Hotter-N-Hell Hundred

The last weekend in August my dad, Tim and I completed the first of our 3 races for the season. The Hotter-n-hell hundred is a 100 mile bike ride in Wichita Falls where the high temperature hits 100 degrees at this point in the summer. We drove the 5 hours up there on Friday so that we could pick up our packets and go to the expo. The HHH is known for having a really great expo-and this year they did not disappoint. The first time I rode the HHH was in 2004 when Tim was already in Ft. Hood training to deploy, so he couldn't ride with dad and I, and it was right before our "church/2nd" wedding. At the expo I found an amazing deal on a wheel set which I ended up buying for Tim as his wedding gift! This year we didn't get anything quite as snazzy as that, but we did get some cycling shorts and jerseys for about 50% off. Sa-weet! So then the next morning we had to get up at O'dark thirty-a.k.a 4:30 am to drive the hour back up to Wichita Falls from where we were staying. With 13,000 riders, hotel rooms were a little tough to come by. At the start line they line you up according to what distance you are riding then, how fast you say you will ride. Well unfortunately I think we got started in the back of our group so we had to work our way through a lot of riders and couldn't find any good pace lines to join. But none the less, we had a really great ride. The boys were out to set a land speed record and stop at as few rest stops for as short of rests as possible. I did not get the memo. I thought we were stopping at one rest stop but we didn't and I was out of water and then I think I missed a "meal" (aka-power bar or gel), plus there was a mean head/cross wind and I don't ride well in wind, so I ran out of steam a bit at about the 60 mile point. This unfortunately slowed us down from about 20 mph to 16 mph. The boys were doing awesome, so I felt like a huge wimp! Grrrr! But we still finished up in 6 hours 17 minutes total time and not including our rest stops our ride time was 5 hours 39 minutes with an average speed of 18 mph. There were 13,000 total riders, but not all of them wore a timing chip-you had to pay extra for it-which of course Tim insisted we get one. There were 1,197 100 milers who wore the chip and we came in 417th, 418th and 420th (some dude snuck in between us claiming 419th-the nerve!). So I think we did pretty dang well. But here's the real shocker, I ended up coming in 4th out of 17 in my age group and 19th out of 149 overall females! It looks like trying to keep up with the boys has done me some good! Tim came in 31st in his age group and dad came in 27th in his age group. So although we didn't get into a super speedy pace line and zip along at an average of 23 mph like we planned, we still did a great job in our own 3 man pace line-Go Team Mann-handlers!

Team Mann-handlers before the 100 miler.