Breck B-32 Race Report

I guess since I am riding and racing and adventuring now and again I should probably start writing again. What better way to start than with the one race I planned on doing this year, the Breckenridge B-32 race. Last weekend I did the 6 hour race at Levis-Trow and struggled with breathing and heart rate but the legs felt good. Wasn't sure what to expect at 9000 feet (starting elevation) but thought I'd give it a shot.

We got to Breck on Saturday morning after spending the past two nights (and one day) in the front range. Registered and chilled out. The race was a mass start heading out of Breck into the back and high country. I got dropped (as did all but 4 riders) on the neutral roll-out despite starting out front and entered the first singletrack in the top half or so. Not too bad. I faded a touch getting used to the many miles of uphill singletrack (it wasn't until after mile 6 that I actually coasted for the first time.) But once I got warmed up and ready I really started to move on up, passing quite a few people. Once we hit the downhill singletrack I was passing people left and right and even more so when we hit the double track decent. We had two long double track decents and I was just getting into race mode (worrying about my result) when *poof* flat tire. What a bummer. I changed the flat ok but it blew out again right away. Race over.

Or was it? I walked for a mile and a half down the dirt road trying to hitchhike back to town but no luck. I did have one more tube in my camelback but no way to inflate it. I finally walked all the way to the Aid station but they had no pump either. Finally I see a trailhead down the road and walked down there. Some hippy had a mini pump and it took us a good 10 minutes to figure out how to work it. Once we did I got it up to about 30PSI. Instead of riding it back into Breck I decided after an hour I might as well ride the race course out, so much for quitting! Getting back in the race started with a 2500ft climb. Brutal. But I must've climbed it ok (I passed two on the way up) because on the decent on the Colorado Trail I passed at least 15 people! For the rest of the race I would pass about a person every 3 minutes. At mile 30 I was excited to be done, an hour after I told Jess I probably would be. And then the road turned. Up. Steep and long. 900ft of vertical when I thought we were done with that. The 32 mile race turned well over 35 miles. But finally I entered the switchbacks of Carter Park and before I knew it I was eating watermelon and then checking into the condo. Before we left it showed I was 8th place out of 13 people in my age. Not too bad. I think I would've been in the top 5 for sure but no way would I have made the podium. I felt pretty good despite it all even though the result wasn't there. I guess that's it for my racing season (you never know though).

Our friends got into town afterwards so Empire Burger was the recovery ticket! Thanks for reading!

Cache Money!

While blogging in the conventional sense isn’t of interest to me (Hi my name is Mark and last night I walked my dog and watched TV) I still think that I want the people of the world to know about the fun things I do. Which is why I made my kind of dormant food blog. And which is why the show must go on for the Waffle House Chronicles as my do all site. I just got back from a cruise and if you want to see tons of cruise photos, look me up on Facebook. I’ve posted a couple hundred photos I am sure. So for now this blog will chronicle my adventures of travel, geocaching and whatever else I do that seems noteworthy beyond the day to day events.

This past weekend we were really looking forward to hitting some caches. And then overnight on Friday night we got 6” of fresh powder. Which I thought would stop us…but I was wrong as Jess was dedicated big-time. The first cache was on the Ice Age trail and no one had been out there yet so we blazed our own path!
Perfect trail though and the dogs loved it!

The second cache was a quick park and grab in Verona and the third was in a nice wooded park which required more trailblazing and Jess used some good cache instincts.


After that we looked for an elusive cache near our house that we still couldn’t find. Oh well, 3 out of 4 isn’t bad.

Sunday was cold and we still had lots of snow. But we went out nonetheless. We had a large lists of caches to get so it was going to be quite the adventure. We started near the Circuit City/Taco Bell area on the west side and got two caches, one of which was supposed to be pretty tricky. After hitting some Taco Bell for lunch we hit a puzzle cache in a cemetery. We quickly figured out the puzzle thanks to the new geocaching application on the IPhone as the puzzle was stuck on a sheet of paper in our printer and we forgot to bring it and then scored the cache!
We went from there to another cache near a Madison eatery which was only hard because of the snow and because of the people around. Cache 5 was a multicache where you find a cache and it gives you directions to the next cache until you get to the final, this one was easy but all that programming of the GPS made our hands cold. We then headed towards Middleton to get some caches out that way. Cache 6 was simple walk down a path and find it in a big tree. #7 rocked though, we had to climb onto rocks under a steep bridge and then did for it. It took us a while to find so it felt like a nice score. #8 was another park and grab although we had to walk maybe ¼ of a mile which is a bummer because there is a bike path I’ve never been on that would’ve got us all of these last 3. Cache 9 was a small magnetic cache in Middleton. That was the end of our successes, 9 in a row. #10 was a puzzle cache but the coordinates were messed up and we never did find it (as things were more than weird.) I am almost certain I know where to look now. So we went out towards the Middleton Airport and failed on the next two as well. One hasn’t been found in months and there was a lot of ice build up so we will have to wait until spring. The other was a very similar situation and by that point we were cold, wet, discouraged, hungry and running behind time so we bailed quick and headed home. All and all 12 caches are nice, 75% completion rate is a bit of a bummer though but what can you do? We were 5 for 5 earlier this week so all is good! Looking forward to the big Iowa Cachefest this weekend, hoping to net at minimum 50. February will be our best caching month ever with 3 states, 2 islands within a US Territory (US Virgin Islands) and 2 foreign countries.