Woohoo! You clicked through to the fundraising page! Time to help our friends, family and neighbors who need a little extra support...
A little recap: last summer I decided to join some friends from high school to celebrate turning 50 and participate in a mountain bike race for the first time in MANY years. I met some of my goals, but left a little more on the course than I would have liked. So, this year I’m going to take another crack at the Vermont 50 Mountain Bike race/ride!. Try to achieve a finish a little closer to the 5-5.5 hour mark, further improve my fitness, and raise some money for an awesome cause. Last year you collectively donated $1,335 to Vermont Adaptive (https://www.vermontadaptive.org/) and your generosity landed us the 7th place on the Top Fundraiser leaderboard!
I had 3 goals going into last year's race:
- Have some fun and spend some time with my high school friends who were all turning 50. We don’t see each other as often as we’d like, but we decided that urging on one another through Strava, texts, email, and then camping at the Ascutney State Park campground before the race would be a great way to catch up.
- Finish - This is pretty self explanatory. But, it’s worth pointing out that 50 miles and 8k-ish feet of climbing were both longer and taller than I’d ever mountain biked in a single day.
- If I finished, I was hoping for something around the 6hr mark. I had some reason to believe I could hit that mark, but there was a lot of uncertainty about the course and the surface which could both drastically alter the speed of the race.
- I also wanted to spend at least some of the race riding with my friends and because we hadn’t really ridden with one another it was hard to know what sort of pace we’d keep to stay together.
- Use the training for this race to improve my personal fitness.
Sooo, how’d I do? —
Well, I had a great time with catching up with my buddies. This was an amazing way to celebrate a milestone birthday.
We started the race together, but quickly realized that we all were comfortable at somewhat different paces, and elected to ride at the pace that we each felt was sustainable. Ultimately, I finished in 6:10:13 which landed me 200th overall (of about 1100 racers across all age/ability/discipline levels) and 20th in my age group. I’m super happy with that result. — I could’ve been a little quicker, but elected to stop at a handful of aid stations rather than carrying all my food and water with me for the whole race.
The race is at the end of September, I have an updated set of goals for this event, I have a little better idea what I'm getting into, and I will be sure to provide an updated recap of this year's event.
