 years). The organizer told me they would have veg pasta and sauce. So when I went up to get some and saw they had pasta and sauce in one tray, and meat in another, I assumed they did the usual thing of making veg food and having meat to add to it. Perhaps I am too used to the Bay Area…. I got some pasta and started chowing down, only to find a piece of meat. I thought it had fallen in, so I gave it to Laura and kept eating. Found another one and only then started asking other people at the table if theirs had meat in it.
It turns out that the vegetarians were supposed to ask in the kitchen for the veg version (plain sauce on pasta). I don’t think that eating a little meat would have made a 20 year vegetarian sick- I am sure I have gotten occasional meat molecules during that time- but it can’t have helped. Laura’s theory was that it was the salad, but she’s not sure of that either.
Unfortunately for me, low electrolytes, low blood sugar and being dehydrated all make me feel ill in the same way, so they’re all also a possibility. But it looks like I consumed most of my electrolyte pills, I think I ate enough, and I had plenty of water. Nothing’s sticking out as the obvious cause.
I did use HEED with added Sustained Energy for some of my calories. I’ve used that in training for the first bottle of the day but I was using it for all my bottles this time. I was getting sick of the taste of SE, so I won’t do that again. And I was depending more on Hammer Gel than I normally do. So I kind of broke the rule of never doing something new in a race. I have used both of those in training many times without a problem, just not to the same extent as I did in the race. I was trying to avoid using Clif bars since the last couple years I have gotten really sick of them by the end.
On the second day I went back to plain HEED and Clif bars plus home-made rice cakes, and that worked fine.
I wound up with a sore throat/cold starting Sunday night that’s still going now, so there were plenty of germs to go around.
I added up what I remember eating, and it looks like I ate quite a bit on day 1, especially the second climb… like 550 calories/hr. Supposedly more than 300 cal/hr makes you ill, although I have never had problems from eating too much, only too little. So maybe that was it.