Contrary to popular belief, I’m not crazy. This is exactly what I tried to convince Tiffany Dearman of a few months ago when we she was so nice to ride 50 miles with me. There is a reason I did all the Leadville races….all this training. It started almost 4 years ago when my friend John Eddington told me I could get into Leadville 100MTB on a lottery. And, it gets better. When there’s a group that enters the lottery, there’s a better chance that you’ll get in. So, I signed up with a group out of Flower Mound for the 2016 Leadville 100 MTB lottery.
Me and John 2016 Leadville pre-ride
Let’s back up for a minute (or a few years) first. The last races I had actually trained for were Boston 2014 and a few ultras leading into Boston. I did run a 50-mile race on a pretty tough “TEXAS” course in 2013. I was also doing the TMBRA (TX Mountain Bike Racing Association) cat 3 race series around that time. Needless to say, it had been a while since I had really put the thought, effort and time into training for anything.
Lo and behold, I learned I got into that lottery in January 2016. I had 7 months to train. Oh, did I mention I had not ridden 100 miles since Ironman in 2006? And, I had never raced in the mountains. I was told by many that Leadville MTB was no joke and to take it seriously. I had better get my butt in gear. I’ll make this part of the story as short as possible. I started dating my now husband in February 2016. We had a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong. But, it DID NOT include enough of the right training for Leadville. He even rode 100 miles with me on his 50th birthday!! I mean, who does that?!
LP 50th birthday ride starting at White Rock Lake!
I get to Leadville that year and made it to mile 73 and missed the cutoff by 3 minutes. So, that was the end of Leadville for me. My best friend Karen was there with LP and I was so defeated. I didn’t have any issues. No nutrition problems, no altitude sickness. Just wasn’t strong enough to climb fast enough to finish. The really crappy thing was they had two different cutoff times posted (one their website and the other in the athlete guide) and I wrote the WRONG time down on my top tube. I thought I was going to make it when I was riding into that aid station only to see them starting to close it down. (I didn’t know it at this time, but this information becomes important later on in this saga.) Life goes on and eventually we talked about getting married and me adopting his two daughters and they move to Fort Worth. I was still exercising regularly during all of this time, just not anything structured.
