Race Report: 3rd Annual Muddy Buddy San Jose
Grant Ranch, up Mt. Hamilton Road in East San Jo
Date 11/6/4
Distance: ~ Six Miles
Masters Men's Wave (2 Person Team)
Teammate: Carmelo Rios
Muddy Buddy is a Bike/Run event with two people per team taking turns leapfrogging each other on the bike, with obstacles at each exchange zone, including the signature Mud Pit at the Finish Line. Let me cut to the race chase.
We start in the third wave, and the waves have a 6 minute spread. The bike gets a 30 second jump on the run. The whole path is double track, about a farm truck's width.
I'm on the bike, and sitting about third after the dust settles. The guys around me are making me work, but I'm hopeful their fitness is an illusion and that I'll have something for them as the hill unfolds. I do. Turns out the guy I have to race to the top of the hill is my teammate. Rios reeled me in and latched on to me about 2/3 of the way to the top.
He taunts me with "Need some oxygen, homey?," "when does the hill start?" and "how about a push?" I grunted back at him. This is a steep technical climb and with the saddle firmly tucked in an unmentionable and uncomfortable part of my posterior and my nose at the bar, I'm not too conversational. Luckily it dipped and then leveled off for 200 meters and I got hand over the man and put some distance on him.
The next leg is mostly downhill with a 400 meter "Streets of San Francisco" style climb level climb to the transition. Daddy passed me screaming fast on the bike a moment ago. He don't know the front brake from the rear, so I'm hoping nothing surprises him. We are passing boys from the waves ahead, and we are passing a steady stream.
The transition here went smoothly. I'm 6'3" with a 36" inseam. Daddy is 4'2" with a 4" inseam, so the hardest part of the transitions was me re-adjusting the saddle height on the Motobecane hardtail we're riding.
I'm riding again and up ahead I see the Rios express still picking off the line o' guys. This was a fairly flat leg. I passed him with a tap on the back saying "go grrrl."
At the transition I drop the bike, did the coolest stunt they have, a 15' tall inflated tower with a rope net climb and a slide into a water pool on the backside, and started my final running leg. Now we had gotten to the point of no return " it's going to be all about Daddy's last running leg. I just needed to get enough room on my this run that I could catch him one last time on the bike and then we'd finish together.
I heard MacDaddy coming to pass me and checked my watch - four minutes into the run. That's perfect. I could even slow down a little, but I didn't. Good thing because they changed that leg and made it longer. They took out a hill/descent and had us go around it. I had to run about 1000 meters more than last year's course and that meant his final leg will be about 800 meters shorter than last year.
I found the bike, got about three minutes into the leg and saw Daddy up ahead, his freight train still rollin'. Sweet! I went by, slow pedaled to the finish, and waited for him to come. He's nursing a messed up hamstring, but he's still got the chuga-chuga motion of the locomotive. We dove into the mud and crawled on our bellies like gung ho Marines at Quantico, and then grabbed hands as we crossed the finish line.
I looked up at the clock. 48 minutes. Knock off 12 minutes for being in wave 3, and we were looking good at 36 minutes. We've won our wave and there were only five bikes in the final zone when I got there, so it looked like we were the sixth team to cross the line.
Then they posted the results. No team # 20. No Aggie Grey. What? Who's in charge here? Where's the protest tent.
We found the time keeper. "You missed us," I said.
"What number," she asked. We tell her and she looks it up. "I disqualified you," is the answer.
"But why?.." we blurted.
"Your time is too fast and you were faster than the first wave. People in your wave don't go that fast."
Carmelo said, "Do you know who I am?" in that way only Carmelo can and she busted up laughing. We verified that we did indeed run the third wave, we did run 36 minutes, and we had the fastest time of the day by two minutes.
On the podium we did a happy meal jump up on the center stack. When the announcer read the time, he said "This must be a mistake, this is the fastest team of the day! Holy cow, let me shake these old men's hands!" All three teams grabbed hands for the photo opp and savored the podium moment.
"I'm coming back next year", sez Daddy, "and I aim to get fit"
While we cavorted around the course, my wife Lori and her teammate Jeanne slugged their way to tight third in the Ladies Masters division, ending up fourth for overall for the day.