It appears that my time matched pretty well with the official time 6:04:45 and 6:05. Tied with David for 126th place.
We beat out 23% of the racers in the field. Though only 133 people finished, as 32 DNFed.
Now it's time to start looking through the data (why the hell else do I have the fancy Garmin 500 and HRM?!)
The bonus tour at the start was 5.3m and 23:27. I'll go ahead and delete those and use the remainder as my time to work from: 5:41:18
I was stopped for 49:30, which is pretty bad, as it means I was stopped for 14.4% of the time I was racing! Ouch. 9 minutes was at Fire Tower SAG, 17 in Story, only about 2 minutes at the first checkpoint. 3:50 trying to figure out if a turn was or wasn't (hey, it had tape!)
Combs "Road" Okay, so I know now that I really need to work on my off road skills., and even the fast guys were walking pieces of that. However, on the way out I was stopped 5:17! One the way back, I did even worse and was stopped for 6:13! Yes, I was stopped to let people pass here and there, but damn! That's 23% of my total stopped time!
How about this, the first 40 miles, from the start to the beginning of Combs, only took 3:08, and I was stopped for less than 15 minutes! And that includes the extra 5.3m/23:27, take that out and you're looking at 35 miles and 2:45!
The final 24 miles took 2:57 and I was stopped for 35 minutes.
What does all this mean? Not a whole lot, really. However, looking at the numbers, means that next year, I could quite easily achieve a sub-5:30 time, and with adequate training sub-5:00 is possible.
What to work on:
Fueling. My eating and drinking has been based upon touring, not racing. Racing needs more calories, more consistently. As well as more fluids.
Off Road Skills. I haven't really ridden any type of trails since I was a kid on a BMX bike. This may entail turning Beast back into a flatbar bike and hitting the trails. Sadly, the trails are now pretty much off limits until spring (or a hard freeze) as riding on them in their current state will destroy them. Fire roads are an option as well, but those are more what I'm riding anyway. Riding the CX track could help some.
If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them
I'm late responding, but I'll second the CX track. Likewise, some of the alleys throughout Louisville -- especially in Old Lou and the Highlands -- are in horrible enough shape to almost qualify as 'off-road.' If nothing else, they'll keep you riding soft (especially if you ride them on a road bike!), which really helps on gravel and singletrack.
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