My 100-mile; Respectable? DNF

 

The Mohican 100 is the first big mountain bike race of the year, and the most “local” event to me. It always rains and it’s always muddy and it has tight cut off times.

I had completed the 100k version of this race in 2024, therefore in my mind, the next time I would need to complete the 100 mile! Makes sense rite? Well, this 100 mile has 13k of climbing, which is the same Stats as coal country! Ya know, the race I did a month ago…. See previous blog 😉. 

Side note: at coal country there was no cut off time and I leisurely completed it in 15.5 hours. 

So now if we break down the math: Mohican 100 mile is 70% single track and has a 14.5 hour cut off. Coal country was all gravel roads, no cut off time, cool promoter and it took me 15.5 hours. 

Gravel roads minus 70 miles for single track plus a 14.5 hour cut off minus cool promoter equals….. no way I can finish. 

But as we discussed earlier, I have already done the 100k, so 100 mile it is. Also 3 of my best dirtbag friends ever would be coming in from out of state to hang out at my local race, so the stoke was extra extra high. 

But, due to all my exciting bikepacking adventures, I have done about 1 week of casual mountain biking since Marji in September, everything else has been on the adventure rig. 

So Monday of Mohican race week starts and I decide to knock the dust off the ol mountain bike and give her a once over. Yikes! I forgot my tires are 2 years old, half warn, plugged multiple times each, and the sidewalls were so warn from smashing against rocks that I couldn’t read the size. So I sent the text to coach cool and spouse to double check that these tires were unacceptable and I must overnight shinny new ones. They confirmed. Tires ordered✅

Tire delivery was scheduled for Wednesday by 8 a.m. …… but you know how Amazon rolls, false promises on the regular. Therefore it was Friday evening, 45 minutes before all bike shops close and my tires finally arrived…. But the tire sealant that I had also ordered….. did not show. 

So I immediately dropped everything and jumped in the car and cruised up to the bike shop…. 20 minutes before they closed I was able to purchase an XL bottle of that sweet sweet orange seal. 

I was able to get my tires mounted with some help from the Mrs. And easily air it up with my new harbor freight air compressor 😎. And it was like 8:00 p.m. So my hopes of getting to the drtbag community for social hour had been dashed. So I went to bed in my own bed and awoke at 3:30 to drive south to Mohican land. 

I was the first to arrive at the venue and the only person awake in Loudonville at 5 a.m. and that’s just how I like it. I got a parking spot rite next to the bathroom and was able to anxiously sit in my car, completely ready and sip coffee. 

At 6 a.m. they opened for packet pickup so I meandered over to get my race plate, tee shirt, and drop off my 3 drop bags. 

Drop bag: 

3 small slim Jim’s- bite size, your gunna want to  unwrap them and put them in your side bib pocket. This provides easy access and makes a delicious dirt and shammy butter snack! 

Reeses puff cereal bar- 100 calories and never consumed one 

Yellow Gatorade- calories. It’s like scratch drink mix, but already mixed and 16% of the price with 50% less thickness. 

Small bottle of flat sprite: gotta be flat. Your gunna want to open it for 2 days prior to get all those bubbles out. The sprite acts as Gatorade’s fat little friend. It doubles the calories with half the liquid. …. Although as I type this… am I just making mountain due by mixing yellow Gatorade and sprite 🤔

3” of a jimmy johns mega Italian sub. No lettuce and no tomato. 

2 bites of delicious, moist, coffee cake from meijer. 

Drop bags dun. 

During the exchange of snacks for boring tee shirt, I encountered my fellow “hard thing” enthusiasts, Dennis and his almost taller friend/offspring, Graham. It’s always nice to see those 2 handsome fellas when they are stateside, which is pretty rare, those guys go through 2-3 passports a year👀. Never any bikes in their travels though 🤔. Maybe I should offer my airplane bike bag to them. 

Anywho, I also heard Ho Ho Ho coming from the darkness, Larry was up and about! 

After putting on my race plate and finishing off with PRD #3 and topping off the belly with Imodium # 3 as well, I pedaled over to the campground to creep around and find hot babes to stalk, but the eagle eye hot babe #1 shmuzie found me first! We exchanged hugs and she pointed out shristis camprunner (camper/forrunner), got a hug from her and then it was stinkin race time! We had a 1-2 mile bike path ride to the start. 

I zoomed off to get to the start because I had a hot piece of tail waiting for me. My Wife and Kids had woke up early to come see us start, meet my friends, and then volunteer at aide stations all day! I got my start line hugs and kisses and we were off. 

Race start 

The race starts immediately with a big road climb, the kinda road climb where all the fine folks who live along says climb, come out with their coffee and cheer you on. And with all those cheers comes the impossibility or walking the first climb or downshifting. So you pedal up it and burn the match. Every time🤷‍♂️

What does burning a match mean? Well ya see, when your heart rate gets near the max, and your exertion on the upper end of “owie owie ouchie”; you are burning a match. Your using calories you won’t be able to gain back until tomorrow, and your punishing your body a little more then you should. - - - that’s burning a match; and every athlete, depending on genetics, performance enhancing drugs, and fitness; have limited matches to burn during a race, therefore you try and use them sparingly. 

Burning a match in the first mile- not ideal but almost always happens. 

Ok so we go up that climb and then there’s some more rolling hills, not terrible, not great. About 5ish miles of road until you get to the two track trail in the Mohican wilderness. 

Unfortunately my head wasn’t really in this race, it didn’t have the excitement it usually had, it was just a day doing a long bike ride. This poor mental state immediately transferred to my legs and they felt heavy from the start. I did my best to manage my power output since there were a few hundred punchy climbs left and I still have cramping PTSD from the 26 mile Mohican fall show; where I got full body debilitating cramps at mile 12, chugged a 8 oz bottle of “imitation” pickle juice, then suffered in pain the last 14 miles and urinated 🔥 for the next 28 hours. 

So with that in mind, I was trying to pedal up everything but also keeping in mind that I had a very long day ahead of me. 

Toward the end of the paved road, through the few miles of 2 track, and into the single track, I was leapfrogging with shmuzie on her belt driven single speed. That was a highlight of the day to get to share some trail in a race with my best friend. 

A few miles into the single track and my multi speed bicycle pedaled around her on a rooty uphill Congo line of walking racers. 

The weather was perfect, 70 and sunny, the trail had rain the 6 months prior but had dried out to some nice “hero dirt”. The vegetation of the side of the trail was full of life, greener then green and smelled peaceful. 

My climbing continued poor, my descending was on point. Mohican in my hometown trail and I’ve made it a habit of riding that trail over and over, in daylight and in darkness, 1 lap, 2 laps, 3 laps. I’ve walked it all, hallucinated a few times, and crashed on every root and rock there is. Therefore I was confident and found joy in the descending, it would be the only time I would catch the person in front of me, then they would accelerate up the next climb and I would decelerate😂

My body felt good honestly, no abnormal paid. My bike was dialed in, I had washed it very well( new thing for me), freshly waxed the chain, put 2 new tires with new sealent on, and checked every bolt; TWICE. 

Side story: my back axle fell out 50 miles into my first Mohican 100k, and I was so bonked I just starred at my wheel laying sideways on my bike wondering “wtf just happened”. 

So bike was perfect, trail was perfected, my wife and kids were in close proximity!!!!!, but my head just didn’t want to be out there. 

So as I’m pedaling along on the single track, it’s going slow, I’m eating and drinking and staying relatively positive in my head but, there’s no fun it anywhere, and I just can’t stop thinking that I’ll have to do this again tonight, mostly in the dark. 

22 miles in, we arrived at Aid station 1! I was so excited for this! My wife and kids were volunteering to make peanut butter and jellies, and they were waiting for me to ride in! 

I’m really bad with the tech stuff, so the only way they could track me was on my live track on my Garmin gps; but that only tells mileage; so they had a list of the aid station mileage and would reference over to my live track mileage😂….. But it worked! They were waiting for me with a coke, pb&j, and a banana! So that was really awesome, my daughter filled my water, my wife took my trash, and my son impatiently held an undesirable looking banana in my face asking “daddy can you eat this already”. They updated me on shristies position- she was at the pointy end of the race, yawning a bit at the tiny Ohio hills, and planning her run for tomorrow morning. I told them Santa clause was on my wheel and will be here any minute, I believe he had to stop for a second and take a work call regarding an altercation between donner and blitzen, up north. And as far as shmuzie, who knows🤷‍♂️. She’s on a purple belt drive single speed, she could be in front of me, above me, behind me; there’s no way of knowing what goes on in single speed world, seems boring really 🥱, what are they doing with their thumb all day?🤔. Last I had seen her she was out of the saddle on a climb, so I told the family to give her a hug for me, if she hadn’t already passed through and I headed out. 

I was 22 miles in and it had been 3 hours and 15 minutes. Mathematically if I’m 1/5 of the way done, I would miss the 14.5 hour cutoff time at least 2 hours. Theoretically, the “25-30 miles” of road riding I had ahead of me would be faster butttttt, I had ridden these roads twice in the past few weeks and their are some big ol’ hills, 300-500 ft, and I know that I won’t be pedaling up those, so I will be just as slow. I can finish after cut off, by myself, in the dark….. so that’s an option 😑

Leaving aid 1

It immediately got dark in the woods, which was really quite nice, this section is all tall pine trees and your zigging and zagging between them, picking the softest line through their roots. A storm was moving in and it got really dark and kinda spooky. Then the thunder started, lots of it and at quite a high volume, but 2 miles later it still had not rained, still just dark skies with thunder somewhere outside of the trees. 

I then come to a Congo line of riders, off their bikes, with most of their bikes laying on the ground, and I see multiple people off in the woods, off trail, some wearing helmets and some without. It had sprinkled a little bit by this time, but not enough to get the trail wet under the tree cover. 

I approached the riders in line and they immediately told me “there’s a medical emergency up ahead. We are stopped until medical personnel can evacuate the person from the trail”. We were toward the top of a large climb and nowhere close to a roadway. I looked up the line of bikes and I saw Grahams, a red Santa Cruz, laying on its side and he was nowhere in sight. Not knowing what that meant, I politely pushed my bike forward up the trail, on the side, until I saw Dennis and Graham. I made my way up to them and you could see a winding line of racers all the way up to the top, where there was a group of people helping the rider in need. 

The entire event was on pause now, until the individual could get to the help they needed. So we cleared the trail and chatted about the day and plans for this year. I don’t know how long we were there, it doesn’t matter. After a while the medical personnel, along with some other riders, carried the individual, in a stretcher, down the trail. I tried not to look or stare, both out if respect and for my own mental regard. There was a lot of race left and a lot of personal battles that will need fought before the end of the day. I hope and pray that person makes a full recovery, but I needed my mind as clear as possible to ensure my safety. 

We all quietly and slowly walked ahead to the top of the climb, down all the dangerous rocks, and then started to remount our bikes and ride again. 

If I was mentally out of the zone before that event, I was absolutely mentally checked out now. Now I was just defaulting on all my training so far this year and everything I had learned from my 2.5 amazing coaches. Eat, drink, move forward, and repeat the FACTS. Anytime you get negative just look at the facts. 

Fact: this is Saturday, and no matter the pain or suffering that happens, it will be over by Sunday, and forgotten by Monday. Fact. 

(Unless you write an obnoxiously long story about it 😬)

Excuses

I can’t make any excuses, anything is possible, doing hard things is beneficial in every aspect of life. I wasn’t mentally in it, and I didn’t want to do the race. That’s the truth. 

Through the rest of the single track, onto the horse trail, onto the double track, and then finally onto some paved roads, I did a lot of thinking. A lot of trying not to be negative, just trying to logically think it out. 

And here’s what I had decided. A 100 mile finish would require a lot of suffering, a 20 hour finish, and my family would have to leave early, because my kids have their first 1.5km Spartan race tomorrow. So I would push my bike alone through Mohican single track, to end at my car in the dark and try to drive 1.5 hours home, take a nap, and head to spartanville. 

Now I’ve got a 2700 mile quest for maple syrup in just 20 👀 short days. A pile of memories to make with the kids tomorrow. And a positive mental mindset to preserve. 

A complete DNF didn’t sit rite with me, after all, it’s an expensive entry and the new tires and my family is here. So since I had not made it to the 100k/100mile split, I decided that I would switch to the 100k. This meant 2 more side stations with my kids, crossing the finish line, and riding back to the car myself……. That’s kinda mine and Coach Carey’s thing, if you get back to your vehicle on your bike then it’s not a bad DNF. It’s a respectable DNF 😂. 

So 100k route it is! I now had new life in me, this was doable and made sense. 

Then the rain started

The thunder and darkness lasted about 30 minutes before I felt any rain drops, but once they started, they stuck around for a while. 

The rain wasn’t really much of an issue at first, I was still inside Mohican state forest on the single track and the tree cover was letting very little rain onto the trail……. For about an hour. Then the persistent rain picked up and everything was wet. 

I was pretty pumped with my new tires around this time though, these new “nobby nics” were more like dirt bike tires with big lugs, they had impeccable traction on the downhills, but were rather difficult to propel forward uphill. They also would really throw the mud, if I could get any speed going. 

It continued to get slick in the trail and the wet roots were becoming an issue, you know your tires will slip on the root, so just hit it straight on and bump over it; except, Mohican has thousands of roots going in all directions, therefore, with injury preservation on the mind, I chose to walk the particularly “sketchy” sections. 

Around mile 28ish the course splits off and we say goodbye to all the 50k participants, as they chose the correct distance on the day and were 2 miles away from their wonderful finish; Us 100k and 100 mile riders still had quite a long day ahead. I looked long and hard at that 50k arrow, really wanting to switch to that distance and be done with this race, but Katie and the kids were at aid station 2, waiting for me. So onward we went. 

We switched off single track and onto horse trail, wet muddy rutted horse trail, then 2 track trail, and then we had a delightful little bike path/ abandon over grown road. It appeared to be a methamphetamine camper manufacturing recycling center. A place where citizens can discard and recycle their old/unused meth campers. Unfortunately some of them had really fallen into disrepair, with even some substantial tree damage. This was however, the most scenic and exciting part of the ride so far 😊

Shortly after it pops out into gravel roads and we had some nice, wet, muddy, dirt roads with big rolling hills to conquer. The faster pace of the smooth roads was a welcomed change, and short lived. About 3 miles of dirt roads and you come to a tiny little opening on the side of the road with a white arrow pointing inward. 

Arriving at Mohican Wilderness

I had arrived at the Mohican wilderness single track. I started into the single track following a few guys, with a few guys behind me. We were enthusiastic to show off our mountain bike skills on this fun little section of rocky trail. However, we were immediately met with deep, slippery mud, on narrow rocky trails with dangerous drop offs. After a few of us immediately crashed trying to ride, it was silently and unanimously decided that noone was out there to beat a time anymore, we were in survival mode. Get our bodies and bikes to the finish, unbroken. So we pushed single file almost all the way through the Mohican wilderness. 5-6 miles maybe? Even the flat sections seemed to be just off camber enough that my new beefy tired would still slide sideways down the hill if I tried to ride. Pushing your bike was even difficult, as mountain bike shoes have no traction for ankle deep mud. 

By the time I was close enough to hear the commotion of aide station number 2, I was completely covered in mud, my bike was solid mud, all my bearings were making noise. Everything was a wet, cold, muddy mess! I was about to see my family though and that had me pumped!! I was hoping they had found things to occupy themselves, since it had been 4 hours since I had seen them. 

As I rolled up I saw my wife, and then my kids running toward me, such a great feeling. They gave me hugs, even though I was dripping wet and covered with mud. I told my wife that I was switching to the 100k route and she could skip the next aide station and head back toward Mohican state forest. 

Not in a hurry anymore, and wanting to get warm and enjoy the energy of my kids for a while, I stuck around that aide station for 15-20 minutes. They had a hose for a bike wash, and my son was so excited to wash my bike. It was delightful to get rid of the crunchy sounds when I pedaled also. 

I was pretty checked out of the race at this point, and just wanted to head to the finish line and take it easy. Maintain my good physical and mental feeling and cross the finish line. Therefore, I made the mistake of stopping eating. Nothing tasted good and I was heading to the finish next. 23 easy more miles on the road and I’m done…… I thought. 

My son was excited to tell me that he was on his 3rd Coke of the day and he was having a blast running around in the rain with the other kids. That made my heart happy and I decided to finish the thing and get going. Wet lip kisses for everyone and I was on the road out of the Mohican wilderness campground, and as I looked back I saw my kids running after me and my daughter was holding up a heart 💜. How nice. 

We were on a road for about a mile and then back into the woods. 500 foot climb in the woods. So muddy and slippery it was small steps forward with lots of sliding back. I bet that climb took me 45 minutes. Once at the top it was some sort of freshly logged forest, and a path had been cleared with a bulldozer it appeared. And that entire bull dozed path, was underwater. Like the kind of mud that would suck your shoe off. 

A while back we split from the 100 mile people and they did an extra 15 miles of hilly roads, then met us back. 

So now as we are trying to push through this deep mud, some 100 mile guys start showing up behind us and even they can’t ride through this mud! We all ended up bush waking off trail for that entire section. By that time it was clear that any 100 milers at this point would be unable to finish in the cutoff time. The trail was to unusable and everyone was forced to walk. 

After what seemed like hours of that slog, we made it to a dirt road again and I was fairly confident that we had 10ish miles of all road, until the 2 mile finish. And at the end of these 10 miles of road would be my family again! At aide station 4. 

Those 10 miles had 3 big climbs. 3 big climbs that I was walking. I had stopped eating a few hours ago, I was sipping my Gatorade and being consistent with the maple syrup, but swallowing anything was becoming more and more undesirable. 

On the downhills I was as aerodynamic as I could get. Dropper down, butt behind the seat, knees tucked in, elbows in, and chin on the handlebars. That combination let me really stretch out the momentum of the downhills and tick off some quick miles. 

The sun had come out and it had gotten humid, the roads were still wet and splattery, but I was now sweating instead of shivering. I finally saw Mohican state forest and I knew I was almost done. Just across the street was my family at aide station 4, and the finish was just a few miles past that. 

They were excited to see me, not as excited as I was to see them though 😂. I pulled off my timing chip from my ankle and gave it to my wife to dispose of, I wanted to complete the 100k route all the way through the finish, but I did not want my timing chip to cross the finish line and say that I had completed the 100 mile. 

A few more wet lip kisses and I was pushing up the last climb on the day. I was tired and my legs were done. Once descending the last climb, you go through a campground and then the slightest uphill to the finish. As I am going through the campground, there’s a bunch of nice people cheering me on. So kind and a nice energy boost! But also, I had every intention of slowly pushing up that last incline, but now I had an audience😞. Can’t push your bike in front of an audience! 

So I pedaled to the finish and was glad to be done with that adventure. 

We took our finish line family photos and headed home. 

65 miles 

8500 ft elevation. 

11 hrs 21 minutes