So I did another race.

Well, ever since I realized that the Murphy race was Saturday I made it an A priority race.  That is to say I found out about it the night before and stripped my bike of bags and pogies to get it ready for some singletrack speed.

I put a lot of time on my prototype 9:zero:7 (which will from now on be known as Proto because Snow Dawg was taken).  Over my many hours, only about an hour was on anything but 10 foot wide snowmobile trails.  Murphy's 10 mile loop was all 18" wide packed snow on singletrack with short hills that you you need to just use brute force over.

I guess there was about 40 riders ready to conquer the 10 mile course, including it seemed like Freewheel's stacked A team (Kevin would be Hannibal, Brendan would be B.A. Baracus if we start choosing roles).  The start was interesting as we were on gravel for a very short stretch and then turn onto a trail of mostly mush for a 100 yards until it met the packed trail.  After an animated drive through the the mush I hit the packed stuff in 5th, and then into 4th before the trees.  Soon, I would be in 3rd as Hollywood faded while B.A. and Chris Fisher duked it out.  They would gap me soon enough and my gap on 4th seemed solid.  About halfway through my lower back was screaming from the different type of effort, add into my singletrack skills not having been honed in months, I found my lead on 4th disappear with 2 miles left.  As we reached the end Fisher would be limping in from a mechanical, boom 3rd place again.  I pathetically rolled in for 3rd behind a pair of MN's finest.

3rd place got me socks and a hat from those tyrants at Surly

Deathrider would ask me to meet him out in the woods alone afterwards to get sweaty.  I soon found out it was river bottoms riding he wanted to do when we got there so I changed my expectations while we rode and goofed around for another 90 minutes on the Penn race course for the 19th (which I think I have to make). The odd thing of the whole ride was I barely felt the hour of pain we had just suffered through.  I guess that is a good thing.

On the drive home I felt my lungs fill up with fluid because I removed my Coldavenger mask for much of the race as going balls out it gets a little hard to breath.  Today my ride was cancelled due to lack of lung power and coughing from said fluid.  It is back to my once a day inhaler I guess until Arrowhead.