Last Saturday, I covered a bike race for the Capital Times/State Journal called the Horribly Hilly Hundreds that takes place about 30 miles west of Madison in Blue Mounds (for my story click here).
In short, anyone who participates in this race is freaking crazy. I mean absolutely nuts.
For the article, I was sent to the final rest stop for the 200K race, which is affectionately known as “The Graveyard.”
With people toeing that fine line between resting and keeling over from unimaginable exhaustion, the ground in this yard (owned by the hilariously colorful Steve Lehman) is just covered by bikers bodies. They will lay there occasionally sipping on water until they feel ready to tackle the remaining 26 miles, which is mostly uphill.
To give you an idea of these hills; I was driving a very old van to the race, and even with the pedal to the floor, this old junker was barely making it up the hills. Seriously, I thought it was going to stall out on in the middle of the race.
I talked to a few of these “resting” masochistic freaks, who said with a smile that their legs had cramped up to the point where they couldn’t walk. But once they could get up they would start biking again. What!?!?!?!
I also talked to someone who said that he would start biking again once he had drank 5 liters of water at the rest stop.
In the end, I don’t think I could relate to these people at all, but I took some pictures of them for the newspaper and here is what I came up with.
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