Bear Lake Classic

Our friend Ben Parker is a road biker and I'm a Mountain Biker. They each have two wheels, a chain, and pedals, but that's about where the similarity stops. We agreed that this year we would each try the other's sport, so to taste a little of the "other side" of cycling I joined him for this year's Bear Lake Classic, a 52-mile race that circles Bear Lake in Northern Utah/Southern Idaho. I put in a total of about 20 miles on the roadie before this trip, so obviously I was plenty prepared.


We headed up the night before and camped out with all the other crazies to wake up early and be ready to go for the 9am start. Here we are in all our Spandex glory:

Omniture has a cycling team so we did have the hookup with some really good gear. The weather was beautiful and I really enjoyed the race. The problem was that I hadn't looked at a map beforehand so I didn't realize where we were at on the lake. If you click on picture below you can see the Start/Finish line was about half way up the west side of the lake:


I thought we were actually right at the bottom of the lake, so we took off clock-wise and when we hit the North end of the lake I thought we were about half way through. I figured, "This isn't bad at all, I'll be done in no time," so I paced myself to about where I thought the Finish line was. Then on the East side the lake just kept going. We rounded the south side and I thought we must be close. Then the road turned straight south and started heading away from the lake! It finally turned back in and for the last 10 miles or so I expected to see the Finish line around every corner. I almost stopped to rest but it was getting close to 3 hours and I had told myself I would not go longer than that. I finally came in at 2:59:17, 43 seconds shy of 3 hours.


As you can see, when I thought I was half done, I was really only about 1/4 of the way through. Other than that, it was a lot of fun and it has really helped my endurance with Mtn. Biking this year. I've already put in close to 100 miles on the Mtn. Bike so far, so I'll have some posts up about that soon.