Today is Monday August 25 2025 and last Saturday i raced 78 miles over the rolling hills around Lincoln, Nebraska.
Gravel worlds!
The race in a nutshell...
- Hours 0-2 = fast.
- Hours 2-4 = very slow, paying the price for starting too fast.
- Hours 4-6 = recovered a bit, picked up the pace a little, finished the race in 6 hours and 3 minutes with a genuine smile on my face.
5:00 am - alarm, coffee, pb&j, hard boiled eggs, banana, Gatorade, coffee.
6:05 am - pedal from hotel to race start, it's a 45 minute ride at a leisurely pace. The weather is perfect right now! Riding thru Lincoln Nebraska at 6 am on a quiet Saturday morning in perfect weather is pretty awesome.
6:35 am - wow this sunrise is amazing, take lots of pictures, really enjoying this warm up ride.
6:51 am - arrive at start line, find a convenient gap in the fencing and line up in the top 25%, the guy on the mic says "9 minutes to go".
7:00 am - go!
8:00 am - i wanted to go fast for the first hour and i've done that. Current average speed is over 16 mph and i still feel good.
9:00 am - i started too fast and now everyone is passing me, plus the fiddling i did to my saddle position in the previous few days is reeking havoc on my legs because i'm getting cramps in places i never cramp. At least i can no longer keep up with the guy blasting awful music from his phone.
10:00 am - Still getting passed by everyone, really struggling, the challenge now is how to stay positive. Stop and adjust the saddle.
11:00 am - That fully stocked rest area was a life saver. filled an entire bottle with pickle juice and drank it in about 8 minutes. So good. Feeling more optimistic. All these minimally maintained road sections are pretty sweet, fast dirt, rutted dirt, sketchy dirt, singletrack like dirt, its a nice change of pace from the seemingly endless gravel.
12:00 pm - The last hour has been pretty good, except for some slight right knee pain. 1 hour to go. Keegen Swenson and Matt Beers just passed me. Drank another full bottle of pickle juice.
1:00 pm - There is the finish line, thank fu*cking god!
So that's it. i didn't do as well as i wanted but that's life. i wanted to do a hard first hour and i did that but it turns out i went too hard. live and learn. The saddle snafu is pretty embarrassing. That's a dumb mistake on my part. On a positive not i went for a ride yesterday (Sunday) back in KC and i felt pretty good. So that's a good sign. I'm very excited to do the Little Sugar Mountain Bike race in Bentonville, AR in October.
Finally a big shout out to my wife and son who accompanied me on this Gravel Worlds Journey and were great helpers the entire time. The little man is 10 and soon enough he'll be older and trips like this wont hold the same magic as they do right now. i'm incredibly grateful that we got to do this as a family.
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