Thought I'd share a little about my summer project.  No it's not GIS or software related - hence the "life" category tag.

Around May of this year, a co-worker (who shall remain unnamed since he bailed on actually doing it) asked me if I'd be interested in doing the Laramie Enduro mountain bike race. Now, I'm not a "racer" by any means, but I'd heard about this event in the past and thought it sounded like an "interesting" ride. About all I knew is that friends had said it was "long", and it was in Wyoming.

A little background - the Laramie Enduro is a 70 mile / 111 kilometer mountain bike suffer-fest, held at the end of July (hot) just east of Laramie Wyoming. In the abstract, 70 miles sounds long, but still not to bad. Throw in the fact that it's all dirt, about half single track, at least 7,500 feet in elevation with 6700 feet of climbing, and it gets a little more daunting. Add to that conversations with various friends who are serious cyclists, and who say this is a very hard ride, and you start to get a little worried. After a lot of training (~600 miles) I got up to doing 55 mile rides on a regular basis, at which point I realized that 70 miles was indeed very long. Very very long. For those interested in checking it out, here's a link to some KML on Google Maps showing the course.

Fast forward to last Saturday, July 28,2007 - race day.  The short story is that I finished in an unremarkable 9 hours and 30 minutes total time, with a riding time of just over 8:30. The longer story involved getting up at 5:00am, making poor breakfast choices, much internal debate about pulling out of the race at the last few aid stations, consuming more Gu than I thought was possible, and a furious ride up the final, dreaded "Headquarters Hill" when I found out (by riding up half of it without realizing I was on it) that it was much much easier than the hills I'd been training on (fyi - if you're in Fort Collins, ride Michaud as a prep for this race). 

Overall, this was easily the hardest thing I've every done, yet, I'm already  planning on doing it next year and plotting out more appropriate training rides.

One thing that I realized, in reflecting back on this, is that the hardest part for me was dealing with the "psychic weight" of not knowing what was coming up next. Aid stations were spaced about 10 miles apart. You could pull out at an aid station with little risk, but if you were out on course and  bonked, cramped up, got hurt etc, it could be a few hours before anyone got to you. Since the latter sounded extremely unpleasant, I was leaning to pull myself out at each station. Yet, within minutes of leaving the station this fear melted away, and I knew I would make it to the next station just fine.
Yet, the unknown aspect was making me ride very conservatively - never pushing too hard for fear that I'd have tapped out all my reserves prior to "Headquarters Hill". Anyhow - most of this is for those who know me, and those who may Google for the Laramie Enduro looking for info, but I did briefly think about trying to tie this anxiety of the unknown back to software development, but I think I'll leave this as a pure "life" posting.