Boggs Rocks: an Education

It’s been some years since I’ve called myself a racer, since I’ve put in the kind of time on the bike that would qualify as a part-time job. But I still pin numbers on, such as I did this past weekend at Boggs Mountain in one of Bike Monkey’s two 8-hour races. The natural question is why go if I’m not actually “racing.”

To my own bafflement, I’ve known I had a reason, but have struggled to articulate it, until this past weekend. I’ll get to that small-scale epiphany in a bit.

Boggs Mountain sits in Lake County, near the town of Middletown, north of Napa County. The entire area burned in the Valley Fire in 2015. Some 76,000 acres burned and nearly 2000 structures burned. The mountain was turned to ash and the entire trail system had to be rebuilt. Not until 2022 were there enough trails for Bike Monkey to begin running one of its signature events again.

Last year the day began with rain and temperatures hanging in the 40s, but after a few hours the rain stopped and the trails dried out in the most surprising turn of events I’ve ever seen in a mountain bike event. Several days before this year’s event the forecast went from predictably spring-time conditions to a forecast that sounded like a repeat of last year: 40s and rain at the start, but with the promise of rain ending and the temperature rising into the 50s, possibly the 60s.

No such thing took place. And almost a third of the field looked at the forecast and concluded being on top of Boggs Mountain was not something they wanted. Of the 280-odd riders signed up for Boggs, just under 200 actually showed up.

Were we to graph the intelligence level of everyone who signed up for Boggs, I suspect the majority of no-shows would appear to the right of the bell curve.

My plan was simple: Roll out at the back of the field and don’t burn any matches in the first mile. I’d go hard enough to stay warm, but do what I could to stay in a fat-burning zone so that I could hope to finish five laps.

At the start the conditions were dreadful: 38 and rain. Honestly, I see conditions like these as an adventure, and I figured I was ready. The course starts at roughly 3200 feet of elevation, with a high point at nearly 3800 feet and a total elevation gain each lap of 1200 feet.

According to my Wahoo Elemnt, shortly after the start—once my GPS cooled to the ambient temperature, the temperature was only 32 degrees and for the remainder of my day it would range between 32 and 28 degrees. Somewhere on the climb it began to snow. It began as rain that’s falling too slowly and then morphed into wet flakes the size of cotton balls.

The course was wet, but not sloppy and there were only a few spots where I saw any trail damage. And a brief aside on wet rock: There was a moment late in my second lap where, because my hands were too numb for me to brake properly, I failed to brake enough to square up my approach to a rain-slick, sloping slab of granite maybe 12 inches high that dropped to another slab of rain-slick granite. I had no choice but to commit to the line and hope my front tire didn’t slide out. If someone told me that the Maxxis Minion was made with pine sap, I’d believe it, because I thought I was destined for terra most firma. Instead, I rolled through as if I was on hero dirt.

I’ve raced in some awful conditions over the years. Bike Monkey’s Fish Rock and the previous year’s edition of Boggs both make my top five in rough days due to the combination of cold and wet. I’d been snowed on in New York while racing at Bear Mountain, but that race only lasted a couple of hours.

Thanks to such cold temperatures and the fact that precipitation came in four forms—rain, snow, sleet and hail—and never stopped for more than a half hour, I can say with certainty that these were the worst conditions I’ve ever seen.

I’ve often said that I’ve learned all I can from a day that’s 75 and sunny. If I want to learn anything new about myself or life in general, give me yucky conditions—something to struggle against.

Writer and mystic William James wrote, “As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!”

I’ve always loved that quote, and when I substitute racing in awful weather for reading fiction it helps to sum up the appeal of a rotten day. And here’s another way to frame how awful a day it was: There were 24 people who did a single lap and then called it a day and another 44 who managed only two laps.

I was among those who finished only two laps. My mistake was not anticipating that the weather would be significantly worse than forecast. I have a heavier jacket I could have worn and a heavier base layer and I think those would have made a difference, but the bottom line is simple: I simply could not go hard enough to generate enough heat. I did okay on the two longer climbs, but on all the singletrack I was coasting too much to generate much heat. This may make me sound like an odd duck, but I’m bummed I couldn’t take more of that day.

Snow and sleet blew sideways at the top of the opening climb and because the mountain was largely devoid of trees due to the Valley Fire, there was little to interrupt that zephyr. Circumstances like that tend to prompt existential questions in me, like why bother? I knew I wasn’t going to win or even stand on the podium. Hell, I didn’t even claim I was racing. I said I was treating the event as a guided tour—plus there’s my use of the word “event,” rather than “race.” As I watched the lumps of white skid across the scrub, I solved the riddle of why I ride these events rather than race them. When I raced, I was out to prove something. Sometimes it was that I was stronger than others. Sometimes it was that I was smarter than others. And sometimes it was that I more stubborn. Always, I sought to prove myself in some way. These days I’m not racing against anyone else. My competition is within. It’s in challenge that we find out of what we are made. But as observing changes the observed, going out on a day like that reveals new depths of character.