PMBAR (Pisgah Mountain Bike Adventure Race) takes mountain bike racing to a whole other level of adventure.  Combine endurance mountain bike racing, route selection to checkpoints, and the killer trail network that is the Pisgah Ranger District and you get PMBAR.

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This week I was lucky enough to go to the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.  I’d been to the bay area a few times before but never had the opportunity to ride.  I was stoked to find out that Pacific Bikes was just two blocks away from my hotel – they hooked me up with a Giant TCR Carbon road machine and some great ideas on routes.  Originally I wanted to rent a mountain bike and hit some trails on Mt. Tam (you know, that place where Gary Fisher and others started the whole MTB thing).  But apparently all the good singletrack on Mt. Tam is closed to MTB now so I opted for a road ride instead.

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NOTE:  Huge thanks to BradO for taking pictures and allowing me to use them in this blog post!  Also, there are some more pictures here.

Last weekend I went back to race in the Pisgah Mountain Bike Adventure for the 5th time.  At this point it’s a mix of both tradition and addiction - a full days worth of epic racing in Pisgah – hard to turn that down!  (Check out last year’s race report if you’re interested in more background on PMBAR)

Alex and I did the race last year, but decided to split up this year and bring two PMBAR first timers into the fold (Jim and Dave P).  We definitely had some fun messing with them … “yeah, I hear Eric’s gonna make it really hard this year” … “10-12 hours at least just to finish” … “50% finish rate”.

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“There’s a full moon out so let’s go climb all the way up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, ride along the parkway and over some snow/ice patches, and do a lap around Pisgah at night.”

Yeah right … suggest those things to your riding buds and they’re likely to think you’ve gone totally mental – off your rocker.  Well thanks to Eric and The Most Horrible Thing Ever for bringing together enough like minded loonies to take on such an epic challenge!

I’ll just start off by saying this was really hard - probably definitely the most suffering I’ve done on a bike.  A few stats for those into the numbers:

• 175 miles
• 21,463’ of climbing
• 14,600 calories burned
• 37.5 hours (midnight Friday night until 1:30 PM Sunday)

The GPS had never seen numbers like this before!

NOTE: Read on for the story of how this all unfolded … I also put together this page with all the passports (routes), GPS plots, and elevation profiles.  Enjoy!

The concept for the race is a 36 hour endurance bike race in Pisgah National Forest.  It’s broken up into 6 stages – each of which have 6 checkpoints.

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This race will be about glory and suffering, pain and endurance, fun and….. no fun at all

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It all started last fall driving back from the Swank 65 race in Pisgah.  Alex asked if I’d consider doing an MTB stage race.  Sounds like fun I said.  Let’s see, there’s the TransRockies, La Ruta, and the BC Bike Race (others too but that would require traveling to Europe or Africa!).  Well we decided on the TransRockies and the rest is history!

TransRockies is a 7 day mountain bike stage race in the Canadian Rocky mountains that covers about 350 miles in the course of the week.  It has grown steadily in popularity and this year 300 teams of 2 from 27 countries converged on Panorama Mountain Village in British Columbia for the 2008 edition of the race.  While there were some who were in it to finish, I was surprised at the number of high caliber, serious racers that were there to give it their all and really compete.  It made for a lot of thrilling days on the bike.

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Saturday morning we got our first glimpses of Panorama during the day - what an amazing place!  Even a few snow capped mountains in the distance.

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I usually have the best intentions of trying to make it to trail work days, but I end up only doing it a few times a year.  On the weekends I try to spend time with the family - Caroline is extremely accommodating of my bike riding habit/addiction, but leaving her with 3 kids while I go work on trails doesn’t happen very often.

But then it hit me.  Hey, the kids love digging in the dirt, moving rocks, hammering things.  I should take them with me!  It didn’t take much convincing.

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Way back in 2003 (or thereabouts) Pisgah Productions started a race in Pisgah National Forest called the Pisgah Death March. It wasn’t your typical mountain bike race. Rather than a set course you receive a passport at the beginning of the race that lists a set of checkpoints scattered throughout the forest. You then have to reach at least 4 of those and return as quickly as possible. Choose your own route, bring your own food/water/supplies, and of course a partner to share the fun/pain with! Oh - and of course Eric (the brains behind it all … AKA Evil Genius) will block off many of the easy routes (roads, fire roads, etc.) as “off limits” so you get to experience the maximum effect of sweet Pisgah singletrack.

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