Scenes from Saturday’s six-hour Meltdown at Harris Lake endurance mountain bike race at Harris Lake County Park.

A rush from the mush

Recent snows, rain and cold weather (which keeps the trail from drying) have conspired to keep most mountain bike trails closed for the last month or so. That there even was a race Saturday was the doing of Amy Burke and her crew at Harris Lake. Race Director Chris White said Burke, who oversees trail maintenance at the park, had four people working on the trails full time last week and seven other employees pitched in when they could, building new boardwalks and infilling gravel in spots left perpetually wet by the recent snow and rain. The 8-mile course was soft in spots, but certainly rideable. Nice work by Burke & Co.

Injured? Ha!

Racers are always full of suggestions to make an event even better. During registration, one helpful racer was telling outgoing TORC race coordinator Sean Callihan about a timing system that uses GPS technology to not only log riders’ lap times but also tracks riders while out on the course: You can look at a computer map and see a rider’s icon move around the course. “The big advantage to that,” said the helpful racer, “is that if a rider goes down, you know exactly where he is.”

“If a rider goes down?” Callihan wryly replied. “We don’t care about that.”

Ghost rider

Jeff LeBlanc apparently was the day’s designated ghost rider. He did five laps — he had the dead legs after six hours to prove it — but he didn’t register so much a blip on Bigfoot Cycling’s official results. Big Foot was trying to figure out at race’s end why LeBlanc was  le missing.

Slow, but not that slow

And in case anyone saw it and thought I’d broken my own record for lethargic racing, that, 1:49:06 time reported for my 3rd lap was actually the time for my 3rd and 4th laps — the computer somehow missed me on the third lap. “We’re actually better suited for running events and triathlons,” Bigfoot told me. “We’ll get it fixed.” (And yes, 54:33 is still really slow.)

Warm thoughts

Though the temperature by race’s end approached a balmy 60, the day started around freezing, making the International Mountain Bicycle Association Satefy Patrol’s kerosene-heated warming tent an alluring draw. “It’s for people who don’t want to be hurt and cold,” one of the patrolers told me.

My aching (15-year-old) back

Just when you think you’re ailing body is trying to tell you you’re too old for endurance mountain bike racing, you have a heartening conversation like the one I had with Pierce Holloway. I caught up with Pierce mid-race. “How’s it going?” I asked. “My back hurts,” he replied. “I always have back pain after I either run for an hour and a half or bike for an hour and a half.” Good to know that aches and pains aren’t ageist: Pierce is 15.

Speaking of which …

Overheard in the pit area: “This isn’t so much about cardio,” one racer was telling another. “It’s about pain management.”

Bikes squared

There’s always a lot of bike oogling at events such as the Meltdown. Adrian Vrouwenvelder, whose son Luke was racing in the Men’s Duo category, and I found ourselves doing a “What the heck is That?” next to a BMW motorcycle that had a Moots YBB attached via a bike bike rack. As we were admiring the ingenuity of the 2×2 Cycles bike rack (which is better described in the accompanying picture than in words), the bikes owner, Garrett Blake of Chapel Hill, walked up.

“I’ve never seen a motorcycle rack like that,” I said. “Where’d you get it?”

“I made it,” Blake replied. Turns out he and some fellow biker/cyclist buddies couldn’t find a good motorcycle racking system so they decided to make their own. The result: a steel rack that holds the bicycle off the back in a way that’s in “aerodynamic alignment” with the motorcycle.

Pretty cool. So cool that we hardy talked about his YBB, one of the cooler hand-built bikes on the market.

Race results

Are posted at On the Mark Sports.