Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Kenai 250 butt massacre


Kenai 250 is the bikepacking race to do in Alaska. It starts and ends in beautiful town of Hope and hits pretty much every singletrack and trail on Kenai peninsula between Hope and Seward. It consist of about 200 miles of singletrack, 65 miles of paved roads and 30,000 feet of elevation to peddle up. It is brutal.

The conditions this year were relentless, wet, muddy and showers definitely guaranteed being wet entire race. The streams which you had to cross were double in size due to rain over the past couple days and temperature was in mid 50's. All in all conditions were just like we love it up here in Alaska.

I was excited about this race entire year as I really wanted to explore all the trails on Kenai. So far, I only did the Resurrection trail as part of Soggy Bottom race in 2015. Here i could enjoy the Resurrection Trail, Devils creek trail, Johnson Pass, Crown Point Loop, Iditarod trail, Lost Lakes, Russian Lakes. Well at least that was my plan until I sat down (by sat down i mean fell) into one of the creeks on the Devil's creek trail and got sand in my bike shorts, which i did not realized until 6 hours later when i could not sit on my arse.

We left Hope at 9 am on Friday and by 9pm we were on the Iditarod trail heading toward Seward (half point of the race) and I had to bike standing up because of the sand paper like feeling in my pants. When we were pulling into Seward at midnight I not only had a mess of an ass but my legs were cramping due to the biking in standing position for past 3 hours.

So i decided that rather to continue as part of the lead group out of Seward and getting droped off from the group somewhere on the climb to Lost Lakes, I took couple hours of sleep and tried to recover my butt and legs. There is nothing more scary than bike in the middle of the night on overgrown trail in bear country. And i mean there was bear shit everywhere.

Next day at about 6 am I headed lonesome to the Lost Lake Trail, but I was not able to sit on the seat. Bottom line is that i called it in and biked the highway back to Hope, which still was 75 miles away.

I really enjoy the ride despite of the sand and not finishing and I definitely will come back next year.