Even though the first 70 km was not so bad, there was plenty of bad stuff to go. This shot is of one typical part  of the 1+ hour climbs that took us from bottom to top.I’m sure the guys who finished several hours ahead of me rode the whole thing, but I was on and off the bike quite a bit. My stomach was still hurting from the night before and I was trying to eat and drink as much as I could, but it’s hard to keep up in an event like this. Just try to eat 5000 calories in a day, but make it all gels, pb&j, bananas and oranges. Not that easy is it?

The gnarlier sections of uphill I didn’t even stop to photograph. My arms and legs were so tired I just wanted to get it over with. If you want to see those sections, check out this video from the race director. We went up and down those trails, giving the entire body a workout trying to maneuver the bicycle around all the obstacles. Ordinarily, I’d have thought that the ride wasn’t actually that bad, as a one day event. But as the final leg of this three day suffer fest, it was brutal.