This was my first time making the trip to Wyoming to race the Laramie Enduro. I’ve heard so many good things about this race that I was excited to go and check it out. I knew that the 111K race was a fast one with lots of roads and trail riding mixed in through the course and there’s not a lot of climbing in this race, so I was pretty much out of my element in every way. The race venue was beautiful, rolling hills and cool rock formations peppered the landscape everywhere you looked which made for great scenery for the entire race.
The morning of the race was comfortably cool and with some cloud cover, the first couple hours were very nice. Not so nice was the start, with an all out sprint up a ¼-mile hill onto the first singletrack. I managed to get onto the trail in 4th position so despite being out of breath, I was happy to be up front. After a mix of double track and trail we dumped out to a dirt road for the first of many road sections. There were five people in our group and we started a draft line and moved along quickly. When we got to the next single track section we quickly shed two of our group and it was down to Alex Pond, Thomas Spannring and myself. We stayed together through this section and into the next road section but Thomas was riding very well and gapped us. On the next singletrack section, I got ahead of Alex for a little but when we hit the road again he caught me fairly quickly. We worked together for a while, but the road was killing me and Alex was much stronger here, eventually he pulled away and left me to push into the wind on my own.
By about mile 50, I was feeling all the hard effort in the beginning starting to take its toll on me. Fortunately the last 20 miles is a good amount of singletrack and my energy and spirits began to lift, I was glad to be almost done, then just ahead of me was Alex I didn’t think I would see him again and I think he was just as surprised to see me. We both pushed hard to the finish but I just didn’t have it to catch him. At the finish we found out that Thomas had followed the race moto the wrong way and was now behind us, which was a shame because he was very strong and deserved the win, but that meant Alex got the win and I took second.
It was a really fun weekend of racing in Laramie, great venue with free camping and the after party was really fun with a great band to end the day with, definitely not the type of race that I’m used to but it’s good to get out of your comfort zone from time to time and try something new.
