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Pre-Race I had been planning to race since I found the grand depart was coming back this year. I did a 3 day trip last October on the route, so I was familiar with the route. Cedar had done the route several times before, and said a few weeks before that 40 hours would be a quick but attainable goal for me to shoot for. Neil Beltchenko set the FKT at 37:11 in 2018, so naturally I wanted to go for it. Just a 3 hour difference, right?  The closer we got to the start, the worse the weather looked. Chad, an absolute monster on the bike if you don't know him, was gung ho about racing which had me nervous because he'd go solo from the gun to never be seen again. Naturally, though, the rain scared him away. The day before the race I was kind of worried about tearing up another drivetrain after the Fried Clay mud massacre. Chad suggested going single speed, and the rest of the group agreed. I'm not sure what made me think that was a good idea as my longest ride on single speed was ...

Race Stats: 400 miles 17,400 ft of climbing 32.5 hrs 4th place The race had organized a neutral rollout with police escort guiding us for the first 8 miles. That was super cool, and definitely made the highway riding less sketchy. As soon as it ended, and there was immediately attacks going off. Everyone hit their aero bars, and the front group got smaller and smaller. 15 miles from the start was the infamous Old Onalaska/Groveton Road. It has a reputation for being miserably sandy in the best of conditions, and after the massive storms overnight, it was a nightmare. The sand made progress slow and power higher than I would’ve liked. As soon as we hit that section, a guy flew out of nowhere and was out of sight quicker than I thought possible. I figured we’d never see him again, but I learned after the race that he was riding fixie (maybe SS and someone was mistaken) and slowed way down around mile 140.  After an hour or so of sandy riding, we were treated with pretty normal riding...

A couple weeks after TNGA Eric, who had interviewed me after the race, invited me to do the Cohutta Cat route credit card touring style. I had wanted to do it for a while now and was free that weekend, so I was in! A couple weeks before the start, Binary shipped me an incredible almost complete build kit with just a few parts needed from my Scott. Too excited to make the wise decision to ride the bike I was used to, I brought both bikes to the shop on Monday, planning to leave for the start Thursday afternoon. I didn’t get it back until after work on Wednesday, and it poured all day, so I got it set up as best as I could without riding it. On Thursday I had a few minutes to pedal around the neighborhood before packing. Initial impressions were that hardtails were a lot harder than I remembered, but it was tons of fun and very smooth.  I drove up to Chatsworth that evening where I slept in my mom’s car in the Ingles parking lot. Some fine accommodations. I realized when I got there ...

  The race started and there was almost immediately a group of 6 or so. We were definitely going out too hard, but I got to meet the legend Abe Kaufman which made it worth it. Going into Darnell Creek there were just 3 of us, and we all came out at different times. I rode the next 10 miles solo until I stopped to eat and was caught by Miguel from Boulder and Ben from Greenville. We all stayed as a group pretty much the whole day. Ben broke his chain coming into Moccasin Creek, and me and Miguel slowly rolled thinking he would catch up. He didn’t, so we resumed normal pace going up Wildcat. I wasn’t feeling too great after a hard initial push, but we kept pushing until Tray where we stopped for water at the church at the bottom. It started raining almost as soon as we started the climb, and was pretty heavy a few times going up. Tray wasn’t as bad as I remembered it last year, which was nice, but still absolutely brutal. The first jeep road descent was pretty rowdy especially since ...