DNFs

by: Emily Brock

My last two races were Trans-Iowa and PMBAR (the Pisgah Mountain Bike Adventure Race). I didn’t post race reports here because they were both DNFs, and I thought it was a bit embarrassing to publish reports of my DNFs on a team site. This is also why I didn’t post anything for my Colorado Trail Race experience last year, even though the story of that race was a pretty good one.

But I have a tendency to enter races that extremely difficult to finish, and a DNF maybe isn’t really that embarrassing in a race where half the field doesn’t finish. And besides, maybe it is good for folks reading this site to remember that when you get right out to the limits of endurance, not every racer is going to succeed. There’s a lot that can go wrong on any given day.

So, yeah, I didn’t finish Trans-Iowa. It is not a good idea to start a 300-something mile race when you are already sleep-deprived from a vicious work week. The course was muddy and mentally exhausting, and after a wrong turn sent the entire field a few miles out of our way, I faced facts that I just did not have the snap I needed for an event that long. I decided I had to drop out at the checkpoint. Once I decided I wasn’t finishing, the stresses and hassles melted away and I tried to just enjoy my shortened ride through the damp Iowa countryside with some of the nicest endurance racers you could ever hope to meet. (full report is here)

And yeah, I also didn’t finish PMBAR. PMBAR is the greatest race in the United States, so it was a real bummer for me not to finish it this year. PMBAR requires teams of two to ride together through the Pisgah National Forest, plotting their own route to checkpoints. It is like an all-day alleycat that takes place not in a city center, but instead on the greatest network of singletrack on the east coast. These are my favorite trails in the world and the place I ride most frequently, and racing on them with 200 of my closest friends is a fantastic experience. My partner for the race got really sick and there was no way we could finish, so we dropped out about eight hours into the race. It was the only thing to do, and I wasn’t too regretful about it since we had ridden all the best parts of our route already by the time we dropped out. (full report is here)

Not finishing a race isn’t the end of the world. If you don’t enter races you might not finish, that means skipping out on the most adventurous endurance races around the country and just racing boring lap races where you never get too far from comfort. If you are too hung up on the possibility of DNF, you might close yourself off from the opportunity to extend yourself far out beyond your comfort zone. And you should do that, you really should, because that’s when the mind really grows strong. I hope the rest of my summer contains fewer DNFs, but I am still going to keep entering the craziest, funnest, longest races I can find. I race my bike for adventures and to find out more about myself, and both Trans Iowa and PMBAR really did that for me.