2006
24 Hours of Big Bear Race Report
by Mac Stricklen
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I came skidding into the timing tent I shot a big raspberry at a
group of people who were enthusiastically cheering me on. They seemed
a little alarmed and confused. Perhaps it would have helped them
make sense of this little gesture if they would have known that I
was a Finger Puller (as in: “pull my finger”). We were
better known to the occupants of that timing tent at the 24 Hours
of Big Bear as team 55 of the 5 person co-ed class, but we were proud
of our identity as the Finger Pullers. And the wet fart noise I emulated
as I concluded my first lap was both a sign of that pride and a sign
of my enthusiasm for this event.
I had arrived
in the Finger Pullers camp with some trepidation. Not only had I
not finished a sub-hundred mile race since the early nineties, I
had done so little riding this year that my daily eight-mile commute
was leaving me exhausted. Meanwhile, 3 of my teammates, Marco Deshaies,
Kelly Shaw, and Aaron Burke had spent the spring laying down impressive
results with the Athens Bicycle team in the WVMBA points series.
My other teammate, Jeremy “Toad” Krohn had gotten strong
maintaining trails in the Monongahela National Forest, and generally
loves racing so much that he can pull out speed he has no reason
to have just because he has a number plate to chase after. But by
the end of my first lap, I was grinning from ear to ear. Not only
had I met my previously unspoken goal of turning in a lap time that
wasn’t an embarrassing mismatch when compared with my teammates’ but
I had discovered that the Big Bear course was inconceivably fun.
Although the Finger
Pullers were camped with the Shennandoah Mountain Touring Chicks
and the duo of Dixie Fixie and Single Chump, our approach to the
race seemed a drastic study in contrasts. Those two teams were both
well oiled machines with orchestras of dedicated support—and
their results showed it. The Finger Pullers were chartered under
a 5-way agreement that we weren’t allowed to care about our
results. We had all done a lot of riding together and had as much
fun turning each others’ conversation into juvenile humor as
we had turning over pedals; and we were all curious to see what 24
hour racing was all about, so we were well suited for one another.
But we were in it for fun and nothing else, so none of us wanted
to open ourselves up to team tension if things ended up not going
well. This just-for-fun credo meant we were heading into this with
no strategy, no formal support, no backup bikes, and in some of our
cases, no training. But we did manage to have fun, and plenty of
it, but we would occasionally stray from the Finger Pullers path.
Miss Kelly Shaw
returned from her night lap so giggly she couldn’t quite articulate,
but at that point I was having trouble catching that enthusiasm.
As much fun as I’d had in my first lap, I had broken the Finger
Puller tenet: I had worried about my results, and was now paying
the price. My obsession with not having a worse lap time than my
teammates had caused me to put out more than I really had, and now
before I’d even started lap 2, I was stiff and sore, and having
trouble keeping down food and water.
All of the Finger
Pullers had some exposure to riding 100 mile mt. bike races in the
past, and this had led to some debate as to whether or not the 40
or so miles we’d each do at 24 Hours could even be classified
as endurance racing. At 3 a.m., when I was cold, tired, hungry, and
confused somewhere on the backside of my night lap, I ended that
debate. The mental and emotional stores I had to tap at that moment
were the same as had fueled me each time I ground out the infamous
2nd climb up Hankey Mountain in the Shenandoah Mountain 100. 24 hour
racing—even on a 5 person team—is truly endurance racing.
Sunrise seemed
to bring a sense of giddiness and fun back to the Finger Pullers
camp. The morning spent around the dwindling campfire was filled
with the immature humor that has been the hallmark of the Finger
Pullers since our inception. And it only gets better when heavily
peppered with exhaustion.
At some point during my seemingly endless night lap, I had done the math and
realized that each of us would do exactly 3 laps, which would put me in the
position to finish out the race for us. I had spent a fair amount of that lap
trying to figure out if there was a way to ask Marco to do my last one for
me without having to admit to myself that I’d completely wussed out.
Luckily it never became an issue. As I started to sense the event coming to
a close I realized I would be heartbroken to go home without taking another
whirl on that awesome singletrack. I’m happy to report that 24 hours
later it was just as much fun.
My fear, now that
it’s all said and done, is that the riding at Big Bear Lake
will be just as much fun after a year. I didn’t even have my
bike on the roof of Toad’s car before I was asking myself the
question that will inevitably lead to doing it again. What would
this be like if I’d trained? What would that night lap have
been like if I’d had some decent lights? What would it be like
to ride that course on a fixed gear? Was the filthiness of the portapotties
just a fluke? How would we have done if we had openly cared about
our results? Would we still be the Finger Pullers?
I ’ll probably
have the answers to all that and more. Next year.
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