Anatomy of implosion Ch. 1. PCP2P

Readers digest version: The Park City Point to Point race was the absolute polar opposite of the Butte 100 in how it played out for me. Butte was a day where I felt good but didn't get it done. Point to Point was a day where I got into a dark, deep hole, and drug my sorry behind to the finish. It was a really hard combination of distance, climbing and technical beat the hell out of you type stuff. It broke me, but not to the point of quitting. There were some pretty impressive rides by friends. Mine, not much impressive about it, but I was proud to get it done. The foolish/ironic spin of the story is that my only real goal for the day was to manage myself correctly, knowing I'd be prone to collapse if I made one too many foolish and vain efforts. Detailed version how it went down below......

Start to Silver Lake #1 - Felt really good, in hindsight, maybe too good. Round Valley was really a nice way to start the day - too many people with too little room to do much but just be in line, and the pace was comfortable. Only challenge here were the moments where we literally rode blindly due to the sun-was at the mercy of the trail staying straight at those moments and fortunately it did. There was a bit of an acceleration between the end of the Round Valley lap and the next section of single track - the skid row climb. I came close to earning dips*^t of the day here. It's a flat section and I came up on Sam who was spinning out on his single speed, put a hand on his back to say hi and try and give a little push, and then came real close to going down and taking Sam's rear wheel with me. The guy behind us started praising the save, saying he thought it was a for sure crash, that I was practically sideways. Sam laughed, letting the guy know I was good at those - and I laughed, making sure the guy understood Sam was talking about my skill at getting sideways, not the saves.

We turned off onto Skid Row, and the climb from there to Snow Top was great - felt real good the entire way and was even thinking how great I was managing by not chasing situations early on that I thought were beyond capacity, including watching Sam ride off into what would end up being a really strong day and finish time. Quick praise to the builders of switchbacks up the Pipeline trail - absolute best cut uphill switchbacks I've ever ridden, and one of my favorite sections of the entire day - like that deep woods feeling buff stuff, right up till you see the monstrosity that is the St. Regis. Keyes, Fatty, Jonny J, all came by and rode off around the Pipeline climb, only mention that to admit my lack of sorting capacity at the start line. In the moment, I thought I felt reasonably well from the St. Regis up to aid #1, but in hindsight am suspicious that that's where I started digging the hole. Wasn't fast to aid #1, but was about where I thought I should be for my day. The Draper wives were crewing in force, and had bottles swapped out in no time. I left aid #1 still feeling good, and hit the short steep road leading to the Bald Mtn switchbacks with a little go get em'. That lasted no longer than 5 minutes, and permanently tipped the scale from being ok, to not being ok.

I've blown myself up plenty of times, cyclocross being the arena of choice for those learning efforts where in trying make a selection you ride your legs and lungs into catching fire and blowing all capacity out of them - finding that line of what I can recover from and what I can't is part of the process of finding and extending limits, a part that I struggle with, a lot. But Bald Mtn. wasn't like that. It wasn't an effort that cooked my legs, I could take as deep a breath as I wanted, but over the course of just a few minutes I went from pedaling hard but well within limit, to soft pedaling, to stepping off and walking a bit, to staying off and walking a lot - I had cracked in a bad, bad way - and while there would be a few brief moments where I regained some focus and ambition, I never regained capacity, and the rest of the day was for the most part a long slow spiral downward from an already bad place. The bigger problem was that at that point, the rest of the day meant most of the day.....