24 Hours of Adrenalin

Hey fellas, anyone wanna do this thing?

For the last year or two, your consistently out of shape, humble, and well, handsome narrator wanted to give one of these 24 Hour races a try. All the kids were doing it, it had the word 'adrenalin' in the title, and, well, you get to stay up late. Sounded fun to me. Well, this year, it actually came together. I figured we would do a corporate team, to keep pain levels and overall costs low, but Polish Pete, he was a daredevil (never did keep his hands in the Mixer) - he demanded a 5 person team. Ok. Fine with me. Let's get it on.

The Venue

I have to hand it to the 24 hour people, the event ran pretty smoothly, and I think a good time was had by all. I was particularly impressed with the detail paid to the porto-potties. Now by nature, porto-potties are never a pleasant experience, but these things were being pumped and cleaned seemingly non stop - leaving us with a strange synthetic cedar scent to perform our business among. A nice touch indeed.

As many of you know, the campsites were broken up into quiet, loud, small, whatever sites - naturally we decided to opt for a loud campsite. Not particularly a mistake, but there are 2 things that may have tainted the loud camping area experience:

1. Late Friday Night: Outside our tent the loudest conversation about "fish taco's in SoCal" took place around 1 am. It was a very odd thing to wake up to.
2. The Guy with the Mic: Don't get me wrong, he was a super nice guy, and not a bad MC at all - but he should be banned from doing any sort of impressions. I think at one point he doing some sort of Irish accent, and I will not even mention anything about the really bad renditions of Dave Chappelle and Napoleon Dynamite.

I took my GPS for a lap and this is the corresponding elevation profile - I should probably just start (and end) with this:

All in all though, apart from the climb, the course was a lot of fun. There was some fine singletrack, and the last few descents bringing you home were a lot of fun, not to mention really fast. Oh yeah, and there was that climb thing.

A map of the course can be seen here.

The Log Book

We thought it would be an interesting exercise to have each racer write down their thoughts after each lap. So we mustered up some paper and a pencil made it happen:

Page 1	Page 2	Page 3	Page 4
Page 5	Page 6	Page 7	Page 8

In Conclusion

Somehow we completed 18 laps, enough to give us second place in our 5 person team category. We were quite surprised and obviously happy with that. Too bad we were all too exhausted to actually stick around for the awards ceremony to claim our booty, recognition and lamentation from the women.

As painful as it became, getting virtually no sleep, and the 95 degree humid weather, we all had a great time. I for one would certainly do it again. Perhaps I would train a little more next time though...

1. Solo Riders: Holy Crap. Somewhere around 5am I was doing a lap and chatting with a solo rider on his 16th lap. He single handedly did more laps than our entire team at that point. Respect.
2. The Comradery: Especially at night, anytime someone came by me stopped trying to fend off a heart attack or whatever, 9 out of 10 people asked if everything was ok. I thought that was sweet of them. No one would stop for hugs though.
3. The 2 Dudes Hanging out in the dark, in the middle of the woods with a large bottle of Jim Beam: God bless them and their important work. I was pedaling up a a hill when I thought I noticed 2 dudes sitting about 30 feet off the trail in the dark. I shined my light towards them and was soon doing a shot of Jim Beam and receiving quite the pep talk. PBR also found them, where they proclaimed him a "Monster" (or was it "Animal"?) while pouring said firewater down his throat. I loved those guys. Consequently that lap was my fastest.
4. Holiday Farms for hosting the event.
5. Bikerag.com - They camped across from us, I met John and he is good peeps.

1. Where did the corn roast go? I really really wanted corn. Nice, indigestible, yummy, corn.

I didn't take many pictures, and certainly did not really take many quality ones. But if you wanted to see then anyways... 2005 24 Hours of Adrenalin - Dalton, MA