PMBAR- a little history

The race is over and I am pleasantly tired. This race report is going to be long so I'll do it in stages. This was my 3rd time doing this race. The first time was 5 years ago and I was still a beginner mountain biker. Yes, for some reason I decided I wanted to do the hardest races out there as a beginner. Needless to say, the first year my teammate Stephen and I DNF'd after getting 3 checkpoints in 10 hours. We both bonked, we both crashed, and the riding was..just..brutal. The next year I went back for more with my friend Carol Ann, who I met through the mtbeer forums back in the day. We met in person at the Offroad Assault on Mount Mitchell, and then decided to race as a female team at the Pisgah Death March. I think we got 4 checkpoints that day but we were disqualified for making a route error and using the Blue Ridge Parkway for a minute. Both those years, Eddie raced with Harvey Minton and both years they did well--in the top 3 or 5 teams. I also remember Marvin and Karen Masson racing together and thinking.."Wow, I wonder if I could ever be good enough to race this with Eddie.."

Fast forward 4 years to 2010 and here we were..Eddie and I lining up to race together. This would be a first..sure we have done many of the same races, even as Duo teams, but never anything like this...together, side by side, with a map and a lot of unknowns. To be honest, I was a little nervous. Neither of us had ridden in Pisgah in over 3 years so while a few of the trails were somewhat memorable, the details were very fuzzy. We had worked out a little strategy to maximize our abilities for the day so that helped ease the nerves a little bit, at least. Eddie didn't seem concerned, it was just a long ride in the woods for us.

On Friday we wanted to do a little riding to open our legs up after racing at Cohutta 65/100 last week. But, instead we ended up just doing a hike at Black Mountain with the dogs.

After that we rushed to get some dinner in Brevard and back to camp to pack up the Ergon BD-2, the pack for the day.

The nutrition plan was to stick with PowerBar Endurance, PowerGel in the Hydrapak Softflask, and PowerGel Blasts. We packed a lot of extra snacks just in case, but I really did NOT want to be out longer than 8 hours..10 was the absolute limit. The whole point of this race was to enjoy Pisgah riding AND the post-race beer and burrito with friends.