18 hours

The 18 hour race is over. It's always a sad and sore day after this one.
This is as much fun as it is painful. I love it when it's almost here and I hate it at 3am.
My buddy Andrew and I had a battleplan of turning 2 laps each at the beginning, and then going on to 3. That leaves each teamate with enough time for a light charge and a meal and rest if needed.
Then Paul Leeger threw a wrench in that plan telling me that the best teams do single laps each. 1 and 1 and 1 and so on. So he got me thinking.
My legs don't get going well until about mile 6 when they're nice and hot, and if we only turn one each, there's no time to eat or charge up.
So we did 2 and 2.
The first time out we both made good times. Sub 50. If we kept that up, we figured that we could get in 19 laps. But that was BEFORE we heard that they would not count any laps after 10am. With that, we'd have to come in at 9ish in order to get one more lap in, not by 9:59. Personally, I didn't like that. Until the end.
The daylight runs were hot and sweaty, and the night laps were cooler, but WET. 80% forecasted humidity, but it felt like more. The fog was thick enough that it's hard to imagine that it wasn't falling as rain. But it was hanging in mid air, sticking to my glasses and making my gloves feel like wet paper bags. But hey, it was cooler than riding in the sun. It also settled the dust and made the trail tacky and fast.
The Pork Chop Express was steady holding onto 3rd place by 2am, about 30 minutes behind the leader. Not to bad considering we were up against the likes of 3 Bike Factory teams.
It was hard to stomach much of anything that I brought to eat other than the V8, the smoothie, and Guinness. I nibbled on my PBJ sandwich and sipped on some Odwalla juices. Anything that had lots of vitaminy goodness, I put into my stomach. And some Advil.
I went out a little before 3am with a fresh cup of coffee and fresh legs, and turned out 2 more. Then came in and sat while Andrew made his laps.
I looked around and noticed that lots of people were sleeping, and there I was trying to stay awake with the radio, the internet on my cell phone, and coffee. I paid for this. Good money too.
We cranked out 15 laps by 8am. I was the last on the bike, and pulled in just before 8. We had time for 2 more, but not the energy nor the motivation. Especially since the leaders were probably on lap 19 at that point. My rear derailleur was sticking and we wouldnt have seen the podium even if we had gone 2 more. It wasn't about winning, it was about fun, and I had a crap load of that. So we threw in the towel. My bike was making funny noises and that powdery dust had working its way into parts that will take some TLC to get clean.
I'd like to thank my ipod for supplying the tunes during the lonely night laps, and beer, for killing the pain and putting a few more carbs into my blood.