Tjalling Ypma - 8/11/08

“You doofus!” was Korrie’s succinct judgment an hour before the race start, when I told her that I had just pre-ridden a lap of the bike course. She was quite right, of course, but how was I to know ? Going by the map and the course description it seemed like one lap of the course would be very similar to that at the Vashon Island Xterra: winding and tight singletrack, but not particularly physically or technically challenging, offering an easy 45-minute cruise just right for a pre-race warm-up. I was very wrong, as I discovered far too late into my pre-ride. It took a painful hour to do one lap, and my body was battered before the race even started, having bounced from rock to rock and root to root over 7.5 miles of the roughest singletrack I have ever raced. For Bellinghamsters familiar with the Galbraith trails, it was like Evil Twins done ten times in succession, with a couple of passages of Papa Bear thrown in and the whole affair liberally sprinkled with large rocks, only worse. A pre-ride was an excellent idea, just not on race morning. I was a wiser but weary man by the time I donned my wetsuit and wandered over to the swim start.

The swim was to take us through two right-hand turns at orange buoys, following which we were to swim to an island, run across it, and then swim directly back to the start point. To make life a little more interesting there was a low grey mist cutting visibility and there were large masses of lily pads on the water, with a particularly big dense patch directly between the island and our finish point. When you are swimming, with your eyes at water level, those lilies are not visible until you get entangled in them, and the race organizers had decided that marking the lily patches would just spoil all the fun. As the guy standing next to me at the start remarked, there was no way those lilies were going to survive.

The starting horn unleashed the usual mayhem, and I let two rows of adrenaline-crazed triathletes crash into the water before I joined the fray. Initially there was no question of navigation as I was jostled between the bodies and we clawed our way through the first lily patch. The mist and the mass of red swim caps made it hard to spot the first buoy, so my course was definitely not optimal, but once there I got a good line on the next buoy and began to feel more in control of things. That sense disappeared once I went round the marker, since the island we were supposed to reach was largely invisible from water level, being indistinguishable from the shoreline behind it and having no buoy to mark it. It became a matter of heading in the right general direction until we got close enough to see where we were supposed to exit the water. The run was probably all of 20 meters, and I barely caught a glimpse of smoking tiki torches, assorted jungle creatures and several fetching Polynesian wenches in coconut bras before I was plunging back into the lake in what I hoped was the right direction. The mist and the absence of buoys made it hard to locate the finish point or gauge just how far right to kink to avoid the lilies, and I cut it a little too fine. Lilies went flying as I thrashed my way through, with masses of floating debris providing clear evidence that I was not the first to pioneer this passage. What joy to reach clear water, spot the exit, and get dragged back on shore by cheerful volunteers.

I felt pretty good about my swim until I reached the rack and saw that Dan had already come and gone. In the absence of long hard climbs on the bike course I did not have my favored terrain to make up time on him, so my focus was entirely on beating the ringer in my age group who had come up from California, presumably in quest of easy race points. I used everything I have learned from my years of bashing around on the Galbraith trails to progress as fast as possible, but it wasn’t easy in those rough conditions and with the high density of traffic on the narrow trail for the first mile or two. People were falling all over the place, and I did many mounts and dismounts, by no means all of them voluntary. The going gets marginally less difficult a couple of miles into the course, and the traffic thinned out after the 20 meter wade across a knee-deep creek, so then I had more freedom to maintain my own pace. The pre-ride was a blessing in terms of helping me know how far I had come and what lay ahead, but I could feel every one of those miles as I crashed from rock to root to tree and wound through tight turn after rocky turn trying fruitlessly to stay upright. Large open meadows littered with rock gardens alternated with root-infested forests. Not just the snot and the shit but pretty much every body fluid was beaten out of me, blood being a prominent component – even now, a week after the race, I keep finding new bruises on my body. Anyone on a hardtail was taking a particularly severe beating, and I felt sorry for inexperienced riders on this no-holds-barred mountain-bike course.

The end of the first loop appeared rather unexpectedly, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the second loop omitted the initial, particularly rough, part of the first loop. That relief was short-lived as I went my third round with this ill-tempered monster, the failing strength of my arms and judgment of my eyes and brain together with the worn tread of my Pythons resulting in endless front-wheel wipeouts. I had bruised some ribs in a fall on Galbraith a few days before the race, and the constant upper-body hammering I was now undergoing amplified those lingering pains. I crashed my shoulder into a tree, resulting in bloody lacerations, and my legs didn’t have much strength to accelerate hard up the hills and out of the corners any more. I did get a nice boost from the spectator who yelled out “Nice job, young man!” as I came by, since I was probably looking and definitely feeling every one of my almost 55 years by then. When Sandra Isbell, who was in third place for the women and had heard me talk with Korrie caught up and asked me how my third lap of the course for the morning was treating me, I had to admit that it was a little rough. I have rarely been so happy to find myself headed into transition, though I was still able to crank it up to 22 mph when I went through the police speed trap on the final flats.

I felt astonishingly good as I set out on the run, probably because it was such a relief to be done with the bike. The run course is two laps of a truly bizarre tangle of loops and out-and-backs, with only one short steep uphill at the start of each lap. Sandra was just behind as I sped through the course, trying to maintain a smooth steady pace. I expected her (at half my age) to pass me at any moment. When she caught me at the start of the second lap she told me that I had been her rabbit, so I agreed to continue pushing ahead as best I could and turned up the gas. Catching sight of Nick Carlson behind me on one of the out-and-backs spurred me on even more; I pushed the pace harder to try to beat him to the line. It was fun to feel I had more speed and to pass a bunch of guys, and I also managed to drop Sandra, but as I turned onto the final flat I felt a hand on my shoulder – Nick’s salute as he finally ran me down and blew into the finish chute just ahead of me.

It was a good day for Bellingham: Dan, Erik and I each won our respective age groups, and Dan and I both essentially sealed the regional age group championships for the year. The award ceremony featured the usual fun events besides the usual confusion over the pronunciation of my name; they included the Gatorade-chugging contest (this can get ugly) and my personal favorite – the carnage award. That award couldn’t go to the guy who got carted off to hospital (must be present to win) so it was a close contest between Janna’s giant hematoma, calling for evacuation from the bike course and two hours in the medical tent, and the fellow who exhibited two sets of tire tracks embossed on his chest. As for that California dude: I think he is still tangled up in one of the lily pads out there.

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