Team Armur - Race Crash Redemption

The crazy idea to attempt an Ultra race started to take shape in my mind when I had no fixed cycling goal in place and was just doing brevet after brevet just for the heck of it. I knew of The Deccan Cliffhanger(TDC), which is a RAAM(Race Across AMerica) qualifier, and that most of the route was along the same route as the Pune-Mahabaleshwar-Nippani-Pune brevet. A tough one and add to it the fact that this was a race, made things super challenging. 

I decided I would attempt it and started reading up on training for such races for I had never seriously trained before. I had several doubts about how these races worked, why one had to have a crew, etc. etc. and thankfully I knew the right person to guide me and answer all my questions – Divya Tate. She’s the race director for TDC and she has vast crewing experience, crewing in several Ultra races across the world including RAAM. With her guidance I embarked on the two aspects involved in attempting such a race – Training and Planning.

For the training part, I owe it all to one person – Kedar Joshi – my regular ride partner during brevets, friend and mentor. With his advice and guidance, I trained religiously and soon started seeing the improvements I was making. One example of how much I had improved was when I was able to stay in the lead group without getting dropped almost throughout the Criterium race, as compared to the first road race organized by the Pune Wolfpack, where I had been dropped at the first attack.

The planning part was something very new to me. First I needed a crew in place and then I had to have a race strategy. I called up my teammate from the Aurangabad fleche – Abhishek Kulkarni about crewing for me and he was super eager and enthusiastic! Then I met the young and bubbling Abhishek Date when piloting the Pune Half Marathon and he readily agreed to join the team! Sudhakar Shinde and Omkar Kesarkar – good friends from Pune Randonneurs made up the rest of the crew and Team Armur came into existence :D 

I always knew who the best person to help me with the race strategy would be – the awesome triathlete Mihir Sambhus. I knew he made detailed plans and strategies for all the brevets he rode and so with his help we put together several plans for the race based on my current speed, capability and so on.

So we were all set and the big day arrived. I was the fifth racer to start and was flagged off by the Iron Man and good friend Hiren Patel. I soon sped down the familiar roads through the city passing the riders who had started ahead of me. Soon, I passed everybody and was comfortably leading the race! Alas it wasn’t to last. As I passed through the bumpy highway portion leading up to Katraj, my handlebars started dropping as the screws holding it weren’t tight enough. I explained the situation to my crew and they went ahead to wait for me with the right tools. I stopped and they swiftly fixed it. That was when the amazing Mikey (Michael Lehning) passed me and the next I saw him was at the Dinner Party in Goa!!! Boy he was FAST!

The next portion of the race with the three big ghats was extremely familiar territory and I was crossing the sections as per the plan we had set up. I felt I was slower than usual on Khambatki ghat and knew that all the pushing I had done in the previous sections was taking its toll on me. So I relaxed myself and went steadily up the Pasarani ghat and onto Mahabaleshwar. Then it was time for that amazing feeling that every cyclist looks forward to! The steep descent down the slopes of Medha ghat :D 

Then it was more or less rolling terrain and I was rolling along faster than I had ever been, crossing Satara, Kolhapur and then Nippani. The amazing speed was partly the result of the training I’d put in and partly due to the amazing Aero bars. Huge thanks to Chai (Chaitanya Velhal) for advising me to go for it. 

After crossing the Nippani ghat I carried the momentum and was superbly speeding towards Belgaum when I started feeling that old enemy creeping up on me again – Sleep!

A little background : Sleep deprivation during long rides is pretty common. At night on the highway, you usually cannot see anything other than what is illuminated by your headlights. This means you are usually looking continuously at the white lines on the road and this acts like a soothing lullaby and your brain automatically goes into sleep mode. I’d faced this in several brevets before and had developed a simple technique to keep myself alert. When that soothing lullaby feeling kicks in I just look at something far away and then at something nearby and then at something far away and so on. What this does is, it makes your pupil dilate and contract repeatedly, driving away the sleepiness for a while. 

Belgaum was fast approaching but at the same time I was feeling increasingly sleepy. I was using the above technique to fight the old foe and the plan was to reach Belgaum and sleep for 15 mins, take a swig of red bull and then continue. It’s like they say, “What you plan and what takes place ain’t ever exactly been similar”. Just about 5 kms before Belgaum, there was some kind of a small descent with I guess a slight right curve at the bottom. I was going at over 40kmph on that descent and as luck would have it, the enemy tasted success. I catnapped for half a second and when I opened my eyes, I was very quickly missing that slight right and heading off the highway. There was a small patch of grass followed by a half foot wall on either side of a gutter that separated the Highway from the service road. I hit the wall at full speed and clearly remember being pleasantly surprised at doing a full somersault with the bike!  Somewhere during that act, my legs had thankfully automatically unclipped. I then landed with a thud on my back on the service road. 

During all this, I heard the shocked shouts of my crew, as they came rushing out to help me. They made me sit up and check for broken bones while also checking on my dear bike. I couldn’t lift up my left hand which was a cause for concern. There were huge road rashes all over my left leg and hands and back! I was really relieved to see that my bike was in perfect condition, barring a few scratches despite the high speed crash into a wall! I wanted to get back on the bike and continue racing but thankfully my crew wouldn’t let me J They made me rest a bit and after my head cleared up a bit, we decided to go to the nearest hospital to get me treated. I was happily sleeping by the time we reached the hospital and don’t remember much of it. There were injections and drips but more importantly, I was getting a nice relaxing sleep. I also remember the doctor telling me that the shoulder was just an internal bruise but by that time I was psychologically on a super low.

Morning came and I woke up feeling much better. I changed out of all the bloodstained clothes and felt I had it in me to try and get back on the bike. My crew was super excited when I woke them up with the plan and soon, they took me back to the exact spot where I had crashed. They had actually marked the place with some stones and in no time I was back riding. The first 40 kms from Belgaum to Kittoor was the most difficult. The cuts in my leg were sending agonizing stings with each stroke of the pedal and my left hand was just okay enough to hold onto the handle bar. I wasn’t able to go into any sort of aero position and this made me painfully grind out the kilometers at a very slow pace, while facing a stiff crosswind. 

At the turn around control point, the officials from Backpack Outdoors gave me a huge roaring welcome and egged me to keep riding strong! This gave me a superb boost and I managed to speed up on the 40kms back to Belgaum. My crew and Neel (Neel Kolhatkar) from Backpack Outdoors had arranged for a nice surprise for me at Belgaum – my favourite Chappati and aloo bhaji! All morning I’d been eating only Chikkis and stuff like that so this was another welcome change and gave me strength to push as far as possible for we knew that all hopes of a finish within the race time limit of 38hours was long gone due to my painfully slow speed after the crash.

The mighty Chorlas was next. By the time I reached the first of the endless climbs, the swollen left thigh was causing my muscles to tighten up which in turn resulted in a searing knee pain. The climbs were terribly slow. Looking at the speedometer only made things worse. I usually run up slopes at a much quicker pace L Just when I was thinking that Abhi D decided to run or rather “race” me, up what looked to be a 10+ % slope. He was clearly winning and there was just nothing I could do about it! The cuts in my leg made sure I couldn’t stand and push through the slopes. All I could do was sit and complete one pedal stroke after another – thinking of words that my good friend Pranaya Mohanty always keeps repeating during the long brevets – “Pain is temporary”!

The climbs finally gave way to the superb 17km descent down along the steep edges of the Deccan Plateau down into the Western Coastal Plains – that’s one thing I really enjoy – EXPERIENCING Geography. It was also getting dark around this time and I had to make do with a couple of temporary lights as I had lost my main headlight in the crash. Things were getting difficult in the darkness and my knee pain wasn’t easing up at all. I managed to dig up one final push out of myself and reached the final control point around 45kms before the finish line. With that the 38 hour time limit passed and we decided as a team to stop and head to the beach and join the Dinner party. 

A DNF on the race card, but a lifetime’s worth of experience and mental strength gained over the course of the 38 hours! Easily one of the most testing rides of my life and I could never have gotten through it without my dear crew who were my source of strength. 

I also have to thank my roomies Arun (Arunachalam Mutiah) and Ji (Nishandh Dileepan), friends and colleagues, particularly Nanda (Nanda Gopal), Monisha (Monisha Bhaskar) and Shruti (Shruti Roy) for putting up with my training antics every single day and still giving me that much needed encouragement and confidence boost whenever I was feeling down and out. 

A race to remember! Zoom Crash Redemption :D