We had a total of 101.9 miles and 4,600 feet of climbing.

It was a grueling pace, especially with the climbing we had to do.

Here are our stats for the four legs.

We averaged 19.0 mph rolling with a total time of 5:34:59 and a rolling time of about 5:23, so we only stopped for 12 minutes total.  My average heart rate was 150, with a maximum of 164.

This chart shows the climb. Since it is plotted against time instead of distance, the elevation profile should look linear if I am climbing at a constant number of feet per minute. Click to enlarge.

I did much better than I expected. Usually Doug R. climbs faster than I do but I was able to beat both him, Joe F. up the hill. Joseph M. was slightly faster than I was but he was racing CAT 3.

On the way back on Oak Glen I was down in the aero bars when I suddenly came up to a big and deep pot hole in the middle of the road. There was no time to avoid it show I hit it directly. I looked down at my tires and didn’t see any blow out but figured that I would get a leak because I had hit it so hard. Sure enough within a minute my front tire was flat so I had to stop and do a quick change. That took me at least 5 minutes, but would have been longer if I had not had a CO2 inflater with me.

I ended up with a time of 0:53:39.35, and with the 5:30 handicap for CAT 4, that gave me time of 48:09:35. Jim W came in 10th place at 0:45:51.76, or with a handicapped time of 0:40:21.76, so he did much better than me, even accounting for time to change the tube. I was near the bottom with my time, but assuming 5 minutes for the flat, I still would have been in the bottom half. I am not very good at time trials. Joseph had a strong 9th place finish.

Here is a picture of Jim after the race with his carbon wheels.  With those wheels, his bike is super light.

We finished the Furnace Creek 508 in 33 hours and 25 minutes. Franz
thought it was the toughest thing he ever did. Paul, a prior solo
finisher, commented that even the two man relay is tougher than he
thought it would be.

Looks like we came in second place in our division. We we close to
first place but could not quite catch that team, but they knew we were
chasing them.

We have lots of photos and video we we post soon. We put up what we
could in near real time. We had a great crew with Russ and Sheila and can not thank them enough.

The 2007 Furnace Creek 508, “the toughest 48 hours in sport” and the world’s biggest and most prestigious ultracycling race, is coming up on October 6-8. There’s a record field size of 223 racers. Here are the stats:

95 solo racers (12 women and 83 men, including one tandem, two fixed gear, and two recumbents)

27 2x teams = 56 2x racers (1 mixed two tandem team, 3 men’s recumbent teams, 1 mixed recumbent team, 7 mixed teams, and 15 men’s teams)

17 4x teams = 72 4x racers (1 mixed tandem team, 6 mixed teams, and 10 men’s teams)

Total of 223 competitors: 127 rookies and 97 veterans; 41 women and 182 men

Participants by Country: Austria-2, Belgium-1, Brazil-1, Canada-5, Denmark-3, Finland-1, France-3, Italy-1, Mexico-1, Sweden-2, UK-2, and USA-202.

Participants by US State: AZ-5, CA-151, CO-5, CT-1, FL-1, ID-1, IL-2, KS-1, MA-2, MN-1, NC-2, NV-5, NY-4, OH-3, OR-6, PA-2, SD-1, TX-3, UT-2, VT-1, WA-9, WI-3, and WY-2.

Online roster:
http://www.the508.com/2007web/2007roster.html Note: the todem for our team is “Prarie Dog”

We had ridden about 15 miles from Orem to get to the start, a nice warm up. Hobble Creek is not very steep so it is not very suited to by ability where I do better climbing the steeper hills.

I took my heart rate up quickly to above 150 and it was not long before the heart rate went above 160, sometimes above 170. I kept in the red zone for the entire climb as shown by this graph.

My final time was around 36:31, with an average speed of 17.6 mph. That put me in 6th place out of the 24 riders.  The did not have any age grouping but best I can tell all five riders who did it faster than me were much younger.  My average heart rate was 166 with a maximum of 175. My cadence 84 so I am getting better at spinning. I did pass four riders on the course. Except for the three speedsters I passed everyone who started 7 minutes before I did. Number 11 didn’t seem that I passed in the last mile so he jumped out and passed me. I let him have a few seconds of glory but figured that anyone how had ridden 7 minutes slower than me could not hold the pace for long so near the end, I went by and dropped him. The top finisher was 33:10.