As part of my newfound addiction to mountain biking, Bobby and I have become very active in volunteering for various biking events, including trail maintenance days and races. We had volunteered for an all-day adventure race yesterday and were scheduled to arrive at Fountainhead Regional Park at 5:30am. Do you know how early that is for a Sunday morning? Yeah, neither do I. After oversleeping, we arrived a little after 6:30am.
Our first task of the day was to manage the parking lot and help arriving racers determine where to go. This turned out to be a piece of cake, especially because people drove straight past me as I tried to wave them down to stop. One nice person even waved back as he flew by. I thought that was very friendly.
After working the parking lot, Bobby and I hiked through the woods to Shock-A-Billy Hill, a particularly steep, rutted descent that can be very dangerous if not ridden properly. This hill was at the end of the mountain bike segment of the race, and each rider had to go down the hill twice during course of the race. We were charged with assisting racers in descending the hill and navigating the two-way trail area at the base of the slope. Watching riders go down the hill was exciting and we heard a few good comments from the racers as they passed, my favorite of which was, “I make it a policy to walk anything that has a name.” I also shaved ten years off my life from watching dozens of near crashes and breathtaking skids.
However, because the overall course was very long, there was a lot of down time spent waiting for riders to appear and things got a bit dull. Bobby and I played Tic-Tac-Toe and Hangman in the dirt with a stick, and then started a game called “How Many Sticks Can You Throw Onto That Log Ten Feet Away”. That transitioned into a game called “I’ve Been Sitting At The Top Of This Damn Hill For Five Hours And I Want To Poke You In The Face With This Stick”.
I would like to give special recognition to The Hospitalizer, an enthusiastic spectator who joined us on the hill towards the very end. In my whole day on Shock-A-Billy Hill, I’d only seen a few messy falls. However, after The Hospitalizer joined us, I witnessed three nasty, tumbling crashes within twenty minutes, one of which resulted in a dislocated shoulder and a trip to the hospital for the rider who had just been encouraged by The Hospitalizer to “let it all go and just believe!”
When the flow of riders had trickled down to a few every ten or so minutes, we decided to headed back and start our next task: removing markings from the course. That was a lot of fun, especially when we’d be gasping and heaving up a steep climb, only to look over and see an arrow marking the trail that needed to be removed. I can understand the importance of marking the course, but two things repeatedly came to mind: (1) Part of the adventure race was navigation, so wouldn’t just a few less arrows have made it more interesting? And, (2) If the trail is going straight with absolutely no detours or turns possible, is it really necessary to signal that the trail continues forward? Were many riders inclined to make abrupt turns into the trees? Bobby became so irritated by having to stop every 0.7 inches on an eight mile trail to rip a paper arrow off a tree that he threatened to “papercut the race director while handing over the arrows!”
Bobby is a very menacing person.
Over two hours after setting out on a route that usually takes us just under an hour, Bobby and I finished the course (beat that, time trialers!) and called it quits. We tried to be optimistic about the day in the car on our way home, but after working for over ten hours, the best thing we came up with was, “At least we weren’t eaten by a bear.” Although in retrospect, that would have at least broken the monotony of sitting in the woods for five hours.