Trial Run

I just got back from pre-riding the 24 Hours in the Sage Course. I took a lap in the day light this afternoon. It took about 1:50 but I was stopping to pull out the map to make sure I was getting the course straight, and chatted with a couple at the Sea of Sage/Rocky Ridge intersection. It was tough to figure out all the turns. I'm somewhat familiar with the Rocky Ridge/Sea/Broken Shovel/Becks side of Hartman but had never ridden Behind the Rocks and Alonzo's. I felt pretty good.

I waited for the sun to go down. Had a snack and a good chat with a couple of riders in the parking lot. My lighting strategy involves using a Cateye LED light on my bars and an HID on my helmet. LED lights have ridiculously long burn times with a good quality spot. HID lights burn extremely bright but don't have the long burn times. I planned to use the LED on climbs and switch on the HID only on downhills. Maximum light and battery life. So I'm riding along, enjoying solitude and the meditative sounds of tires on dirt, a whirirng chain, the occasional kurchunk of a derailleur, and long, slow breaths. I don't have a lot of experience with the HID light and learned the hard way that it has to go through 10 charge/discharge cycles before the battery is conditioned to take a full charge (I just learned this by using the google). About 3 miles from the trailhead the HID completely shut down. I say to myself "no problem" because I've been riding with just the Cateye light alone for about 4 years. Then that light starts to flicker because I'd neglected to fully charge it after my last ride. I had a lot of thoughts flash through my head: how would my parents take hearing that their son was eaten by a mountain lion, how many people would tell me that I'm foolish for riding alone/at night/alone at night, I was cold, it was too dark to find my way back, etc. But then the only thought that I could think was "I am going to make it back to the car". And I did. And it was close. I don't always go around calling God by his first name but this time I gave a personal parking lot prayer of thanks.

So I need to keep refining the lighting strategy. I wish that I could give you a solid estimate for an average lap time. My daylight lap was skewed. My night time lap needs to get thrown out because I was crawling along on a dying light and I took a wrong turn earlier in the ride (and bumbled into some poor guy's campsite and freaked out his poor dogs). 1.5-2 hours is my best guess.

I'm off to keep myself awake for as long as possible. I'm trying to fall into an extremely irregular sleep pattern to try to be ready for an all-nighter.