Race report – 24 Hours of Pure Pain, Agony, and Suffering. Oh, and I think there was some Adrenalin in there somewhere, too… 

- by Bryan Holloway

Saturday/Sunday, October 18/19th, 2003.
Conyers, Ga, Centennial Olympic Horse Park
2-Person Category, Team #65: Team Cycleworks – Atlanta
Chance Regina, Bryan Holloway

First of all, I’d like to say huge CONGRATS to Shige Honjo and fellow Cycleworks teammate, Terry Mathison, who rode 18 and 22 laps, respectively, in the SOLO category (that’s 144 and 176 miles!) and placed 8th and 6th, respectively, out of 26 in the solo category. That is awesome. In fact, Terry’s total of 22 laps was only one lap off the winner. Both of those performances simply boggle my mind. I’m sure Shige did well due to his training in Moab two weekends before:

So…fellow Cycleworks teammate, Chance Regina, had been asking me for a year to form a 2-Person team with him. I correctly anticipated the brutality of the situation, and waffled exorbitantly. Finally, at the last minute, Brad convinced me to go for it. He said, “Well, you haven’t tried the 2-Person Category yet. You might as well give that a shot…” It turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. You have to spin fairly quick laps because you don’t want to let your teammate down; you don’t get much rest between laps; and you get no sleep (We decided we would alternate laps one-for-one, as opposed to doubling up, which results in slower laps). 

So Chance and I threw together a team, and we had the most awesome support crew. Bromley pre-cooked a whole slew of good eats (chicken/rice soup; spaghetti; mac and cheese…) Shelly and Zin brought the grill and burgers. John Floyd and Evan Halladay wrenched. While my cousin, Will, who just happened to be passing through town moving en route from St. Pete Beach, Florida to Tahoe, California joined us, too. I think he got more than he bargained for, as we put him to work, and he got no sleep through the night, just like the rest of us. Will assumed the role of official timekeeper, clocking our splits and monitoring our competition. Thanks so much, guys/gals! You are awesome. I owe you big time. 

It was a perfect beautiful, clear, dry weekend in Conyers. We couldn’t have asked for better weather for the event. So the race got underway and Chance took the first lap with the LeMans start. Here he is finishing the lap:

Chance Regina finishes the Le Mans start

Our strategy was simply to alternate laps and keep going all through the night (no sleep). We spun our first several laps in 46 ~ 50 minutes, and were well on pace for better than 1 lap per hour. It was fun! I distinctly remember thinking during those first several laps “Man, this course is so much fun! Why don’t we come out here more often during the year to ride it just for fun?” My answer would come soon enough. 24 hours later, after a couple dozen laps around the place, I was so darn sick of it and wiped out, that I never want to see that course (or my bike) again in my life…

So around and around that course we went. I was pretty happy with our pace of a little better than one lap per hour. A year ago, 25 laps won the category, and we were on-pace for that. Our support crew was awesome. As soon as I came in from each lap, Bromley handed me warm, dry clothes and something hot to eat/drink, as John and Evan grabbed my bike and tuned it up, Shelly set the egg-timer for 40 minutes, and Will gave me the time splits. 


Around 8pm, as I started another lap, Craig rode up next to me and asked how we were doing in the standings. I told him I had no idea, I hadn’t even checked. In fact, I didn’t even know how many teams were competing in the 2-Person category, and he offered to look into it for me. “Yes, please!” So after I came in from that lap, Craig gave me the scoop: there were 16 total 2-Person teams, and we had just moved into 3rd. He said the first place team had a pretty sizable lead (a whole lap), but the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place teams were really close. And also we had a pretty good gap on the 5th place team. I thanked him for this good news, and we agreed a lot could change come morning light. It’s the graveyard shift that separates the men from the boys in these 24 hour races. 

Our Base Camp set-up was awesome. Brad brought an industrial-strength kerosene space heater to keep us cozy warm all through the chilly night. With it’s long, horizontal cylindrical shape and glowing red output hot air blast, it resembled the engine of an F-15. Ed thought it should take off flying across Base Camp like Chevy Chase’s sled in Christmas Vacation.

During the night, our times slowed to 55 ~ 59 minutes per lap, but we were still on pace and fairly consistent. So we continued to churn out the laps, and found ourselves in a dogfight with Team #63 for 3rd place. Somewhere along the way, we slipped back to 4th, and hovered about 5 minutes behind Team #63 for most of the night. As the night wore on, my lap times steadily grew…55 minutes…57 minutes…58 minutes…

Around 3am, I came in from a lap, and Will told me I slipped 4 minutes and did that lap in 1 hour, 2 minutes. But the bad news was that #63 got a 2nd wind or something, and just turned a 3-minute-quicker lap for themselves. So they just put 7 minutes on us, and the gap was now 12 minutes. Feeling 3rd place slipping away, I decided it was time to try to do something about it. I didn’t want to wait until the morning, when I knew everyone would get a 2nd wind. So I attacked the next lap, middle-ringed it up all the climbs I’d previously been resorting to the granny-gear, and busted out a 52 minute lap, shaving 10 minutes off my previous time. I thought that should help reel in Team 63 a little bit, and then hoped I didn’t just kill myself, because that took a lot of energy and left me feeling pretty spent. Well, I came into the transition area, showed the woman my baton, and she asked “are you going out again?” My heart sank. That meant Chance hadn’t checked in yet for the next lap. I screwed up. I should have told them I planned to bust out a quicker lap. I hadn’t because I wasn’t sure that I could. In retrospect, radios would have helped; I could have radioed into Base Camp when I was 10 minutes out… (We even had some radios, but they weren’t working; they weren’t compatible). But alas, when I showed back up in camp, they didn’t expect me for another 10 minutes, so Chance wasn’t ready yet (in fact, he was just waking up from an all-too-short nap). I think I surprised myself as much as the others when I showed back up in camp early.

So we lost 5 minutes there. I’m not upset that happened. That’s 24 Hour racing for you. And in fact, if you only lose 5 minutes over the course of 24 hours, then you’re doing pretty darn well. Our little 5-minute debacle was definitely not the deciding factor. But I tell you what, after that happened, it just sort of zapped my energy and will to live. 

I went back to my easier pace of ~58 minutes per lap and quit worrying about the standings. I was so happy to see the sun rise. Mainly because that meant the end was near. By the end, Chance and I were both just a shell of a man. Unfortunately for us, our competition never faltered, and gradually pulled away from us. By the time Chance finished our 25th lap at 11:11am Sunday morning, I’d already done the math and determined there was no point in doing the last “optional” lap. We were too far behind the 3rd place team to catch them, and there was no way the 5th place team could catch us. So I opted out of one last lap and we were done. So there you have it. After all was said and done, we had completed 25 laps (13 by Chance, 12 by me) in 23 hours, 11minutes, 34 seconds, and placed 4th in the 2-Person category, 3 laps off the winner. A little disappointing to miss the podium by one place, but what can you do? 
(Full results and lap splits at www.24hoursofadrenalin.com.)

Bryan rides during the day on Sunday

So I’m very happy with our performance, but I find myself with one regret: that I didn’t do that last “optional” lap, even though it wouldn’t have made a difference. For a variety of reasons: “26 laps” sounds better that “25”; I was one lap shy of topping 100 miles, it’s not every day you get to do a Century on your mountain bike; never give up… But I think I just need to remind myself how bad I felt at 11am Sunday morning. I’ll just tell myself if I tried one more lap, I might have ended up injured or hospitalized for altitude sickness or something. I think it’s really easy to sit here a week later and say “I could have done one more lap…”, but at the time, it just didn’t seem like a very good idea…

Am I glad I did it? Definitely! It was quite an experience. Will I ever do it again? No way. Next year, I’m back on a 5-person relay team. Or better yet, a 10-person Corporate Team and/or beer-drinkin’ support crew!

Extra special thanks to all of you who came out to support us and cheer us on! That meant so much. 

Thanks for reading. Ride On,
-Bry

Bryan