Stump Farm 12

It's been a great year for trail riding so far. A winter backed off pretty quickly and spring showers have been merciful to the trails so everything opened early. A few romps at the kettles, new mileage at Cam-Rock and BALLS and I feel like I have more miles on my legs than I normally would by mid summer (or all summer some years). Craigslist tossed a well used but zippy new race bike.

I loaded up the car on Friday night during a thunderstorm and fell asleep wondering if the race would happen, or if I would be able to muster up the will to go. According to the race web site they said the trail handles wet so a few extra layers to manage cold and soggy and I was headed to Green Bay.

Riding faster is my thing this year so I opted for the 6 hour instead of 12 and after Saturday and decided to just go out hard and run myself into the ground, not something advisable for 12 hours but manageable for 6. Everything went as well as could be expected. The 12 hour racers squished out the water from the trail leaving it nice and buff, thank you. My tummy was on edge for a lot of the race, but everything stayed down but it was tough to keep enough anti cramp juice flowing and my right leg teased me with a cramp for the entire second half, it never made good on it's threats though.

There wasn't a big green clock, and I lost my watch recently so when I finally asked what time it was it took me some time to do the mental math to figure out how many laps I had left, or how many I had done. In the end it was 8 laps and good enough for 4th which is far better than I expected.

Met some guys from Team Segal during the race and we yo yoed for a while. Afterwards the Segal guys revealed their secret, sponsorship from PBR and tossed a coozied can my way.