Will Boulware (3)

“I’m not turning this light back on.” Yeah, I’ve heard that one before. I first said it around the 1-hour mark, maybe 7:30 in the morning, and I was pretty sure I was lying to myself, but I had a sliver of hope that I’d be done with this third and final installment of the Triple Crown before the sun went down. I know the Ocoee/Cohutta area better than either of the other two ITT loops, so I was planning on a well-paced, well-fed, well-hydrated, uneventful Saturday ride.

The Death March is crazy steep in places and a little chunkier than the Tellico and Reliance ITT’s. Bike-wise, a lot of smart people go for something like an XC mountain bike, and I have a Santa Cruz Blur hanging on my wall at home that fits the bill perfectly. Lightweight carbon frame, deep-geared 12-speed drivetrain, and a suspension setup that eats up washboard and rutted roads like they’re not even there. So anyway, I left that bike at home, and instead brought my trusty Salsa Fargo. I did swap the front tire for a big fat heckin’ chonk of a 2.4 inch Maxxis Ikon though. I aired it down to a little under 20 psi and hoped it would take some of the sting out of the Potato Patch descent. (To the two-person peanut gallery that will comment on the 150 grams this added to an already heavy bike, there is no hope for me. Move along. You know who you are.)

I went through my usual big dumb ride ritual of getting up at 4:00, over-caffeinating, loading the pickup truck, and consuming a Hardee’s biscuit en route to the Thunder Rock campground. I usually try to get my pre-ride act together without making too much noise so my Garmin chirps and door-closings don’t wake every camper within earshot, but there was someone camped in a van nearby that was already up and about with no such worries in their life. They were dragging a generator out from under the van as I left the parking lot, so I silently wished the nearby tent campers all the best and rolled off into the dark.

For the second time in a month, on my second ITT of the month, my top tube bag decided to riot. The strap holding it to the headtube that keeps it from falling over sideways would NOT stay velcro’d. I kept trying to get it situated with one hand in the dark all the way up the FS45 climb, but it was hopeless. Every bump I encountered, it would flop sideways and dump all my snacks out. Rinse, re-strap, repeat. I stopped at the top of 45, shoved the offending top tube bag into my frame bag, and carried on. Good riddance.

Up the hill, down the hill, across the broken concrete bridge that fortunately had no water over it, back up the hill, back up another hill... that was the trend for the day. The ride to Tumbling Creek was uneventful. The creek area was cold and misty, and there were a few campers clustered together cooking something that smelled much better than the gel I was slurping, so I stopped at one point and dug a honey bun out of my jersey to make myself feel better about my lack of campfire food.

As I started up the next section of hills, I started doing math in my head. I was carrying 4 bottles - I had consumed one by this point, I still had a pair of 1-liter bottles with Skratch superfuel mix left, plus my emergency bottle of plain water. I had about 10 miles to the Jack’s river piped spring, so maybe a bottle to get me there, and Mulberry Gap was really just a bottle further than that. I did not need an emergency bottle of water. For the first time in my life, I played Tour de France rider and emptied a bottle as I pedaled along to save weight for a climb. Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

I made it to the top of Potato Patch within 5 minutes of my goal time, and I started down the hill after dodging a few parked trucks at the junction. I hadn’t ridden Potato Patch this year, but every previous encounter I’ve had with it left me grumbling and threatening to come back with a bulldozer to fix the absurd braking bumps that always form in all the wrong places. Pro tip number 1: bicycles with suspension do not rattle the fillings out of your teeth in scenarios like this. Noted.

The road got a little smoother after I passed the overlook, and there really wasn’t as much loose gravel on it this year as I saw last year, so I made decent time (for me) on the way down. I huffed up the hill to the barn at Mulberry Gap, snarfed the sandwich from my sack lunch out of the fridge, and stuffed the rest of the snacks they gave me into my frame bag. Out the door. Off we go. Back up the hill.

Climbing Potato Patch is an experience. In reality, it’s over faster than you think it will be, but during the process, you get the impression that time is standing still, you are standing still, and the hill is getting bigger. I stopped at the overlook for my required verification photo and explained what I was doing to a puzzled onlooker in a Subaru. Once the words “93 miles” and “14,000 feet of elevation gain” registered in his head, he started dropping F-bombs as fast as I had dropped my snacks in the dark earlier. Quite a bit of disbelief there. As I was trying to leave, he rummaged through a cooler in his car and offered me a meat tray. Not knowing what exactly that entailed, I declined and rode on.

I got to the West Cowpen descent right on my expected timeline and I was actually feeling pretty good. Pacing was ok, I wasn’t bonking yet, and everything seemed to be going well. Cowpen is another descent that I was dreading, as it was freshly graveled last year, but had not been graded, so you had loose gravel and ruts. Safety third, folks. This year, it was actually fine, and I got to the ranger station at the bottom with no incident. I filled 2 bottles full of hose water from the side of the building (I’m becoming a connoisseur of hose water) and I was off. Pro tip number 2: At the ranger station, the blue handled spigot dispenses hot water, and the red handled spigot is for cold water. The more you know…

There’s a bit of a downhill false flat from the ranger station to Big Frog, and I really enjoyed that. I got to the piped spring on Big Frog right on schedule and was halfway through filling a bottle from the spring when it started to sprinkle. Hmmm. Weather app hadn’t shown anything for the next 5 days. What’s this? By the time I filled bottle number 2, it was pouring on me. I don’t appreciate being wet, so I increased my steady-pace wattage to something a bit more hasty and hoped I’d get up and down before this soaking rain turned into a thunderstorm.

The construction crew that’s been working on this area has done an amazing job with what I thought was an impossible task. What used to be a horribly rutted, steep, boulder-y climb is now graded, compacted, graveled, and almost pleasant. It’s still steep, but it’s passable. It stopped raining about the time I got to the top, but when I started down the hill, I found a batch of freshly rained on, freshly graded mountain clay, which was now inch-deep peanut butter mud. I’m neither a good bike handler nor a good surfer, but I somehow made it down the hill with a few 100-yard Tokyo drifts that I wish I’d gotten on a go-pro.

I made the right-hand turn onto 221 and had an uneventful trip all the way to the creek at the bottom. Climbing up that last hill before I got back to 45, it was getting dark faster than I would have preferred. “I’m not turning that light back on…” Lies. At the top of 45, I chose sensibility over stubborn pride and dug my faithful Lezyne out of my bag. I probably could have survived the descent without it, but I wanted a trip to Taco Bell when I was done, not a trip to the dentist.

My goal time was sub-14 hours, just anything to beat last year’s effort. I was honestly surprised when I stopped my Garmin in the parking lot and saw 12:55. That’ll do! Each one of these ITT routes offers its own unique challenges, and the rain added some unplanned fun to today’s closing miles, but the fall weather and colorful leaves I got to ride through today made this one special. Much, much better than last year’s effort in 95 degree heat. Pro tip number 3: Wait and ride all of these routes in the fa…. No, nevermind. Go ride all 3 whenever and however you can. They’re all brutally beautiful from both a scenery and a perseverance standpoint, and there’s no better place to have a conversation with yourself than in the dark on the last climb Kim always puts in there.

Major thanks to Kim and Shannon for the routes, the website/leaderboard upkeep, and the community they’ve built. This really means a lot to all of us! I’m headed to the couch to eat Christmas tree cakes for the next 2 months, but I’m looking forward to racing with everyone in Reliance and Tellico next year, and hopefully trying for another triple crown!