This past weekend was the 4th annual Powderhorn 24 race which starts about a 1/2 mile from my house! This was my 3rd year riding in the 24 hour event.  This year our group consisted of 2 teams of 4 and 2 solo riders all being based from the same house directly on the “official” course.  It was setting up to be a hot and humid weekend for a 24 hour bike ride.  It was a little chilly over night, but the humidity was a strong presence.

We setup the same plan as previous years.  Each rider would do 2-3 laps (10-15 miles) or ride about an hour before switching riders.  This would allow us to stay fairly fresh and would provide a nice chunk of “off” time.  Unfortunately, one of our riders had to go home around 2 am due to sick kids.  He rode a few extra laps before heading out, but this hurt a little later in the day – can’t blame him though!

Our volunteer time was 4am – 7am at Checkpoint #1 where we would punch rider manifests. This meant that none of us would really get a break during this chunk of time.  It was a fun way to volunteer as you get to see a lot of the riders and actually the 4am shift isn’t too busy as a lot of solo riders and even teams are taking a break at that point. I met some interesting people, like a guy who was trying to help but could barely stand up and wasn’t super effective at punching manifests.

They had bonus laps again this year.  One of mine was stopping at a retirement village and having a conversation with one of the residents. The building was cold, which felt nice.  I talked with a woman (can’t remember her name) who was nice at first and then started talking badly about her family, so I found a graceful time and way to exit.  Eric, was in line ahead of me and ended up talking for quite a while with his guy!  Another stop we played ping-pong – they did a horrible job at scoring and following rules.  One stop was almost impossible to find, I found it, and then they still didn’t give me credit for doing it.

One cool thing they did this year was to actually track each rider, instead of just the team.  So we are able to get some great data.  This helped verify some of my data about number of laps ridden, etc.  The data isn’t 100% accurate as we swapped riders out on the course, while most did it right after the checkpoint, but it should be pretty dang close.

One quibble with the results… we beat the other team at our house by 1 lap ridden, but lost by 1 lap since PH24 missed our check-in for 2 bonus laps.  Our riders do both of them – I did the one and the other was Crossfit and I remember talking to our rider about it afterwards.  The other team knew they missed one and that was all they missed.  This means that we both lost out on the extra 5 points which would have put both of us in the top 10!  Oh well.   This year we did beat all the solo riders!! For the last 2 years that wasn’t the case.  4 solo riders beat or tied us overall (with bonus) due to the bonus laps!  Another quibble with the overall race was the fact that the first lap was an uncounted, “community” lap which meant that it was super slow.  It also wasn’t a true community lap as by the end it was quite spread out.  My thought is that if you want to do a community lap it should start at 6 for those who want to do it.  Keep the mandatory meeting at 6:40 and roll out at 7pm for official laps.  Our first rider didn’t finish his first lap until 7:45 and came through on his next one 17 minutes later.  So a lot of time was wasted – plus no one knew that this was going to happen beforehand.

A major frustration for me this year was that my phone didn’t work for all my rides.  The first time I thought it was a fluke, so didn’t change anything.  After the second time I thought it was a bug in Strava, so I downloaded Map My Ride.  I could hear it talking to me for awhile, but at the end of the ride it had quit too.  Finally, I decided to put my phone in a ziploc to see if my sweat was impacting it.  Sure enough, it worked.  I was disappointed that such an easy fix could have helped early on.  It was extra frustrating as my bike computer wasn’t syncing (it is wireless).  I think it is probably just a battery issue, but need to do something about it!

Here is the data that I was able to collect:

http://www.mapmyride.com/workout/702390271

Here is the data collected by the organizers about our team.

Team World Vision

Riders

Laps

Bonuses