MOAB
— As lost and found items go, this one qualified as a doozy.
It was after 1 p.m. on Sunday, and although there still were plenty of riders on the course, the 13th annual 24 Hours of Moab mountain bike race officially had ended more than an hour before the call went over the public address system: Les Price was missing. His teammates would appreciate his return.
It wasn’t so much that Price was lost, not in the traditional Grand County Search and Rescue sense anyway. It was more that he had disappeared, vanishing in that 24th hour while said teammates tuned up the bicycle he was scheduled to ride on his final 15-mile lap through the desert. Teammates aside, who could really blame him?
“Normal people don’t do this and think it’s fun,” said Ben Hartford of Littleton. “So I think we’re all a little ‘off’ in that regard.”
Hartford may be onto something. Then again, maybe it was Price, 42, who apparently underwent a spate of normalcy before suffering through another two hours in the saddle. After pushing the pedals overnight at race pace through 30 miles of sand and stones, a little game of hide and seek sounds like a lot more fun.
Yet that doesn’t stop the nearly 1,500 competitors – new and old – from lining up at the starting line every October in Moab for the largest event of its kind.
“This is the granddaddy,” said Michael Hayes of Carbondale, adding that, yes, he’s riding his second 24-hour race for fun. “It’s a pretty amazing sight if you’ve never seen it before. It’s a really cool scene.”
Almost universally it is the so-called “scene” surrounding this king of overnight athletic events that compels its dedicated throngs to pilgrim back to Utah from Colorado and beyond.
They begin at high noon, pro racers and recreational riders sprinting side by side to their waiting bikes as the crowd of perhaps 1,000 cheers them on. The roars grow louder after dark, often reaching a climax sometime before midnight as verbal incentive for stunt riders jumping their mountain bikes over pits of fire lining the course. The biggest is reserved for those who come up short.
“I thought we’d get at least one of them over here,” said James Jackson, assistant director of Grand County Emergency Medical Services. With fewer than 40 visits to his clinic and a single ambulance ride throughout the race, Jackson said this year’s event had the fewest injuries in a decade. “The one guy who fell into the fire apparently just dusted himself off and kept going.”
It doesn’t take long for the applause to subside altogether, dwindling to sporadic late-night shows of support: “Way to go, Chris!” or “Keep it up, Jari!”
And keep it up they will. Technically, midnight is the halfway point. Realistically, it might as well be the beginning.
“That 3 a.m. lap”
The hours ahead will be the longest of the year for many riders, the heart of the night, when they push off from the warm, comfortable glow of base camps and into the desert darkness with nothing more than halogen headlamps to guide them across the steep, technical track through the canyon country wilderness. A good lap over the 1,500-vertical-foot course takes less than 90 minutes. Most last closer to two hours.
“It’s that 3 a.m. lap that gets you, when it’s your third lap of the race and you’ve got to get out of your sleeping bag and go out there with a headlight on,” said Hayes, a Colorado Rocky Mountain School teacher whose four-man “Stomparillaz” team masochistically entered the race’s “rigid-frame, single-speed” division. “It’s weird, because there are always people around, but you still feel like you’re going to get lost. Your head starts playing with you a little bit and the suffering is just a little different at night. You really have to have the suffer gene. If you don’t have the suffer gene, it’s probably not for you.”
By 3 a.m., the campground is mostly silent. Campfires, like the majority of riders, no longer are stoked but merely maintained. It’s colder now, with a steady breeze blowing from the north across the vast expanse. Four more hours to sunrise. From there, it’s only a five-hour ride to the finish.
“Every lap, you get out there and it’s dark, maybe it’s chilly, you’re eight miles from camp, and you’re like, ‘Oh, God, my legs hurt, this is so hard, I have this huge climb coming up. Maybe when I get back to camp I’ll just sit down and take a nap,”‘ said Jari Kirkland of Boulder, who rode some 210 miles to win the women’s solo division. “But when you get back into camp, you think, ‘That wasn’t so bad. Maybe I’ll do another lap.”‘
Worth the suffering
Such self-duping deals tend to be the norm among the most successful 24- hour endurance athletes, a common denominator that can be combined with proper training, solid support crews and appropriate equipment to turn otherwise advanced riders into bona fide racers. And despite the guarantee of mental and physical exhaustion that accompanies a 24-hour race such as Moab, many consider the intangible returns well worth the price of admission.
“Even last year, when it rained so hard they had to postpone the race. Even though it was a horrible experience, I had a great time and have a great story to tell,” said Hartford, the Adams County district attorney who has raced on the Gitchigumi’s Revenge team with his pal Brian Husmann of Denver the past three years. “Looking back, we can share in our misery together, so that’s a cool thing.”
Hayes takes it a steep deeper.
“Existential payoff is all it is for me. Really, the race is meaningless. It doesn’t make the world a better place. World peace isn’t going to happen because 24 Hours of Moab happened,” he said. “But there’s some beauty in just going out and suffering for the sake of suffering, in my mind. It makes you appreciate life.”
Scott Willoughby: 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com
