La Gravilla, the Sea Otter bike festival’s 62-mile gravel race, is not a gravel race. At least not by design or character. It is raced on the Lifetime Grand Prix XC MTB course – A route that would ultimately decimate the fully rigid gravel bikes of the elite La Gravilla field with its jagged descents, mud, sand, and ravines, all mixed in with 8000 feet of climbing. The start line was filled with an intimidating group of national champions of various breeds, former world tour road pros, and generally a rarefied forest of smooth legs that managed the ironic feat of making the hair on my pale legs feel emasculating.
I had an easy-to-follow race plan at the start—Do not get sucked into the hard sprints for position and race at my own pace. This is good wisdom for most racers, but essential for me. My heart occasionally decides to turn up the beat like a speed-metal drummer on a coke bender due to a condition called Supraventricular Tachycardia. It tends to occur right when I start clawing at the deepest walls of the anaerobic pain cave, and when it happens I am left with only the ability to soft pedal – This makes pacing with consistency and restraint my keys to a successful race.
So it goes that consistency and restraint become the first victims of La Gravilla. I smashed out the first couple of miles in a fury of leader chasing anaerobism, breaking my season’s best power records as I marveled at just how hard these guys were willing to start a four-hour effort, with my race enthusiasm not even giving me the chance to consider falling back from the action.
With an alert from my EKG heart rate monitor notifying me of my abject failure at arrhythmia avoidance, I felt my pace slow and spent the next five minutes watching many of the riders I had wasted so much energy to drop cruise on passed down the trail.
The next hour was spent minding my race and rhythms. Sitting amongst the mid fielders, it was satisfying to discover that I had the fitness to match the pace, but also, grabbing free speed from either side of the gravel discipline, I used some road racing tricks to pull ahead where aerodynamics reigned, and then leveraged the handling confidence of my Libre to push through the mountain bike berms and descending chunder.
As the gravel gods presided over my race (presumably from a bar in Belgium), it is around the half-way point that they smirked and set my soundtrack to “Yakety Sax.” Having foolishly skipped an aid station, my bottles came empty with an hour of sun-baked racing left before the next one. My descent from racer to survivalist was painful. Perhaps from the building fatigue, or perhaps from whatever was stinging me in my right nipple. Already fully gripped in my attempts at holding my life together down a descent that was jack hammering the vision out of my eyeballs, I struggled to open my jersey and free the nipple enthusiast.
At this point, I am having to beg my legs just to give me adequacy. The course, which on the first lap I appreciated for its California beauty and its opportunities to press an advantage in the aggressive technical sections, I now lamented for being an endless momentum-sucking sandpit that never stopped either torturing the legs with steep climbs or torturing the rest of the body with steep washboard and jaggedly rocky descents.
And the nipple stinger was still to return. It had been lying dormant for ten minutes before re-emerging with a taste for chuck roast, laying into me near my shoulder blade, comfortably dining from its new nest in my bib strap. The only rider I would, even briefly, be in the vicinity of for the entirety of the second lap timed our meeting to watch me dance a jerking striptease while riding to let loose my attacker. Whether or not he was impressed, I may never know, but it seems that the goats were (Do you still have Yakety Sax playing in the background?). As I pulled my jersey back on, a large free-ranging herd flooded the road at the crest of the hill, fully blocking the route. Two of the rams were aggressively feinting at each other, and along with the sheer density of cloven voyeurs, it felt dangerous to try and push through. Yet, as I went to unclip and let the horned masses mosey pass, the lone shepherd appeared and, as courteous as it was unexpected, cleared a path for me with a wag of her tail.
Finally fully clothed and goat free, I did what I could to carry my speed down another La Gravilla special edition chunder fest. My tired body could now also be classified as fully rigid and my handling suffered for it. But with great effort, I made it to the bottom of the gnar, arched around the final smooth berm confidently pressing out of the compression, and then front flipping the first fifteen feet of the exit. Having forgotten my bike back at the end of the berm I had just blown out, I brushed off my hip and my shoulder, smiled at the alarmed women watching alone and stunned from the middle of nowhere, straightened my bars, and rode off doing a flurry of math problems in hopes of proving the head hit I had sustained had left my neurons in place.
A two-bottle chug, and a two-bottle refill at the aid station brought me some hope for bodily revival, but I had drained both the well and the aquifer. The final 15 miles was a mile-by-mile countdown, with my goals getting reset to “Finish”, and “Don’t walk the climbs.” Ambitious goals at that, with 3,000 feet of steep and rough climbing left.
It wasn’t until the final climb that I came to understand the level of carnage the course had leveled on the field. Reports from volunteers had informed me half a lap ago that I was somewhere inside the top ten, and I had been waiting for what I thought were inevitable passes as I limped home. But those passes never came, and now with a clear view both a quarter mile up and down the climb, I could see they weren’t coming. Ultimately the brutality of the course had culled the 33-rider field down to 14.
Making my way up the climb, I was now, incredibly, coming up on riders from other categories. These folks were on a different level of survival mission than me. With only one lap to complete, they were now over four hours into their 30-mile day. They ranged from struggling to walk their bikes up the climb, to bartering with a volunteer to get a ride back on a 4×4. “This guy,” the rider says to me while gesturing at the volunteer, “…says that next knoll is the top. Is that true?” I confirmed that it was, making me complicit in a lie to motivate a broken man. A broken man that I can only hope is now proud he persevered, and that he didn’t have a heart attack when he saw the harder half of the climb beyond that knoll.
As I ground my sand-encrusted gears across the finish line, four and a half hours had elapsed since the start, when my goal was simply to give a performance worthy of an entry into the elite field. Having stood at the start feeling somewhat naked, or exposed, or just harboring an unfortunate secret that brought into question for me my place in this field – That being a heart that has passed its lifetime quota of the sort of crux all out efforts that tend to decide races – As my girlfriend cheered and handed me a beer on the far side of the finish banner, I allowed a bit of pride to well up for a 7th place finish. My Libre had thrived and survived where most bikes foundered, and I had ridden myself back into an elite niche of the racing world.
As for the race itself, if this course keeps its character in the future, from within a sport trending towards pavement-esque routes, La Gravilla will be growing its reputation as a brutal test in the world of gravel racing, and will likely become known as a monument for survival.
