Race Report: 24 Hours in the Enchanted Forest
[Note: this is a director’s cut of a report originally written up for Versus Race Team]
When my two-year-old finally started sleeping through the night a few months back, I wondered how to fill the yawning void of sleep deprivation that I found myself quickly careening away from. She had been such a poor sleeper for so many months that I had grown used to feeling like a zombie, operating on coffee and anxiety. It probably didn’t help that up until we moved to Colorado in January, she had been sleeping in a bedroom that was actually my closet. I was on high alert through the night and tending to her every noise, when all she probably needed to be a better sleeper was some space. So when we moved, and she immediately started sleeping uninterrupted all night long,
I was beside myself with glee, and pretty quickly, spare energy. I soon realized that the answer to being so well rested was obvious- sign up for a 24-hour solo mountain bike race! My M.O. is something along the lines of “doing pretty hard stuff I’m almost but maybe not fully qualified to try” (which is pretty much also the definition of being a parent, right?), so this spring after a bit of hemming and hawing I signed up for Zia Rides’ 24 Hours in the Enchanted Forest, located in the Cibola National Forest down near Gallup, New Mexico. And then I started trying to whip myself into shape.
“I soon realized that the answer to being so well rested was obvious- sign up for a 24-hour solo mountain bike race!”
2023 had a lot of lows, and my fitness suffered. There’s never enough time in the day, especially when you don’t get a single minute of downtime until approximately 9:05 when your second child is in bed for the night. Beyond that, I was beyond stressed due to my crushing workload. But then I quit the job that was slowly killing me, we moved, and things turned around for the better. I’ve gone back to working outside, in a place that feels like paradise, with weather that almost always seems perfect. I started improving my fitness on the clock, choosing difficult mountainous climbs to get where I was headed instead of the flatter way around. And then I got back to it on the bike. It often feels like there are no easy rides here in Durango, which makes for a useful condensed training plan. Acclimating to riding at elevation has been a process, but I finally feel like I’m getting there; I live around 7,200’, and I regularly work up to 10,500’.
This 24-hour race was at around 8,000’ in elevation, which is just a bit higher than where we live. The 13-mile course loop had nearly 1,000’ of elevation gain per lap, and meandered through ponderosa pine forest, meadows, a bumpy creek bed, and even a mile of active timber harvesting (*chef’s kiss*). Timber sale administration is what I do for work, but on a different national forest, so I was able to use this mile of logging activities, which was near the end of the course loop, as a barometer for excitement each lap. I did my best to slam the brakes for the first few laps and sat myself behind riders going way slower than I would normally ride. I wanted to avoid blowing up by the third or fourth lap. This was my main goal for the race: keep going, don’t die, don’t break, enjoy what I could.
“This was my main goal for the race: keep going, don’t die, don’t break, enjoy what I could
Unfortunately, while my big kid was having a great time at the venue, playing in the woods and riding her bike around, my toddler was having consistent meltdowns, sobbing and screaming at full volume about pretty much everything, including when I wouldn’t let her pee on the racecourse right at the finish line. Her tantrums had begun the night before, after a missed nap on the car ride down. She jumped around the tent as the minutes turned to hours, screamed, pulled my hair out for laughs, bounced on her sister, pretended to sleep for a few blissful seconds, screamed. Big sister wasn’t helping, and I eventually kicked her out of the tent so that the little one could fall asleep. At this point, my partner Eli noticed that his air mattress had a leak and was flat. A big point for me is trying to mitigate the stress of my partner, given all he’s agreed to make experiences like this happen for me, and how trying our children tend to be during these moments, so I told him I’d sleep on the deflated mat, since it seemed like the best I could offer him. It was bad sleep.
Back to race day and my toddler’s on course meltdowns. By the time early evening arrived, maybe only 7 hours into the race, I was so distraught by her distress that I was willing to quit right then and drive home, if it would make things better for my family. Eli encouraged me to shake it off and head out for another lap, and after sobbing for the first four miles, wondering why everything always has to be so hard and why parenting feels so not good so frequently, I put my head down and got back to it. A quick downpour during my first night lap left me chilled and with wet hands, but I kept going as long as I was able and bounced back a bit with some extra layers. If I’d had a good night’s sleep the night before the race, maybe I could have rode all night. But I didn’t, I already covered that. So, I raced until 2am, then crawled into our tent for a few hours’ sleep.
I would have gotten back up at 5 or 5:30 if I was solo, but being me, I wanted the kids to get plenty of rest, so to avoid an early wakeup for them I waited until closer to 7. I was able to ride two more laps before the 11am finish, and my first lap of the morning was my proudest moment of the race: I rode the entire lap clean, clearing one techy section I hadn’t yet ridden, along with all the other techy bits of course. Overall, the route was awesome, with several miles of climbing followed by a rewarding chunkyish descent where I was psyched to have no one catch me (I otherwise was constantly getting passed). The descent was so bumpy at speed that by a few laps in, I became nauseous every time I rode it; it was still a blast, but it messed with my stomach a bit and for most laps, I hadn’t quite recovered from it by the time I crossed the finish line, where I was trying to prop myself up with nutrition each lap. I didn’t cramp, I didn’t bonk, and I was really proud to finish this race feeling strong. After 24 hours, I made it 135 miles, leagues beyond my previous longest mountain bike ride. The icing on the cake was taking home third place in the women’s 18-39 category and getting to stand on the podium with two really strong riders (and my kids!)
135 Miles
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24 HOURS
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135 Miles 〰️ 24 HOURS 〰️
That is where the story should end. And it did, last time I wrote this.
My recovery from this race was amazingly quick, no sore legs, that sort of thing. It made me feel extra proud of managing my efforts to avoid a bonk, and I was feeling like I had done everything right. I ate a bunch in the first few days after the race, but that seemed like the extent of my variation from normal. But then four days after the race, I started feeling kind of itchy. I got nervous that the small strip of poison ivy that crossed the racecourse on a rocky feature during the creek bed climb had somehow gotten all over me during the first lap when I hadn’t ridden up it do to overcrowding on the trail. I self-treated for five days, which turned out to be a mistake, since it wasn’t poison ivy. I had developed shingles, as a combination of an untimely exposure, and an overload of ‘stress’ on my system in the form of a 24-hour bike race. I’m not sure how this could have been prepped for, or avoided, but it felt like my body failing me when I had tried so hard to set it up for success. Perhaps, if anything, it’s more of a cautionary tale to pay closer attention to mild feelings of sickness in the week leading up to such a big event.
I don’t think I’ll try a 24-hour race again, but if I do… I’m sleeping on a fully inflated mat and going into it feeling well rested (fingers crossed).
