believe it.

caption: ow.

Part of me wanted to think that the Saveageman bike course was ... a little bit of hype. Of course, I KNEW it was a tough course, but I thought - maybe - that some triathletes were puffing our their chests. Maybe it was a wee bit exagerated? They weren't, and it wasn't.

Believe. The. Hype.

This morning at 6:00 a.m., three triathletes left Catonsville for Deep Creek Lake. We were on the course at 9:20. The first 18 miles are rolling hills... certainly not easy, but doable. Oh, and gorgeous... the beauty of this course is unbelieveable -- lakes, blasted out mountains, creeks, tall trees. Amazing. So the first 18 miles were okay. I felt okay. The decent was a BLAST - I hit 40 mph... oh, and I swallowed a fly.

And then we hit the town of Westernport, home of the famed Westernport Wall.

The climb up TO the wall was brutal -- so much so that I had to hop off my bike ... and getting back on it was no picnic. I didn't make it up the wall - I bit it about 3/4 of the way up - but I'm not worried about it. The wall is so short -- if I make it, great, and if I don't, well, there's another 36 miles of climbing where I can prove myself. Haha.

The next part of the course was a climb up a gravel road -- the dust was really bothering my eyes. There were some more sharp decents, and then more climbing -- there are Seven Big Hills (excluding, of course, the smaller hills on the rolling hills).

I did pretty well with nutrition and hydration - I had a Gu, Luna Moons, or Sport Beans every 45 minutes, and alteranted Accelerade, Gatorade, and water. We stopped at a little store and I got salted peanuts. Good call on my part -- they were just what I needed.

And then, after hill number... 4? 5? I was separated from my group. They had been really great about stopping and waiting for my slow ass, but when I reached a fork in the road, they weren't there. I rode around for a while, called around them ... but no such luck. Finally, I knocked on someone's door and called my mom, who checked my email and gave me the phone numbers of my riding buddies. I got a hold of them and finally caught up.

What did I learn from this?

1. Bring my OWN cue sheet!

2. Carry my cell phone!

The hills were KILLER ... I was in my granny gear and huffing and puffing all the way up them... I had to stop and walk a couple of times. Total climb: 5940 feet.

Final stats:

4h 45m 44s
58.60 miles
12.31 Mi/hr

The average MPH is really funny (and, um, really slow), because I was going 4-7 mph on the hills and 20-30 mph on the decents. Only 2 people last year went over 20 mph on the course. It's seee-low.

We stopped at an Unos and all four of us had a giant burger and fries and beer. Mmm. Beer.