Maratona dles Dolomites 2012. Unfinished Business

3

July 9, 2012 by shortbloke

First things First

First things first. The Maratona Dles Dolomites is a great event. It’s well planned and well executed. It’s a chance to ride some serious mountains in the company of some exceptional riders in one of the most beautiful places in the world.  The food stations are placed frequently (if not always in the most logical places) and well stocked. Support was everywhere, including medical and mechanical. The routes are the same every year,  interesting and well planned. The registration on site was a little slow but well organised and provided an informative rider pack. The freebies were useful and high quality (a really good quality shirt and gilet).

In summary, if you ever get the chance to do the Maratona Dles Dolomites, don’t hesitate.

The Blokes’s Story

So, on to the Bloke’s story.

It appears I am capable of both false modesty and misplaced confidence in equal measure. The previous two days of riding at a not unreasonable pace of 17kph over around 50K of proper climbs in the area had filled me a sense of confidence that I could do this, and do it not badly.

On the day, things turned out a little differently.

Can we go now, can we?

4:45am. Having laid everything I needed out the night before, I was able to move quickly from sleeping to dressing to muesli to tea to filling my pockets with 8 gels, spare contact lenses, a credit card, some cash and a phone. Double check the bike. 120psi in the tyres, tighten shoes. 5:30am.  Done. Ready. Can we go now?

Outside the window the voices mixed with the noise of wheels rolling as a steady stream of cyclists passed on their way to the starting pens. The small child in my head was pleading impatiently … “can we go now? Can we? Can we go nooow ?”.  Fortunately the small child stayed in my head, allowing the fully grown man my companions thought they were traveling with to retain at least a thin facade of machismo nonchalance.

Finally we joined the stream and rolled down to the pens. In the pens, surrounded mainly by Italians, it was striking how clean all the bikes were. They were all spotless. We wondered whether any of them had ever seen a wet road. Either these guys had spent hours cleaning every crank and cog, or they were all riding their “dry” bikes, leaving a grubby mud splattered “wet” bike back home in the shed.

We drank our spare water, made a couple of final trips to the portaloos, and waited.  The sound scape continued with the gentle tones of the local priest’s blessing …”in nome del padre..”…

A thousand clicks and we’re off

Suddenly I spotted the Mexican start wave washing over the pack of cyclists that strung out into the distance ahead of us. As it approached we were engulfed in a chorus of clicks as we all  us rose up over our saddles and pushed our  shoes into our  pedals together. I can’t begin to describe the feeling. Car-free roads, amazing landscapes, proper mountains, glistening bikes all around. 7:00am on a wet Sunday morning in Hertfordshire really doesn’t compare.

At first it was a little slow as the shear mass of riders filled the entire road. Eventually things strung out and I was able to settle into a comfortable pace. We had been advised to cycle in the middle of the road. Good advice. Either side was filled with impatient riders whistling and calling in an attempt to clear their path through the melee. Best not to get in their way.

This is an unforgiving course. Almost immediately it turns up.  There’s no time to relax into it. In fact, the whole ride is a set of extreme climbs that roll seamlessly into super fast descents and back again with an almost complete lack of flats.

The ascents are all hard and the descents all fast. In most cases the descents roll out far ahead in plain sight. With no cars it’s easy to let your wheels roll. Personally I like to sit up in the descents, at the cost of some wind resistance. Aside from reducing the risk of crashing into a tree, it means I can relax a little, soak up the view and rest my legs. It’s the most amazing feeling. Words do not even come close.  Even doing that I reached a max of 71kph. I can’t begin to imagine what speed the guys tucked up tight behind their bars reached, especially those that were giving gravity some extra help by pedaling out of the downhill hairpins.

Playing Spot The Bloke

GB had ridden off from the start with some determination. For the first part of the course I just about had him in sight, whilst riding on and off with TB and NB. I was feeling good and confident of finishing well. GB was out in front, but his blue shirt was mostly recognisable in the mass of riders ahead of me.

Eventually though, GB was lost out in front. Then NB passed and left me. Finally TB caught and passed me too. There was nothing I could do about it. Feeling somewhat frustrated, I pressed on, scanning the riders in front of me for a familiar backside.

Then it went really wrong. In one way or another, for all of us.

Oh dear

Finally I caught TB, NB at the top of Compalongo at something around 11:00am. We discussed the cut off for the long route (11:40am) but really, none of us took it too seriously. We hung around a little – just a few minutes – at the feed station and took our breath before rolling down the descent and along the rolling dips in the approach to the cut off turn. Then we saw the police cars. It was 11:49am.

It really was a cut off. Clearly they can’t hold the roads closed for ever, so cut offs are an essential part of the race plan, and they really weren’t going to let us through because they needed to open the road. We were too late. Too slow. They said we could go through if we surrendered our timing chips and rode without support, but that was not a sensible option. The only option was to turn left and complete the Medio course.

We stood there amongst some 20 other riders who had also missed the cut, slightly stunned. We had been complacent. We thought we were fit enough and we had lulled ourselves into the the false sense of security that the cut was a warning not a deadline. We were wrong.

So there we were. Hot, sweaty, tired and too late.

Gutted. G.U.T.T.E.D.

Eventually reality sank in and we turned left and pressed on to the next major climb (Passo Falzarego). About 12K of serious up. The entire climb is visible from the base, so it’s very clear what lays in store. The shear vertical size of the vista in the line of sight is daunting.

At this point, NB had gone ahead. About two thirds of the way up, I lost TB as well. I was toast, and the last of the Blokes. GB had made the cut, YB too. NB and TB had shown more fortitude than I and kept their pace. I was getting slower and slower and frankly, I was roasting like a chicken. It was approaching 35C and I could not take it. I stopped at least 4 times on that climb, once at a road side fountain where I drank down a bottle and a half of ice cold spring water, with more appreciation than I can possibly describe.

Meanwhile, GB had his own problems. I didn’t find this out till the end, but his focus, training and attention to detail had paid off. He’d made the cut and had also made it over the Gau, the biggest of all the climbs on the route and the one everyone we had asked about the long route tended to mention.

However, it all went wrong on the other side. Half way down the Gau he blew a tyre and came off in a pretty serious way. The inner tube exploded with such force it blew the tyre clean off his wheel. Fortunately he was breaking into a turn at the time, so not moving at full speed. Stunned and little shaken, he replaced his tyre before noticing that his break levers were completely bent over, putting him and his bike out of action.  All he could do was wait for the broom wagon to pick him up and take him home (see – riding with support is a sensible thing to do….). Gutted, but basically unharmed, his ride was over at the point.

In one way, GB was lucky. Sirens were a constant part of the day’s sound scape – constantly in ear shot if not in the sight line.  Not sure if they were crashes or exhaustion, but through the day I saw a few riders ending their day getting lifted into the back of an ambulance. GB can be thankful, if only a little, he was instead taken home in the broom wagon.

YB’s ride was also not quite perfect, blighted by some mechanical issues. His bottom bracket bearings started to stick about one third of the way in. The mechanics had no replacements, which is irritating. He was told it was all over but being a stubborn Saffa he decided to press on. He did amazingly well, despite a sticky bearing, making the cut and finishing in a reasonable time. Still, there’s that nagging feeling that the recorded time isn’t quite what it could have been.

Umberto, come stai ?

Back on Falzarego and a lack of endurance was knocking me back steadily. Annoyingly for both him and me, NB had finally found his rhythm and drifted past me out of sight without so much as a heavy breath. He later complained that he’d wished he’d felt like that earlier in the ride. Perhaps there is some Psychology there – only once it didn’t really matter did he find his full form. I resisted the temptation to show any sympathy, given how familiar the view of his backside disappearing into the distance is for me.

TB had also left me  in “how the hell do they do that” mode, trying to stay alive rather than worrying about how to catch them up. Heat is clearly an issue for me. Perhaps my nutrition planning was not great. Perhaps I had not  hydrated properly the day before. Perhaps I did not drink enough on the day. I’m not sure. What’s clear is that I was clearly lacking the endurance required to do this ride properly.

Aside from trailing NB and TB, there was no shortage of good looking Italians to remind me of that fact either. All the way up Falzarego I was tracking one group clad entirely in stylish black (I never got close enough to check on how clean their bikes were, but my guess would be spotless).  One rider was clearly weaker than the rest and his buddy was periodically having to wait for him. More than once I passed him as he balanced his bike across the hill, calling down to his friend to check he was ok…”Umberto, come stai ?”. I passed him more than once because once he had established his mate was ok, he would sprint past me back up to the pack and ride with them for while.

Yes, you heard me, Sprint. Back up the hill. Back up like a 9% stretch of proper mountain in 35C of burning sunshine. For crying out loud, talk about rubbing it in. If I hadn’t wanted to kill him, it would have been a pleasure to watch.

There were more moments like that to come. The Medio route cuts the corner off the long route. The two routes meet up at the base of the Passo Valporola, about 500m from the very top. On the shorter route and therefore ahead of the long route riders matching our own pace, we were thrust into the midst of the faster long route riders as they poured over the mini peak and rattled round the corner onto the final climb. It was a shocking to see the pace and how fresh they looked. There I was, barely able to breath. There were they, having done 30K more than me and one more climb, looking like they had just started out. Fresh, pumping hard. It was, frankly, amazing to see. To look and feel like that after 120K of mountain climbing. How great would that be ? I fear I will never know, but as long as it’s fun trying to find out, I guess I don’t really mind.

Unfinished business

There is of course no shame in doing the Medio course. For me at least, I did most of the course with no real issue. We all climbed some seriously big ascents and at least some of us made a pace that anyone would call respectable.

Personally, I  finished 106Km of climbs and descents in some proper mountains.  I was the last of the Blokes and recorded a bottom quartile time on the event, but a time never the less. My official time was 7hrs 21m, with an average speed of 14.4kph.  That’s 6 minutes behind NB and TB. My Garmin has completely different times, so I’m not entirely sure I started it at the right point, but it says I had a moving time of 6 hrs 39m. That’s quite a bit of catching my breath and filling my bottles.

The Medio was hard, with only one less climb than the long route (close to 3,500m in total). There were successes and a great deal of hard riding done by all of us. I learned some new things, about this ride, about how age is not really a factor, about how I ride, about how much training is required to do one of these things and once again, how important fluids and nutrition are (I’ll post something more about all that later). All good.

But one thing is clear. We had gone there to do the Maratona long course. And not all of us had made it.

Clearly, The Blokes have some unfinished business in the Italian Dolomites.