Deuces Wild Xterra Race Report

I just read Bill's account of his Olympic race. It seems a lot of people had trouble with the cold lake. Show Low is about at the same altitude and has more or less the same climate as Los Alamos and has a lake, so you can imagine how chilly it must have been only one week after the Memorial Day Southwestern snowstorm. It was chilly...in the 50's.

Mike Hoog and I drove to Show Low together...he's a nut. He also had trouble with the cold water. While he was doing the Deuceman long course, I got out on my mt bike and checked out the course and then went for a swim. Water seemed fine after a hot bike ride, but was different in the chill of the morning.

For once this year, I felt pretty good on race morning. I started right up front and had a great swim. Once on the bike, I realized that I had never swam then mountain biked. It was weird and I was a little off-kilter, but eventually got my wits about me right about the time we had a fast harrowing decent down a rutted jeep road. Oh, I had the slowest T-1 too. I didn't quite have the whole routine down for going from a swim to a mountain bike ride...I'll have to work on that.

The mountain bike went pretty well. I got a sore back from not having raced on a mt bike in years, and on a bike I'd barely ever ridden. It is a Paul Graham reject...we purchased it for Dina, but it's the lightest mtb we have, so I ripped it off since she ain't ridin' mt bikes much these days =)

At one point, I had caught up to about 3rd, 4th and 5th and we were all riding together, them on their very light carbon full-suspension bikes, me on Paul Graham's 1998 Stumpjumper hardtail reject. I climbed well on it, but the steepest technical decents were tough to stay with those guys. I scared myself quite a bit, but eventually moved into 3rd anyway and stuck it out. The 4th place guy drafted me on the long dirt road sections, but this wasn't like a normal triathlon anyway.

I got into T-2 and had another long transition, as I was pretty sure the Xterra run was going to be weird and I would need socks. My socks were already soaked and very muddy from the mt bike ride, but I just had to deal with them like that. My feet slipped and sloshed in my old pair of racing flats (which didn't provide much support on a pretty tough trail run, fyi). I soon found myself chasing down the guy who passed me in T-2 and had 2nd place overall in my sights as well. That was cool.

The weird thing is, it's not like a road run. They take you through boulder fields, up really steep stuff that you need both hands and feet and just crazy stuff like that. I tried to run faster, but the obstacles always threw me a little. I eventually did catch 2nd place before the halfway point, but it seemed to take longer than I thought it would.

The final weird obstacle was a channel of the lake. We had to cross the channel, which got deep and I ended up swimming half of it...in my running stuff. That was funny. My feet really slipped and sloshed around in my shoes after that.

I was quite ready to be finished right after that, but it was just a little bit further than I wanted it to be to the finish. My legs cramped going up the final hillside railroad tie stairs to the only bit of pavement leading to the finish. But, I had 2nd place pretty well wrapped up and was jazzed as I could be.

Overall, I would say that this was a very fun experience. People say that this course is a bit above average for difficulty for many of these Xterra races, so if that's the case, I wouldn't hesitate to try another one. It wasn't nearly as hard as I had expected, but enough that I was psyched at having completed it and gotten a good placing in the process. The Xterra awards are weird with all sorts of weird activities and give-aways. They say it's part of the Xterra "planet culture," or whatever. It was strange, but I'll definitely do another one someday and I recommend it for everyone.