The dog-eared file folder that I’ve been keeping on the Leadville Trail 100 mountain bike race still has the route and training tips from 2002, which is when I first decided that my love of mountain biking and my personal goals should collide at the famous “Race Across the Sky.”
What happened between then and now? Well, let’s see … there was cancer. Then a guy in a pickup truck hit me while I was walking across the street. After chemo, radiation, six surgeries and several years of physical therapy, I lost 30 pounds, got in shape and finally made the transition to a full-suspension bike.
But in the meantime, Lance Armstrong happened.
Since 2008, when His Livestrongness first competed in the 100-mile, high-altitude extreme test of craziness, no one has been able to get into the darned thing. And it was tough enough before that.
“We stop counting at about 8,000,” says Karen Jayne Leinberger, the media liaison for Life Time Fitness — which had sponsored the race for six years before buying the rights just before the 2010 season — who estimates that since Armstrong made the race an international target for “citizen bikers,” the number of entrants comes closer to 10,000, for a lottery that allows 1,500 in.
This season, I thought I had it made. For the first time, the registration form asked if entrants had a “story” about how or why they were trying to attempt what is, by most accounts, the hardest single-day mountain bike race in the country.
I thought, OK, if a person who doesn’t even own a car and bikes everywhere survives cancer and then two years later gets smeared across a road by a pickup, then rehabs by biking like a maniac to race in the Leadville 100 isn’t a story …
But I still didn’t get in. I was confused, and I’m not the only one. I heard from several people who also had some interesting tales to share, but they, too, failed to win the Leadville Lottery.
Oops, says Leinberger. “We wanted to know people’s stories, but we shouldn’t have had that as part of the registration,” she says. “It had no effect on whether they got into the race; it was really so that we would know later, after they got in, if they had a story to tell. It should have been a tab to click on after they registered, where they could share their stories. We should have made it clear that the story was separate.”
Does this story have a happy ending? It’s too soon to tell. The good news is, I do plan to compete in the 2012 Leadville Trail 100 — I paid big bucks to get in — and I share how on the new travel and adventure blog Free Range, which you can check out by visiting .
ROOM REPORT
Locals offering YSL deals. Two “haute” local hotel packages include VIP tickets that let you skip lines at the Denver Art Museum’s “Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective” exhibit. At The Curtis — a Doubletree by Hilton (1405 Curtis St., thecurtis.com, 800-525-6651), $199 per night gets you two tickets, champagne, breakfast buffet for two and parking (through July 8). At the JW Mariott (150 Clayton Lane, jw marriottdenver.com, 303-316-2700), $359 a night brings two tix, $100 Cherry Creek North gift card and $25 in the hotel restaurant Second Home Kitchen + Bar, plus parking (through July 8, use code MKXW).
Kyle Wagner: 303-954-1599 or outwest@denverpost.com
