Joe's Playground

Shortly after purchasing a mountain bike and doing a couple of races down at Wakefield Park in Annandale, Joe Dombrowski convinced me to race the Shenandoah Mountain 100. This race, I suspect will be the hardest ride or race that I will have ever done. It is 100 miles, 12,000 ft of climbing on a combination of single track and fire roads. The top riders like Jeremiah Bishop, Chris Eatough, Floyd Landis finish this in something more than 7 hours. It takes some 12 hours and many never get to the finish. Lance just won a like event in Colorado, the Leadville 100. He and Floyd were joking around that the Tour De France was just training for the Leadville 100. It would be cool to see Lance attend the SM100.

In preperation for the SM100, Joe took me out to some of his favorite training grounds out west of Front Royal in the National Forest. He's done these rides solo before, but doesn't like to as there are trails on this route that take you 15 miles away from something other than trails and it wouldn't be good to be stranded in the National Forest 15 miles away from any sort of road. The trails were brutal, rocky as all get out and some of them were simply unrideable. There was one point where I lost all anaerobic punch required to navigate one of the more technical sections after about 3.5 hours on the bike and I got a feel for how the SM100 could go if I'm not prepared. Nothing like being in the middle of the forest, void of both physical and mental capacity required to continue. This is when you just look at the rocks in front of you and slowly move your bike in the right direction. After 5.5 hours on the bike, we reached a ridge that was mostly unrideable and I had to walk my bike for what seemed like a mile. The final downhill stretch was windy with several switchbacks, sort of like Wakefield and fast. We ended up getting back to the car after 6.5 hours of riding and about 10 minutes before the sun went down. In hindsight, if anything would have gone wrong on the ride to delay us even 1/2 hour, it could have meant some trouble as I wasn't packing lights...mental note...bring lights next time...

This ride was by far the most technical and physically challenging rides that I've done. Joe claims to have done this particular ride over 30 times previously.

Joe's had a good run lately, placing top 10 (9th and 6th) in 2 junior national championship mtb races, 3rd at Mt Snow and he won the cat 3 sr road race championships at Page Valley last week after only ever racing a handful of races on the road.