Low Gap Race Report: Mentor Perspective from Jen Ryden

Race Report from Jen Ryden

Event: Grasshopper Low Gap

Date: January 27, 2024

I got excited about the Low Gap Under 19 Girls Mentorship Program when I heard about it. It was an easy way to sign up to race without worrying that people thought I was taking myself too seriously. Of course, in the mentor instructions, I found out that we needed to convey that we were racing and that we can own being competitive no matter our times. Oops. Then I got worried that I’d be dropped. My strengths as a mentor are being able to persevere through hard times and offer distraction when things suck. I’m not a very fast climber and I got worried that I was undertrained and at risk for being dropped by the partner I would be supporting.
After expressing my concerns about getting dropped on the climb to the program director, she paired me up with Delia, a rider who also doesn’t think of themselves as a climber. I was mostly reassured and took up a new goal of feeding my rider 200 calories an hour to get through 4+ hours of racing. I got a bento box for my top tube and stuffed it with open packs of blocks and Rice Krispie treats. I definitely wouldn’t have been as prepared with food if it wasn’t my primary job to be the feeding domestique, but my focus on eating and drinking was really good for my own sustained energy as well. 

I wasn’t able to pre-ride the course – we had house guests the weekend before when the normally closed course was open. The best I could do was print out the map with elevation profile, try to memorize it and keep a photo of the map handy on my phone. If I were to do it again, I would take an extra hour to figure out how Ride with GPS works and load it on my phone. As it was, there was a lot of looking sideways at the map and guessing where we might be. Even with GPS, there’s no way I could have anticipated the extent of the mud and water bars that we would ride, slide or slog through. In fact, had I pre-ridden, I might have tried to relinquish my entry to someone else instead of returning a week later to suffer again. The novelty during the race was at least entertaining and added the satisfaction of surviving a first run on the course. 

My pre-race prep was meh. I did a decent job eating and drinking electrolyte drink to pre-hydrate the day before. I felt vastly undertrained, both due to December and January rain and due to neglecting my early morning riding once the NorCal mountain bike season started. If I had to train for it again next year, I’d add weekly Tunnel Road threshold intervals to my routine to prepare for the 2 x 6-8 mile climbs. Happily, all the mountain bike skills work we’ve done with the high school team helped me navigate through the muck with greater confidence. In real life we’d let the trails dry before we left these kind of tire tracks. Learning to drive in Colorado where you can count on sliding on ice set my expectations that sudden moves in tractionless conditions would end me up in a ditch.

The start was intimidating. The U19 girls and their mentors started just behind the pro field and in front of the speedy age groupers. Our 2 mile neutral roll out was fairly hot, and I got jostled elbow to shoulder as I was passed by high intensity age group riders. Far and away the best part of the start was taking Fern and her mentor’s wheel as Delia and I steered through the pack. Fern happily chatted away distracting us while simultaneously passing other pairs of mentored riders. We enjoyed their draft until the climb started when she apparently kept the same chatty pace despite the 6% grade and we settled in for the long haul. 

The best part of the course was the road descent. With my gravel bike, I had the best of all worlds – drop bars and killer brakes. There were many nerve wracking hairpins, but I kept a good margin of safety for my partner and we passed at least 8 riders. While road descending was glorious, ironically the hardest part of the course for me was the dirt descent. I got worried that with her front suspension and relaxed ready position, Delia would drop me and my silly gravel frame. I was not at all relaxed in the drop bars with my high fixed seat post and fully craned neck. Luckily, after the first dirt descent scare, I found my nerve, used my bike’s big ring where I could pedal downhill and managed to keep up. The slimy mud and water bars after the second feed zone were hard for both of us and laughably ridiculous to ride through. We nearly took out a course photographer who was stationed at a water bar. The difficulty level required all our attention and we felt good about our dirt credentials as we passed some roadie adults.

The last 8 miles of the course are downhill and a little upwind. Between the first and second rest stops, Delia revealed that she’d had the stomach flu all week and only started eating food the day before. I was so impressed by the mental reserves she’d had to use to make up for her week of calorie deficit. When we got to those final 8 miles, we were in finishing mode and we pedaled side by side through alternating sections of pavement and gravel, both of us on the lookout for crater sized puddles that could send us over the bars.  We sped up a bit for the line – I wanted to offer a sprint partner, but she had already given 120%. We were so grateful to have completed the race, that we just kept pedaling back to the starting park. We were oblivious to our cheering section who had been waiting there for us for an hour. (Not a pro move.)

Going to Low Gap was a great experience. I loved having 8 of us, students and coaches, from the Skyline High School mountain bike team at a gravel race; riding with the mentorship program; and having my whole family prepare for a race together. I would go back and race Low Gap again, more prepared for uphill climbs and more aware of just how hard gravel racing is. Mentoring was super fun, but I think now I’m also willing to own being competitive as an age group gravel racer.