Race Report Psycho 48 2024 Part 2
So, with first surprise gone I knew I was in third place. Heidi confirmed it after lap 2 and told me the first and second racers are at a stop as well. So, I went on the track before them. Kept the pace around 20 mph. The first one closed to me almost around mile 20-25 at that lap. I let him pass again and just kept my pace steady. The second one was far behind, so I was worried but did not see him again. And the game now started between two of us. I always passed him at the start/finish line due to efficient short stops and he passed me normally about 3-5 miles before end of a lap. That game went on a while. I think if I remember right for about 18 hours we kept changing positions close to the start/finish line and I took over after a short stop again. At lap 9 I was a bit frustrated and pushed in a harder lap to see if I can build a gap. It looked like that worked. OK later I learned he had to pull out of the race and after first 24 hours I was riding a bit lonely my laps. The first 18 hours fight was a cool extra motivation for me. However, sticking to the initial plan would have put me at average similar speed and be a bit more power saving compared to those extra pushing in such a race. Will adjust that in the future.
I remember around lap 10 Heidi telling me the other racer maybe asleep or at least still is at his car. Meant I lapped him one full lap and decided to keep adding another lap or two between us. That worked well for me. However, we did get a bit confused since GPS tracker missed counting the laps right. It did record the laps, but the count didn’t update correctly. So, I could not trust how much lead I had at that time. Overall, the first night was a bit chilly with some area’s temperature below 40. I did ok with a thermo-jersey plus regular long sleeve jersey and thermal long pants on top of my regular bib pants. And first night I was not feeling too tired, so I was able to manage it well. Critical situations were deer crossings. Some extremely close … possibly about 5-6 ft in front of me. Besides that, lights and batteries for the bike worked flawless and got changed on schedule. Had at least two stops where I took a bit longer (possibly overall one hour time lost because of it) But that was more my personal decision and things I wanted to get done and fixed.
Funny as it was … into second night … at daytime no Halloween decorations setup at the houses, but sure starting with the dark the people had the decorations setup for Saturday evening. At least I knew this year the flying ghosts are not real ☺ Nevertheless I remember my lap 20 was very tough. Lack of sleep was getting to me, and I did start a bit hallucinating, seeing things on the road that were not there. Once I stopped after lap 20, I knew I had 709 miles completed, and luckily Heidi checked the competition and manually counted the laps from the GPS tracker (due to GPS tracker count wrong). We saw that I had well over 100 miles lead to the next racer behind me and I decided … I am done since I have a new track record, and I have enough lead that neither the record nor the win could be taken away from me. So, I stopped riding after 44 hours and 44 minutes in the race and finally went to sleep. Yes, I could have kept going but did not feel safe to do so.
