Forte Deux's Race Across Oregon 2011 - by Erica McKenzie

Well I can’t say I have ever had a strong urge to participate in an endurance bike race, but super cyclist Sarah on my Sorella Forte bike team spent a few months coercing me into the idea of racing 518 miles as a 2 woman team. The only time I have covered that kind of distance is during the infamous RAGBRAI (ride across Iowa), which involves sensibly splitting 480 miles into 7 days and 55 beer garden stops in the company of 20 000 close friends. Your most challenging moment on RAGBRAI is finding your tent amongst 8 000 others, or trying to ride a straight line after the last beer garden of the day without attracting the local police. Covering 500 miles in less than 36 hours, sober, and with minimal company was daunting in comparison. But eventually I agreed on the condition that Sarah would ride the uphills and I could race my TT bike to train for ironman. We dubbed our team ‘Forte Deux’ (strong two) to recognize our connection with Sorella Forte. The next thing we needed was an unwitting crew, so our poor ball and chains, Colby and Dave, were automatically delegated the task while we tried not to emphasize the fact that they would be looking after two tired, crabby, smelly, emotional women for two days while driving 520 miles at 15 miles an hour. Our crew leader was our good friend Dan who has raced and crewed RAO before, and provided a wealth of knowledge and experience as well as the first nudge toward the idea of breaking the two woman record. The upside of having these three boys as our crew, all of them engineers, became obvious after picking up the rental van. Before you could say ‘Enterprise needs to know nothing about this!’ Dan had turned the van into a moving headquarters, complete with a bed, closet, kitchen, computer table, multiple coffee cup holders, a loudspeaker and an awesome external lighting system. Seriously, it even had pen holders!!! After a dry run around Corvallis to practice exchanges and to give us some experience riding at night with a van stalking our tails, we headed up to Hood River. The race director George is an absolute hoot and, unknown to me, had google searched all of us before we arrived. When he started spilling all sorts of weird details about me at registration I had to stop and think for a while if I had forgotten about a stalker from my past. I told him I was simply there to ride the flat parts, and I thought he was hilarious when he told me to enjoy all 11 miles of it. However, as Colby blithely pointed out, there is 11 miles of flat if you summate the short flat tops of the hills on the course. It was at this point that I began to wonder exactly what I was getting into, and at the pre-race meeting I started seeing RAO shirts labeled proudly with ‘40,000 feet of climbing’ but was luckily distracted by some other more interesting regalia (the shirt that said ‘Share the Road Dickhead’ was my favorite I think). We met the teams we would be duking it out with and listened to some entertaining questions such as ‘It says in the rule book we can’t strip naked and dance around outside the van, but how about inside?’, asked by a 60 year old man who seemed dead serious. While Dan was being an awesome crew captain and working hard on pre-race preparation details, I had been secretly accruing a long list of mistakes and issues to hide from him, including a new saddle on my bike two days before the race, half a night of serious gastroenteritis after boasting at the pre-race dinner about how tasty my big plate of creamy chicken pasta with bacon was, forgetting to even consider what kind of gearing I had on either of my bikes (irrelevant when you’re riding flats right?), and planning my diet of Swedish fish, cocoa puffs, Gatorade and peanut butter sandwiches. At 7am Saturday George led the two-person teams out on a very scenic 6 mile parade start to Mosier, where I met up with the crew while Sarah took off on the first leg of the race. We started with 90 minute pulls, and the incoming rider would overlap wheels with the waiting rider, who then took off from a standstill, sometimes straight up a very steep climb which was tough. I soon became very aware of the fact that there was no flat road on the course and I was going to have to put on my big girl pants and actually go up some hills! We raced a relatively fast first 200 miles, rotating regularly in the heat and leap frogging with other teams while trying to figure out what work/rest cycles would work for us. The routine quickly became jump off the bike, pee by the road (if you’re like me you lost your comfort zone with this when you were 3!) and scramble into the van to eat, drink, prep gear for the next rotation and rest and cool off until it was time to leap out again. The scenery was absolutely spectacular as we rolled on through some distinctly uninhabited regions and towns like Fossil, Antelope, Spray, and Ukiah toward Heppner. George showed up for a while in the car and drove alongside me chatting and taking pics (what an amazing race director – he drove the whole route and talked to all of us!). The team had to leave me and jump ahead to Heppner to get gas and ice before 7pm when direct following of riders by the van became mandatory until 7 the next morning, and George was there again to greet us when we made an exchange in Heppner. For the night time we went to 75 minute pulls to balance riding and sleeping. Riding at night in the small oasis of headlights from the van was fairly surreal, especially on some of the steep descents, but the cool night air brushing past was wonderful after a hot day, and the wildlife was amazing. I was surrounded by a blanket of stars watching owls fly right over my head, and other large birds of an unknown species swooping and wheeling right in front of me. I was paced for a while by a skunk running up the shoulder with his tail in the air, so I relinquished my half of the road to him just to make sure I didn’t get sprayed, knowing if I did my crew would leave me out for the remaining 250 miles! When Dan was obviously enjoying providing some graphic detail about a nasty climb ahead of me over the PA I gave the crew another moon to look at but I don’t think they realized you can still hear normal conversation through the dormant PA system as I heard some raucous laughter and Dan saying loudly ‘Well that was exciting!’. However, despite the cool temperatures, after some slow and demoralizing sections in the night, it was a relief to wake and see the sky lightening to dawn, and at that point it became much easier to turn the pedals. Unfortunately with the light also came 92 degree temperatures with no wind, no shade and a black road surface, so the crew kept busy dousing us with water and reminding us to shove ice in our clothes. I was battling a progressively sorer knee, and was climbing a lot more than I expected which on the TT bike was proving tough, so after about 200 miles I made the change to my road bike which thankfully Dave had also put time into prepping for me (you have to cover any bike for the race with a mile of semi-trailer reflective tape). I don’t think I’d been on that bike more than 20 miles when I got a rear flat, but luckily the trusty van was there sneaking along behind me and the guys quickly threw me another bike and fixed the flat in the next town. At this point we knew we were on track for the women’s record with a good buffer so Sarah and I both focused on trying to maintain at least a 15 mph average, though we still had many sizable climbs, including the last 17 mile ripper, to get over before the end. Going up one of these I watched the cute brother-sister Heron team (brother is on OSU cycling and damn fast!) doing ‘hot swaps’ where they were exchanging every ½ mile or so, and consequently putting some serious time into us. So on the last big climb we followed suit and exchanged every mile, keeping up a good pace so that near the top of the last climb we had two teams in our sight, including the men’s team that Dan dearly wanted us to catch. However as soon as they went over the top for the last 30 miles of descent they put on their cement wheels and were gone until seen later in the bar replenishing themselves. Sarah and I rode the last 5 miles to the finish together, and crossed the finish line tape with linked hands and huge smiles to receive a hug from George, and a bottle of ‘Total Domination IPA’ Dave bought to share with me as a fun post-race toast. In the end we finished in 34 hours, 55 minutes, with a square acre of chafe. One mixed gender team blew us all away by two hours and was seen driving back to Canada as we were still descending into Hood river, but we were within 25 minutes of the 2nd and 3rd place mixed teams and also the two man team. Furthermore, we took something like 2 hours off the two woman RAO record. We lost 27 minutes in overnight exchanges since having a single van forced us to stop forward progress during exchanges; however the extra cost to add a van would have been about $37 a minute and would have changed the ambiance of the group for sure. The awards breakfast the next morning was a blast. George had been shopping at the dollar store and picked up all sorts of strange prizes to distribute. One racer got a book that all of us deserved, appropriately entitled ‘When smart people do stupid things’ and the solo guy who got 7 flats was given a grabbing instrument to clear the road in front of him. Sarah and I were given Barbie dolls (though George pointed out proudly that they were actually cheap knock offs!) and a rafting trip down the Deschutes River. The winning solo man who was crewed by his wife got a room for two and some massage oil to go with it! George kept us all laughing with his running commentary of things that were done (someone pressure washing their bike shorts in a small town car wash, while still wearing them) or said (‘The race was great but my crew is just terrible!’) during the race. When he told us about a Canadian team that had a bike rack malfunction and disassembled the bike to go in the car at each exchange I laughed out loud when Dan muttered smugly under his breath ‘Well obviously they didn’t have an engineer on THEIR crew!’. Dan was also appropriately recognized by George for his long and successful association with RAO. Then, after a mandatory visit to Starbucks since we were all still whipped, we headed home and in two hours had the van back to a state that suggested we only drove it around the block as long as no-one checked the odometer. In summary, it was an amazing experience despite my initial reservations. We covered 518 miles in record time for a two woman team at that specific event. My contribution was 280.7 miles, ~ 22 000 feet of climbing (figured out retroactively by Dave using mapping software since I was too dumb to use my computer properly) and 18.5 hours in the saddle. I knew going in I would wear out knees and/or crotch, and Dave, quietly barracking for it to be the knees if anything, kind of got his wish, but they are recovering well. Our crew did an awesome job supporting us, and splitting up our efforts to play to our strengths while sharing the workload effectively, and getting less sleep than we did. They were truly amazing, and constantly kept us encouraged and focused on our targets in order of priority: DON’T get hit, DON’T get hurt, DON’T get unfriendly, and GET the record. Thanks also to the many people that lent us equipment or advice to make this possible, and the fun and vivacious volunteers operating on two days or more of sleep deprivation. The pain has dulled enough, and Dave enjoyed it enough, that we’re already considering a mixed team attempt in 2013.

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