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"I didn't expect to fall so much"


The Stowe Derby home page begins:

The Stowe Derby is one of the oldest and most unique ski races in North America. It started in 1945 as a personal challenge between two amazing skiers - Austrian, Sepp Ruschp who was hired to come to America and head the new ski school at Stowe and Erling Strom, world famous mountaineer from Norway. The challenge was the same as it is today - to race from the top of Mt. Mansfield, Vermont's highest peak to the historic village of Stowe... on ONE pair of skis! The ultimate test of a skiers ability. Ruschp was the winner of the first Stowe Derby.
In the spirit of Ruschp and Strom, I decided to race ... in the first annual fat bike version of the Derby.

Thanks to event organizer Pascale Savard and photographers Mike Hitelman and Bear Cieri, I was able to get a few photos from the race. A bit of cropping gives the appearance that I'm leading the bunch up the incline.

Photo credit: Mike Hitelman


Darkroom tricks aside, I AM leading the bunch up the incline ... by about a tire width (which, in fat biking, isn't as small a margin as it is in other disciplines).

Photo credit: Mike Hitelman


Finally, this one captures my race perhaps more accurately than the prior one.

Photo credit: Bear Cieri


And, here are a few more great shots by Hitelman that help capture the mood. In the second image, you can choose which one I am ... trust me, at one point or another, I was all three (minus the youthful biological clock, of course).


Photo credit: Mike Hitelman | link



Photo credit: Mike Hitelman | link


Per the fat bike race specifics page, "Riders must be at least 14 years old, and be experienced fat bikers." Well, I met one of the two criteria, anyway.

The race would be my second ever fat bike ride, and on a decidely different surface than the semi-plowed streets of suburban Framingham. Namely, on choppy soft snow with moderately steep climbs and descents. Here's the course map.



It's worth noting that while the skiers (skate and classic) started at the top of Mt. Mansfield for a 12+ mile course, the fat bikers started 4 miles along the ski route, after most of the serious descending was done. As this video from 2013 shows, those 4 miles took the best skiers fewer than 8 minutes to navigate!

The fat bike race started near the Stowe Conference Center/Inn at the Mountain. We pushed our bikes a quarter of a mile up the end of Toll Road, lined up in waves of 5 (spaced 30 seconds apart), and at the given signal, were off.

The first stretch was downhill. In my first 3 minutes, I crashed 4 times. Unlike a bike crash on other surfaces, bike crashes on snow are pretty much like Alpine ski falls.

No harm, no foul.

Well, okay, a little harm, but nothing that ibuprofen over the next few days wouldn't minimize.

The videos that follow tell the story, but briefly, the race had what I'll call four phases.
  • Descent 1: short, only the first third of a mile; relatively wide open Alpine ski trail
  • Upper trail: a bit less than 3 miles of rolling terrain through the woods
  • Descent 2: a bit more than half a mile of narrow sketchy descent through the trees
  • Bike path: about four and a half flat miles to the finish in town
Here's the elevation profile (the apparent vertical walls are likely when my slow walking speed triggered my Garmin's auto-pause function).




My Video
  • Excerpts from the first 40 minutes (consider watching at 1.5x speed)



  • Excerpts from the second 54 minutes (consider watching at 1.5x speed)



Here are the galleries available on the Stowe Derby site:
The Numbers
  • 9 of 12 in the men's 50-59 field, 58 of 71 overall
  • Distance: 8.2mi (click here for Strava)
  • Speed: avg 7.1mph, max 17.0mph (despite 800 feet of vertical drop, well below my 2014 CX average of 10.7mph)
  • Elevation gain: 525' (but, that's gained while descending a net 800')
  • Heart rate: avg 155bpm, max 176bpm
  • Crashes: 22 (16 to the left, 6 to the right, which says something, but I don't know what exactly)
It's fun to compare my clothing choice to that of the Craftsbury Ski Marathon back at the end of January. What a difference 30 degrees makes!
  • Smartwool short black socks
  • Tall ski socks
  • Foot warmers
  • Long underwear Cycling shorts
  • Running tights Cycling tights
  • XC ski pants
  • Short sleeve Under Armor shirt
  • Long sleeve Under Armor shirt
  • Team Fatty merino wool long sleeve cycling jersey
  • Long sleeve cycling jersey
  • Cycling windbreaker
  • Ski glove liners
  • Ski gloves XC ski gloves
  • Hand warmers (1, somewhere early in my prep, I lost the 2nd)
  • Balaclava
  • Neoprene facemask
  • Ski hat B2B cap and bike helmet
  • Ski goggles for the first half lap, Sun glasses the rest of the way
The one thing I would have done differently for the Stowe Derby was wear my waterproof Alpine ski gloves rather than my non-waterproof Nordic ski gloves.

In the words of a competitor overheard relatively early in the race, "I didn't expect to fall so much."