Vermont Overland Grand Prix

Executive Summary

A 51-mile gravel road race that uses five sections of Vermont's "Ancient Roads."  Based on my drive before and after, I'm sure it was achingly scenic, but I only looked at the road ahead of me. Flatted near the finish and lost 35 places, to finish  101st in 3:39:59. The winner took only 2:42:47. 

The Race

Maybe I'm getting blase about these gravel-road races.

The Vermont Overland Grand Prix was epic. The roads, ancient, hard-packed dirt, or modern paved, were all just tremendous. The event vibe was the best of any race I've been to in years.  But no one thing stands out as being mind-searingly memorable. Maybe that's good--no near-death experiences, no blinding rainstorms, no black depression of wanting to drop out and ride back to the car. Yeah, I'll go with that!

Anyway, the first edition of the Vermont Overland Grand Prix ran over a 51-mile single loop, with five (?) sections of Vermont's "Ancient Roads."  Through a quirk in Vermont law, any public right-of-way that ever existed remains in the public until the town formally turns it back to property owners. Some of these roads, known only to the locals, date back to the 18th century. And they are not roads that you're taking your Subaru Forester down, by any stretch of the imagination. 

Amusingly, it turned out I knew the promoter, Peter Vollers, from my Cornell Cycling team days, twenty five years ago. 

Sandra and I drove up from Falls Church the day before, and stayed at a lodge in Killington, about 35 minutes from the start. She indulged my pre-race parking/navigating paranoia, and we pulled into the race parking lot more than two hours before the 9 AM start. 

For a first year event, the more than 300+ entries made for an impressive start line. Unlike Hilly Billy Roubaix and Iron Cross, almost no one was on a mountain bike. The race shut down the main street of Woodstock Vt.  for the entire day. After the national anthem we rolled out, and a mile later we left the pavement behind on a wide, hard-packed dirt road littered with wheel-eating potholes. I watched several guys endo into the ditch almost immediately. Ouch. As soon as the gradient turned up I found myself drifting backwards out of the front group. I may have made a mistake in not going harder early, but it wasn't like others were  impeding my progress, either. Five miles into the race we hit the first ancient road, and I was off the bike pushing. I was overgeared (34x28), and the recent rain made the rocks pretty slick. On the descent, despite the warning signs, a guy a mountain bike nearly creamed me, as I was held up briefly by even slower guys ahead of me. 

The next 40 miles were a blur--pass guys on the road downhills, and then lose ground on the ancient roads. As usual, my back got progressively worse. In the last hour I found my rhythm, and actually started to pass riders until I flatted in a stream crossing with about six miles left. The entire bike was coated with black smelly grit-encrusted mud, and I sprayed down the tire with Gu from my waterbottle to try to clean it. What a  mess. I was running latex tubes with Stans, left over from Hilly Billy Roubaix, but obviously I didn't have enough Stans, since the leak didn't seal. After the repair I was completely paranoid about flatting again.

Minutes later we descended through a hay field, onto the pavement, crossed a covered bridge, and then minutes later i was sprinting though downtown Woodstock. One last steep uphill and I was across the line. My flat cost me 12 minutes and forty places, only good enough for 101st place. I've flatted way too many times in these races recently.

Pissed off just after repairing the flat. The photo shows a rather tame section of an ancient road. Photo credit Ryan Dunn: http://www.rwdunn.com/

Heart rate and speed. The big notch at 190 minutes is the flat tire change.  Averaged about 165bpm 

Enjoying a recovery beverage brewed by the race sponsor at a restaurant on the finishing straightaway.

Equipment

• Continental cyclocross speed tires @ 65psi with Vittoria latex tubes and 1/2 a bottle of 2-month-old Stans. Less than ten miles of the course was paved, and even on the smooth hardpacked roads, the tires were not a liability. 
• 34x28 was not low enough. Some of the "ancient roads" would have been ridable with lower gearing.

Links

• The event page
• 2014 Results
• My performance on Strava  
• More photographs from Ryan Dunn, one of the moto escorts
• Information on Vermont's "Ancient Roads:" http://www.vtroads.com/index.htm and an article in Yankee magazine that explains some of the interesting legal issues about them

2013 Iron Cross Recap

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

OK, I've never read Proust, but he aptly describes the Iron Cross experience.

I've raced Iron Cross (billed as North America's first ultracross race) in 2008, 2012, and this year. The passage of a year dulls the pain, and leaves only the memories of the epic race.  Two of three times I have been reduced to thoughts of just lying down off the track and giving up. Somehow that experience doesn't keep me from coming back.

The course is mostly gravel fire roads with two (2-3) km long sections of mountain-bike single track. And of course, the signature section of the course is the Wigwam Runup: a 100-m-high goat path beneath a high-voltage power line. My GPS said that the gradient averaged 48%. New  this year was the inclusion of about 10 km of rocky, rutted ATV trail at the end, and the deletion of a long segment of single track that formerly came at the end..

Race Summary

Unlike 2012, I was pretty stoked about the event. Conditions were perfect: shorts, Paceline embro , long gloves and arm warmers. 

I don't like to criticize the course, (too much) but the rollout proceeded immediately into a 2m-wide shale-strewn path. I'm sure that within the first 5km, the leaders were already five minutes ahead.  A longer open section to shake things out would have been fairer. 

The modified course meant that we hit the first single-track section (Lippincote) only about 20km in to the 110-km race. It felt shorter to me this year, and seemed to beat me up less. After a short, fast descent on US30, we hit the base of Wigwam. Like every year, it was one long line of guys, bikes on the shoulders, rear wheel of the guy in front of you threatening to hit you in the face. Step. Plant the toe spikes. Step. Plant. Repeat. And once again using those running muscles just torched my legs. 

From the top of Wigwam the distance just flew by, and suddenly I was back at the start/finish and nearly halfway through the race. I pitted for two minutes at the back of Rob's van to refill my camelback and ditch my vest, gloves, and armwarmers. More flowing, fast, gravel downhill followed. 

I caught Tom Snyder, after buzzing his tire by accident, at the start of the Hogshead Climb. "Hey, Tom." "What are you doing here?!" and then back to grinding. 

I had been a little crampy up to that point, despite eating a Gu every 50 minutes and seemingly having the spigot of my camelback in my mouth the entire way. But I came completely unglued with 20km to go. It was all going well, until almost immediately it was not going well at all. I was forced to ride the (anemic) brakes on one downhill, as I was so bleary that I feared that I would not be able to ride out of a bad situation. I started counting the kilometers to the finish, which is never a good sign.  I rode the next uphill section under reduced power for fear of cramping. My lower back was on fire, and my arms hurt from the combined braking and pounding. 

The finish line was going to involve quite a bit of vertical, and I started praying it was going to be the road climb that we descended at the start. Every downhill seemed to be followed by another little wall of an uphill.Would that final climb never come?  Instead of the road, the finish climb was an ATV trail. I realized that if the finish didn't come at 110 km, I might just get off the bike and lie down.  Finally I could see the inflatable Red Bull finishing arch through the trees, but the climb was too steep. Only 150 m from the end, and I was pushing the bike.  I remounted with 50 m to go, and rolled through.  At least 10 guys passed me in the final 3 km.

Setup

I rode the Fuji with what should have been Conti Cyclocross Speed 35mm tires. Unfortunately, while setting up the bike on Saturday I saw that the sidewall on one was slashed,  probably from my second flat at Hilly Billy Roubaix this year. I replaced it with a Panaracer 35mm that I had used in '12. It probably didn't make too much difference. The Fuji has a 46x34 with and 11x28 in the rear. That setup did accomplish some of my course recommendations from 2012, but did not address the one in all caps: NEED.MORE.BRAKES. The TRP cantilevers are just not sufficient for this course.

I had gone back and forth about riding my mountain bike this year, but the course change that eliminated the long single-track section, which convinced me that the road sections would be more efficient on a 'cross bike.  The downhill sections would have been slightly faster, and the lower gearing would have been an advantage with the mountain bike.

The Panache shorts from the '13 NCVC kit are the nicest club shorts I've ever worn. Not quite Assos, but close.

Comparison with 2012

I was faster on every segment I examined. 

2012  2013 Segment
11:39   09:28   Lippincote
07:43   06:49   Wigwam runup
09:02   08:50   Thompson Hollow Descent
14:55   13:46   "Iron Pavement"
17:44   16:15   Hogshead climb

Overall
2008: 100 km in 5:14:59 @1:17:39 : 44th/93 starters in the 40+
2012: 100 km in 5:03:17 @1:14:23 : 27th/79 starters in the 40+
2013: 109 km in 5:24:10 @1:12:37 : 38th/94 starters in the 40+ (going backwards...)

Links

• Iron Cross main page: http://ironcrossrace.com/
• 2013 Results
• Iron Cross 2012 Recap https://www.facebook.com/notes/william-luecke/iron-cross-2012-recap/10152155469880099
• Link to 2013 Strava data

Notes

• Drove up in Rob Campbell's van with Tom Snyder. Left from the Exit 11 park and ride. Took just  about 1.5 hours to get to the parking area. Plenty of time.
• My heart rate trace (no power data) was pretty consistent after the first 20 minutes: 158 bpm average. 

Monstercross 2013 Report

Impression and Analysis

Fun race, and totally worth doing. 

I started in the 2nd wave, about 1.5 minutes behind an unknown group that I suppose comprised the real podium contenders. Probably should have bulled my way up there. It took about 5 minutes to get my heart-rate up to TT pace, or actually a little above, but I had to pick through a lot of riders, and it was reasonably dangerous to pass on the paved sections. Even during the first lap I was worried that I had gone out too hard, which might be true. I did spend most of the race sweeping up riders and riding through them; it was only at the very end that I lost a couple places. In the middle of the second long lap I got into a group with two cross bikes, a single-speed mountain bike and a couple mountain bikes. I think that it actually slowed me down, but I couldn't go hard enough to ride away at that point, but when I stopped pulling, the pace would drop back down. In the end, I got dropped on the final steep uphill section away from the last stream crossing, so maybe I was going too hard after all. 

The Garmin trace   

confirmed what I could feel in the race. I started to come off the gas on the second lap, about 110 minutes into the race. My heartrate dropped from low 170s to high 160s. It would have been easier to follow wheels at that point. I was pretty bleary for the last 10km, and went to the back of the group when I realized that I was starting to ride beyond the event horizon.  The plot also shows that my cadence was really pretty exceptional (for me) for an off-road race. 

Social

I drove to the race with my good friend and former training partner, Tom Snyder. I probably went to 100 races with him from '92 until he quit racing in  2001. I hope this means that he's making a comeback, at least for ultracross races.

Notes

Tom says that on the first lap, a deer took out the guy directly in front of him. Scary. Link to an awesome video of the wreck

Conditions, Course, and Equipment

The course is two long laps and one short lap of fire roads and bridle paths totaling just under 50 miles  in Pocahantas State Park near Richmond, Virginia. No uphill lasts more than a couple minutes, and there are really no climbs of any significance. 

The course was definitely muddier than in 2012, though the weather was pretty similar: partly sunny, 40F in the morning, and low-50s by the end of the race. I imagined that the 2013 course was shorter, but Strava says that it was the same course both years. 

In 2012  I rode Panaracer T/serv 32s, which have an incised tread, and are basically high-end urban tires. They were treacherous on the twisty sandy sections, but they rolled well on the wide fire roads and the short paved sections. For 2013 I rode Continental Cyclocross Speed 35s at 60psi, based completely on this review. I felt confident in the twisty sections, and I don't think there was any penalty on the road sections.

 The Continental Cyclocross Speed (2013)

The Panaracer T/serv 32 (2012) 

Both years I rode the Fuji Cross Pro, instead of the Litespeed I used for Iron Cross. 

Results 

• 2013: 3:05:23  71/382 overall and  9/46 in 50+
• 2012: 3:17:33  58/336 overall and 12/50 in 40-49

So I was 12 minutes faster, but basically went backwards in the overall standings. Interestingly, my time would have put me 12th in the 20-39 and 9th in the 40-49 cross divisions. Guys apparently don't slow down as they age.

Links to results

• 2013 By Division
• 2012 By Division 

GPS trace of the race

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