Pure insanity – 2009 TMHTE
“Hey it’s a nice day in February – let’s go do a night ride up the Farlow Gap trail” (Farlow just happens to be one of the gnarliest, most technical trails in Pisgah National Forest)
“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.