How Was Your 2008 Montreal 24-Hour Inline Race?

You know the old saying: “I would have written you a shorter letter if I’d had more time?”

What’s that other saying, “Getting there is half the fun?” Well no, not always.

Here’s the text of the email I sent to our team captain 48 hours prior to the race:

Fortunately Gustavo pointed out what I knew but had failed to think about correctly, that I could take advantage of the looser requirements and drive across the border without a passport. So thanks to the inanity of the State Department, I have firsthand knowledge that Burlington, Vermont is a really beautiful place. And that the drive from there to the border is simply amazing. And thanks to the folks at the border for cruelly deflating all of my hard-earned anxiety by not only passing me through without and drama, but not even so much as looking at my ID. Seriously. Never even asked me my name, much less asked me to prove it. Total letdown.

Unfortunately these last minute changes to my itinerary didn’t get me to Montreal in time to join in the pre-race dinner festivities, but I would have just ruined the ambiance (and quite possibly the drapes), so this is almost certainly for the better. Instead I did a late night walking tour of that fine city, and formed a very good impression of it. I will definitely be doing a longer stay next year, as I cannot wait to skate hell out of that place.

The morning of the race I was bound and determined to skate to the track, but chickened out at the last minute; my backpack turned out to be much heavier than I had anticipated, and being not entirely certain where I was going in a somewhat hilly city with no heel brake… it just seemed prudent to take the car instead. This was a decision that I would later be very pleased with. I got to the track with plenty of time to settle in, hang out, relax, warm up, etc.

The warmup lap was frustrating, as the pace car was doing about 6mph. We were heel braking on level ground to avoid passing it, and several people eventually grabbed on and skitched for the end of the lap. Then at 1:00pm, the fun began. I was fourth in the lineup, so I got my skates on when Henry, the second, went out. It wasn’t too arduous, and we never screwed it up, but keeping track of who gave who the chip and bib and all that was a bit more effort to keep track of than I’d expected. But it was still mostly a hurry-up-and-wait thing, which I’d expected.

I did my first lap, and it was an amazing experience. There’s a DJ playing the whole time at the relay area, which is right in front of the paddocks, so you’re immersed the entire time in (mostly) techno music. But the cool thing, which took my completely by surprise, is that as soon as you take the baton and really put on the gas, the music vanishes and is replaced by the wind. It was like the scenes on TV where the actors turn off the lights and you can tell that someone offstage turned on the blue light at the same time. The course was a little tougher when you’re doing it for real: there’s a very slight hill after the first turn, and there was a constant headwind for about 80% of the lap that seemed to slowly increase over the next 24 hours.

I came in with a lap time of 10:45, which shocked me. I had really expected to do significantly better than 15.6mph. I was pretty sure that was just a fluke and that I’d kick much more ass on my second lap. But, it would be an hour and a half before I could find out for sure.

In the meantime we decided to try on each other’s skates. Turns out my skates fit Matt perfectly, and he did a personal best in them. Amazingly enough, I don’t think he’d ever worn speed skates before. Which is really scary considering that he was doing times comparable to Tom and Jessica. So much to my chagrin he spent the next 23 hours showing my skates what they were born to do. That was a bit humbling, but I got over it pretty quickly. Fortunately were at opposite spots in the rotation so it wasn’t too tough logistically for us to share skates like that.

On my second lap I did much better, but was still above ten minutes. There began a tradition of me promising Jessica every ninety minutes that I would eventually turn in a lap below ten minutes. I’m nothing if not dedicated. Instead I proved myself to be a very consistent skater. My lap times varied much less than everyone else’s, even improving slightly (10:15) when the rain began which obviously makes no sense. I did my first rain lap on Matter Yellows, and then fell all sort of in love with the MPC Street Fights when I switched over to them.

It was a very wet night. After my first rain lap I went to one of the vendor tents and bought some rain covers, but it was hopeless. The boots were waterlogged. And although there was probably very little hope of drying them adequately between laps, sharing them between two skaters ensured that just wasn’t gonna happen. So squish-sqeak-squish it was. It hasn’t surfaced yet, but somebody on the team got a picture of Matt literally pouring water out of one of my skates. I kept dutifully wiping them out and stuffing the silica socks back into them for half an hour at a time, but I kinda thought they were done for.

But for all that, the rain laps were a lot of fun. I can’t explain it, but although I’d only done it once before Montreal, It turns out I really enjoy skating in a heavy rain. My bearings don’t of course, and this race cost me my remaining two sets of good ones, but it was worth it. (I’m currently using some old decrepit rejects I’ve had in a drawer for a few years, and they’re good enough for around town use.)

After about two hours of steady rain it stopped, but by that point night was falling so the course didn’t dry very quickly. I was doing pretty well on my Street Fights though, so no complaints other than the squishy boots. It did eventually dry up enough to put regular wheels back on, although there were a few thousand squeaky bearings out there and the paddocks stunk of WD-40.

At midnight the first five skaters in the rotation were given a four hour break. We had tents and sleeping bags up on the roof, but I elected to sleep in my rental car. I think that was one of my better decisions in life. The place does quiet down considerably at night, but the constant yelling at the relay area doesn’t stop. Even in dead silence it took me a while to fall asleep, so I got about three hours. I took my water bottle and two double-caffeinated gels with me, and as soon as my phone went off at 3:30am I downed them both and get out of the car. I then quickly got back in the car and started digging in my backpack for more clothing. It had gotten COLD. Even with long tights, my regular UA shorts, sweatpants, dayglow yellow Team SkateLog shirt, and a long-sleeved t-shirt, and a warm hat, my teeth were chattering as I walked back to the paddock.

The next four hours were the other half of the team’s rest period, so we got to skate twice as much, which was kinda nice. It made it a bit easier to stay warmed up between laps, and of course helped with staying awake and alert in the pre-dawn hours. I’d never skated at sunrise before… I’m not going to be making a habit of it, but it’s pretty nice once in a while. Even though I had technically gotten a full and proper dose of caffeine, hot coffee is still an important part of my morning. Other teams had coffee brewing, but since I knew it wouldn’t be too much longer before I could simply buy some, I decided not to mooch of of them. I remember shortly after 6:00am, taking the baton from Kirsten and yelling “Tell Gustavo Subway’s open!”

Once the rest of the team woke up the pace slowed back down to “normal” and we settled into the home stretch. By that point were were solidly in eighth place with no serious chance of catching up to the seventh place team, but a full five laps ahead of the ninth place team, so all that was left to do was to keep on keeping on.

Then, something interesting happened… on my 9:00am lap, I got a good draft and came in at just under ten minutes! It was hard, but I had finally managed to do it. I was like a little kid on christmas morning, running around sticking my GPS in everybody’s face as if they wouldn’t believe me otherwise. That was definitely the high point of the race for me, as I had decided many hours ago that while my times weren’t anything to be ashamed of, I just wasn’t going to break ten minutes. At least not this year. So when I did, well, let’s just say I was rather pleased with myself.

At least until the 10:30am lap, when I did it again, this time with no draft. That really surprised me, and of course I came running back to our little SkateLog campsite, GPS in hand, like a little kid who just discovered that his family’s having a second christmas on Dec. 26th, and he’s getting even cooler toys.

Eventually we got to the point in the race where we start trying to figure out how many more laps each person will get. It had been decided (or maybe it’s an inviolable tradition, I’m not really sure) that Cptn. Wright would get the last lap no matter what, even if that meant her skating a double. But while working on the math for this (hey, with that little sleep, any arithmetic requires multiple cortices!), word came around that we were less than five minutes behind the seventh place team. Obviously we had no idea if there fastest skaters were all coming up in the rotation, or if the whole team had finally bonked, but it was decision time: do we tweak the rotation to put our fastest skaters on the track for the duration, with some slim hope of moving up in the standings on the final lap?

As I headed out for my last lap I told Jessica that if she came out there and pulled me off the line I’d be totally cool with it, and that was the absolute truth. I wasn’t at all certain I could break ten minutes a third time, and she had just turned in an 8:08, our team’s fastest lap yet. But she didn’t, and I did. Not by much, I think it was around 9:48, which meant that not only had I managed to break ten three out of three times, but my last lap was the fastest of the three. I’m not sure yet, but I think I might be the only one on the team who’s times consistently improved as the 24 hours wore on. I really don’t know what to make of that, other than to assume that Gustavo’s Magic Powder really was, as Jenn likes to say, “All that and a bag of wax.” Either that or Matt had done such a fantastic job of training my skates that even I was now able to skate faster in them.

After my last lap I went and got my camera and camped out near the finish line to catch some of the drama, especially as the soloists came in. Once it was all said and done we all geared up for a “victory lap” with a few hundred of our newest friends. It was a nice, slow, easy, respectful skate. Until the bike buzzed us. Then it was, as they say down here, “On like a pile of neckbones.” It was actually pretty comical to be a part of a huge pack of skaters that even after rolling for 24 hours, still weren’t gonna let some smartass on a roadbike show them up. I couldn’t quite hang with the very front of the pack once it really heated up, but I was still moving pretty fast when I came across the line for the last time.

It took a while to break camp and clean up after ourselves, so it was close to 3:0opm by the time we got out of there. I dropped Gustavo off at his hotel and headed back toward mine. That turned into a comedy of errors after I took a wrong turn a few blocks from “home,” and headed toward the wrong end of Montreal. I whipped out the trusty Crackberry and asked the GPS for turn-by-turn directions, and after a few turns that got me back on track but left my instincts completely confused, the GPS app crashed. Lovely. So, exhuasted and frustrated and wanting nothing more than a hot shower and a cold bed, I called Jenn on speakerphone and asked her to guide me back. It was about thirty minutes later that we realized the two of us had slightly different destinations in mind, and I was now in yet another wrong part of the city in the middle of massive weekend shopping traffic. More lovely. I did eventually get back to my hotel, but it took an hour longer than it should have. I got upstairs, set my alarm for 6:30pm so I could meet the others for dinner, and passed the hell out.

About twenty minutes later the phone rang. Plans had changed, we were doing an early dinner. I had an hour to wake up, clean up, find the place, and get there. Somehow I managed to locate the building using the maps in the front of the phone book and plot an approximate course on foot. Halfway there the phone rings again, and I am told there’s been a change of plans: the restaurant in question closed four years ago. Lovely. Fortunately, the second choice wasn’t too far from the first choice, so I still had a reasonable shot at getting there in time. For extra credit, I even managed to eventually find the damn entrance to the restaurant, although that was much harder than it should have been.

Once seated, which took a few minutes because I couldn’t find them in the restaurant (Picking up on a theme here? Don’t ask me to navigate when I’m sleep deprived and in a new city.), a grand time was had by all. Tom and Kirsten learned how steaks are cooked in their hometown, I learned how mixed drinks are served in Montreal, and we all learned that Gustavo really enjoys ordering appetizers.

I slept very well that night, as did every other skater in Montreal. The next morning was quite uneventful: get up, pack, negotiate Monday morning traffic, get back to Burlington, drop off the rental car, and spend the day in one airport after another. Finally got back to town around 10:00pm, where Jenn was waiting to drive me the half mile to the office where I picked up my bike and did a very gratifying ride home.

In summary: That was fun. Can I do it again?

Marianne, those times are really good and so steady lap after lap. Sounds like you had a terrific time. Congratulations to you.

After about 3 GUs and a belly full o' Gatorade, I can't eat anything on a long skate unless it's salty. This is probably bad for me but what works are those awfully unhealthy Lance cheese-on-wheat type crackers. I have not yet found something salty that isn't laden with fat or too wheaty to chew up mid-skate. Yeah I guess speed must be about 10th on my list because I'm dead slow :-)