Owie (San Dimas Circuit)

The ninth time up that hill was balls out hard, and just as I finished sprinting over the “cobbles” (aka fake brick textured road) that lap, I could feel them sneaking up on me. Cramps. Nothing debilitating yet, but the tinge was there, right in the end of my quads, slightly above my knees.

Three laps to go…. I finished off my last gel and even bummed a couple gummies from Mark, in an effort to postpone full-on cramps to make it through the remaining hour of racing, but I think by then I had already started to feel the damage of dehydration.

Holding on by the skin of my teeth, I maintained contact with the front group up the steep section for 2 more laps. My cramps progressively worsened until standing up to pedal was basically no longer an option. On the last lap I stood up for a few seconds just to pop over the top of the feed zone hill, and after about 3 pedal strokes just as I was pressing down with my right foot, my quad completely locked up. I’m talking, as contracted as my muscle could possibly be, hyper extending my knee even. That’s never happened to me in a race before, but it reminded me of playing around with an e-stim machine in the athletic training lab….only times a thousand. I actually didn’t even know that could happen to my body. So after some serious concentration, I managed to force my peg leg back into a more natural bent position, but right as I did so, I shifted weight to my left leg only to have the same painful contraction happen to that quad as well.

Needless to say, I didn’t make it over the final climb intact with the lead group, but with a downhill and then only a mile or so of flat, I finished up just about 15 seconds in arrears.

Apart from crashing, those cramps were by far the worst physical pain cycling has ever caused me.