12hrs of the Peaks

Hey Team: Chris Wilkens here. Those of you who are frequent checkers (and readers) of the email realm may already be familiar with who I am. That’s me there at the very bottom of the last two R3 Team Updates (very cool to have team updates I might add) – the one duly noted as the team’s Single Speed expert. Please don’t let the title fool ya - I am by no means an expert (at anything really)! But enough about me! I wanted to pass along my report on this past weekends S.S.S.S.S.S. – O! (loosely translated to Super Sweet solo single speed shred-off) aka 12hrs of the Peaks. For you’s all scratching your head and wondering what is he talking about, here were the details:

The 12hr race course:
lap one: schultz creek trail, sunset trail, red onion, elden lookout road, sunset trail, little bear, little elden, schultz.
lap two: fort valley connector, 164B, western most fort valley, pipeline, lower motto, fort valley connector.
lap three: schultz creek trail, little gnarly, lower brookbank, rocky ridge.
Finish one set, do it again and so on…

What a great event all around: from the free beer/music at registration, to a 6am race start (which by the way was the first time in my six years living in Flg I have ever seen Schultz trailhead at that time of day – it’s cold, even in the summer), to cranking the pedals around and around and around for 12hrs – well 8hrs in my case, great people (cyclists as a species are good eggs, but something about reducing life down to one gear just elevates the good nature of said cyclists), and all this just out our back door – sweet flag livin’ for sure!

For me I have come to realize that I really enjoy the idea of riding my bike for long periods of time - just my body and mind seem to deviate from their original plans some where along 6.5+hrs into a ride; thus reducing me to spend the next hours debating the pros and cons of my life's current state of affairs. So, the race results: http://www.meandrosco.blogspot.com/ that's me in slot 15. I set out to do lap 4 (the climb-a-thon lap) and played leap frog with a guy biking up Elden in what looked to be parachute pants stolen from David Lee Roths gym locker back in the Jump days of Van Halen's mega success and realized the pain was just not worth the humiliation of watching my current lack of riding ability. So called it a day on lap 4 (3/4 up Elden) and enjoyed the smooth flow of some icy cold PBRs back at the p. lot. End result - sign me up for the next one - I'm in!

There are two more events in the SSSSSSS-O:
Race two: absolute bikes old fashion mountain bike race.

Race three: elden lookout road single speed hill climb Sunday, September 2 high noon. from where the dirt turns to pavement all the way to the towers near the sunset trailhead. mass start.

thanks for reading and hope to see you all at Fort Valley on Saturday (with a much more reasonable start time!), chris