My day started at about 3AM when I woke up in Huntsville on my brother's couch; heated up some water for oatmeal, threw stuff in the truck, and hit the road. About 30 minutes on the road my stomach is starting to feel like it is having some "issues" which came and went until I got to Dalton. I get checked in and take forever trying to decide what I'm going to wear--knee warmers or tights, l/s or s/s base layer, jacket or vest, etc. much like a teenage girl. Finally get shuttled off to the start and get in on the 3rd or 4th wave I believe, which is good because I'm going to need as much daylight as possible! Err wait--there wasn't any daylight--just fog and overcast cloudy sky and more fog and a little rain thrown in there at random intervals.
Right away I realized the trail was going to be horri-bad, epic mud and general suck. I'm probably not really strong enough to push the 34x20 I had even in optimal conditions but the massive rutting and suck areas really owned me and I was regretting being too lazy in the weeks leading up to the Snake to change out my gearing. I managed to keep the stomach under control pretty well for the first half but it would rumble to the surface every time a sharp pitch came a long that required a burst of power (so basically all the time). At some point during the first half of the course a large train of us passed two guys standing beside a dirt bike who I asked if I could borrow their engine--one of them burst out laughing the other one just kind of blankly stared at me as if he were trying to work out how to affix the engine in his dirt bike to my single speed mountain bike. Good times. Aside from the massive amount of climbing compared to what I am used to down here in South Alabama the first half of the course was really a sweet piece of trail and the down hill sections were a blast which had me thinking such ludicrous thoughts as--"wow this isn't really that bad..of course the end is supposed to be worse".
The 10 miles or so after the half-way point was pretty fun as well, aside from another ridiculous climb out of the aid stop. At some point we opened up onto a bit more of double track that was so muddied up when you had a few bikes rolling through together it sounded like a greased up skillet frying some bacon. Coincidentally had I carried some bacon strips with me I probably could have fried them on my brake rotors after some of the brutal downhills that littered the course. It was also during the second half of the course I think I figured out why Alabama has a laughable amount of climbing and almost no rocks or technical trail--it all ended up in North Georgia. The last six miles or so was a total mind game for me that involved a whole lot of hiking and lots of four letter words in my mind as really that is the only possible way to describe the last five or six miles of the course. You could say it was "rocky" or "technical" or something like that but really that just doesn't sufficiently convey the horribleness. Let's just say hearing the guy I could barely see 60 yards in front of me (fog!) yell "Gravel!" was probably the single greatest utterance a human could produce at the time.
I was so happy to be on road rather than
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Listening to: Lynyrd Skynyrd - Free Bird
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