Whiskeytown 9-to-5

(Whiskeytown Lake, CA. October 4, 2008) Today I came to ride for Team, For Glory and for Bacon. In the end, there was only me, there was no glory, and, sadly, there was no bacon. But I did ride. What I rode was the Whiskeytown 9-to-5, which I must say is a good event on a great course. I had never ridden these trails and I would love to ride them more, but that’s for another time. For those of you whose geography of Northern CA (AKA The State of Jefferson, www.jeffersonstate.com) is a bit rough, Whiskeytown Lake is about 10 miles west of Redding, CA.

Heart Rate and Altitude from my watch for the race

This saga starts a while ago with me needing to find more races in my apparently never-ending goal of getting better at racing Leadville, but this one was not on my radar. I had planned to spend today in Granite Bay, CA at race that had been scheduled there, but less than 3 weeks out they cancelled, claiming “trouble with our insurance carrier.” I interpreted this as, “they want us to pay our premiums,” and went about looking for another race. After a brief fruitless search for WMD’s, I got back to business and found this race, and called them to see if they were still taking entries. They were and I gladly signed up.

The next part of the story starts about a week ago when the weather forecasters started with the ominous language about a major storm aiming at us and of course the storm will peak on Saturday. We lucked out and the storm peaked Friday night, which turned out to be a good thing, but more about that later.

Woof5 and the small dog spent all day Thursday (and by all day, I mean they left at 1:30 am and got back at 11:30 pm) up above Mammoth Lakes, looking for parts of Steve Fossett. For those of you who have not met the aforementioned “small dog” she is a type-1 certified search dog, German Shepherd, about 65 pounds and jumps 4’ vertical walls with no trouble. Still, she’s the “small dog”. They did get shuttled in and out by a CA National Guard Blackhawk helo, which was fun for them.

So we headed out under partly cloudy skies on Friday morning and drove through Susanville and around the north end of Lassen Park and into Redding. It started raining harder and harder the closer we got to Redding and up at Whiskeytown it was a pretty good rain event, steady and about a half-inch per hour. My previous plans to pre-ride the course were pretty dampened by this. I did walk a few sections of this and W5 and I tried to figure out a good spot for her to hang out with the dogs and provide support. I checked the RAWS station on Mule Mountain which is the closest to Whiskeytown and it recorded just about 4 inches of rain in the 24 hour period from 6 am Friday to 6 am Saturday. Over the same time, the Galena RAWS near home recorded 0.04”. So, my first race plans included the thought “dust will not be an issue today.” It was actually rather warm (low was 53) and not hot (high recorded 4 pm was 69. Nice race conditions.

It had pretty much stopped raining when we got there about 8:30 and following a brief riders meeting we got ready for the start which was a rolling start to spread the field (about 30) out before the single-track started. The course was probably 90% single track and some really great single track at that. I could probably best describe the course as an “M” profile with the first climb starting 100 yards out of the start/finish and going pretty much straight up. Ok, maybe not straight up, but there were a few short pitches that took just-out-of-the-saddle standing effort, trying to balance being forward so as not to flip over and being back enough to keep some traction on the rear tire. Speaking of tires, I thought of putting on a real big knobby mud traction tire when I saw the weather report, but being overscheduled and basic lazyness kept the same tires on and given the tackyness of the trails (a lot of it was dg) the older tires worked just great. There were two really challenging parts of that first climb, the first was a section with a bunch of tree roots crossing it. The first few laps I was able to ride it, later I was just slip-sliding all over that. Probably a combination of mud and lots of tires running over it. After that came what I would best describe as a gigantic rut that was just barely wide enough that you could ride through, but the sides of the rut were at your waist-level. Pretty cool, just a couple of challenging bumps to get out of it. Over the top of this started one of the truly great parts of this trail – a long very narrow single-track that traces the contours of this canyon. This is what I call “riding with consequences” – namely consequences if you screw up. Kind of like my infamous plunge off the trail on the American River Canyon during the GBG Birthday Ride ’08. Anyway, this trail was mostly smooth, which was good as my front tire seems to attract kicker-rocks. There was really no way you could have passed on this section. That part dropped you out through a small water-crossing to a short section of uphill fire road that then led to a steep, loose gravel fire road that dropped you back to the elevation of the start where you crossed a bridge over the river and started up the other side. The first part of this was pretty steep but was on a gravel road that was in great shape. That wasn’t too long and was one of the areas that we had scoped out the day before so I knew to push hard up that. The first three laps that’s what I did and passed some people there. The top of that climb led into another great single track that was mostly level with some small rollers that was pretty fast and reall fun. That wove in-and-out of the tress and it was long this section on my forth lap that I came across a deer just standing in the trail. She took off down the trail and then out into the forest. That was my only wildlife sighting although I head a bunch more.

That single track then dumps you across the park road and on to the next section that starts with some fun downhill single track that then turns into a series of stair step climbs and level parts. Through that, the trail starts a sequence of climbs-and-descents each of which seems to end in ever-increasing water crossings. Those were interesting because throughout the day as the rain tapered and eventually stopped completely the water crossings slowly decreased. Out of this section, you climb another fire road for a short section and then off onto another single track with some very challenging and steep (but thankfully short) climbs. The really fun part starts at the top of some of all this, there were some incredibly steep and turn-filled single track trails that had rocks, mud and all the fun you’d expect. This was crazy, but not all that dangerous as there were no steep drop offs anywhere. Still, there was no way I was leaving a bacon strip in my shorts since by butt was clenched so tight. Off that there was some nice fire road with a very broad but shallow water crossing that was really fun because you could coast across it and make a big wake in the process. Then a short and really challenging steep hill that I actually rode a couple of times before it got too chewed up, even the big root at the top. The there was this fun, steep-sided and almost level single track before a short climb up a fire road and then a fast drop back to the level of the start.

W5 found a great spot near the river and was there each time I came around. She was able to take the dogs out and do some hiking and even biking in between my laps.

The first lap I took off hard and fast, but off course there were too many people to really go for it and people fell in front of me and that presented some challenges but still once the trail opened up I could move as fast as I wanted and climb without worry. I got ahead of a bunch of people on the fire road climb and then later on a couple others. By the time I saw some people on the trail they said I was third at that point. That’s not to last. I did get hit by one or two good rain showers on that lap, but I was pretty much soaked anyway and didn’t mind. I didn’t feel cold and my theory was that since it was nearly 100% RH, there was essentially no evaporative cooling and it was more like riding in the tropics than the desert. At the end of that lap, I refilled the camelbak, got something to eat and headed back out.

Second lap was a bit slower especially on the later climbs, got some rain, but not too much. Third lap was even slower and I noticed that my heart rate just wasn’t getting up to the levels it was the first few laps. I tried eating more and took off on the fourth round. This one was even close in terms of how fast I could go and how high I could get my heart rate. I knew at the end of the lap that I needed to eat more and rest to let that digest. That’s the 20 min break in the middle of the time. I started back out on the fifth lap and it was the same thing, I just couldn’t get the effort up high enough. I was pushing like everything depended on it and it just wasn’t going anywhere. I tried deep breathing and wondered occasionally if I wasn’t digesting the food I was eating and the food was in my stomach preventing my diaphragm from being able to expand downward.

I got around that spent a few minutes deciding if I should go out again. Since I had just over 2 hours to the 8 hour cutoff I figured I could move through another lap and have some fun and ride some amazing single track around as the weather cleared even more to the point where the sun actually came out. I think I was also going so slow since I saw absolutely no one out on my last lap. I was just riding these great trails alone, but with no one to chase or no one chasing me, I think I slacked off. This is why I don’t time trial. 

We hung around for the awards ceremony since it was just so nice and it smelled good and was just a wonderful place they had it in this little amphitheatre with the river out behind.

Sunday morning we walked over Redding’s Sundial Bridge. Cool location:

We drove home coming through Lassen Park and even saw the first snow of the season. What a great weekend. And there was eventually bacon in Sunday morning’s breakfast. 

Media Section:

Here’s the Heartrate file. The top plot is my heart rate, the second is the altitude. You can see how much faster I was climbing at the beginning. I’m lazy, what can I say. 

Video:

Tags: Add new tag, Northern CA Race

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 6:05 am and is filed under bike races. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.