Atlanta Spartan 5K

On March 16th, me and Beatriz did the Atlanta Spartan 5K.

A little over a year earlier, I'd broken a bunch of ribs training for the same race. This year, I was uninjured, and more or less ready for it. I wasn't in as good a shape as I had been for the previous year's race in Nashville, but I was feeling good enough. Let's do this!

I drove myself, B and Dave over that morning, and we gave ourselves plenty of time to park and warm up. We figured we might need extra time because, historically, you had to park kind of far away and walk over. However, that ended up not being the case that day! We found a spot, probably the only available spot, in the lot right next to the start/finish. We couldn't believe our luck. I even worried that we were parked in a volunteer lot or something, but no, it was completely legit. Woo!

The event was in Conyers, at the International Horse Park, which I'd done more mountain bike races at, than I can count, including three 24 Hours of Adrenaline races. Most of the obstacles were set up in the steeplechase area, and the runs were all through the woods on trails I knew pretty well. We were just doing the 5k, which was entirely on the steeplechase side, but the 10k and 15k runs even went under the road, over to the granite side.

Having done one of these before, the vibe was familiar. It wasn't all South African Candy Aisle any more.

Having given ourselves a little extra time to park, that it turned out we didn't need, we had plenty of time to mill around and get ready at a leisurely pace.

Dave and B:

B was racing. Dave was not.

But, that was great, because he was able to take photos of us!

Me and B before the start:

Yeah, looking good and strong.

We had to crawl under some barbed wire and hop over a wall to get to the actual start.

There was a group of ladies ahead of us who seemed completely incredulous at this. I'm not sure what they expected. A few of them began crawling and just pushed through it. The others were like "How I'm gonna do that!?" to the course marshall. "I can't go around?" He kind-of explained how to do it. Plus the rest of their group had figured it out. Eventually the last 2 got through the barbed wire, and their friends helped them get over the wall. I thought they might bail right there, but they didn't. It looked like it would be a long day for them, but hopefully they at least walked the route and tried some of the obstacles.

It did occur to me at that point, that you can either skip or at least do the penalty loop for most obstacles, but you absolutely must do the crawl/wall to the starting line. There's no getting around that one.

Me and B at the start:

I was worried that it would be cold, so I brought my jersey with me, but the sun was out, and I ended up not actually wearing it.

B is on Team Usana, and there were a bunch of folks from the team at the start, so we all took a group picture.

A bunch of them had done many of these before, but for a seemingly equal number, this was their first event.

I want to say that, again, the announcer was just like: "Yeah, just go when you want" rather than doing all of the standard "Spartan, what is your profession!?" speech, but I may be confusing it with the Nashville event. At any rate, we eventually started running. The start was located close to where the start for all of the mountain bike races was, and we ran the same trails for a while.

At some point, we diverged though, and there were some little 4 foot walls to climb over. It's been long enough that I don't remember the exact order of obstacles any more. I do remember that we ran for what seemed like a really long time between obstacles at first, and then towards the end, there were a ton of them in a row.

I'd never done the Helix before. I'd watched videos of it, and it looked easy, but for all I knew, it would be tricky in some way.

Turned out no, it was super, super easy.

The sandbag carry was tougher than Nashville. It went straight up and back down this super steep hill. Climbing was strenuous. Coming back down was sketchy.

In previous years, the weather had generally been pretty bad for this particular Spartan. It was either cold, or wet, or both. This year, it was warmer than expected, the sun was out, and it wasn't going to rain. It had rained either the day before, or the night before though, so it was still a little muddy in places, and stepping in someone else's slippery footprint was something to watch out for.

The Mud Wall was a Conyers-specific obstacle. I'm not sure it exists anywhere else. We had to scramble down a slippery embankment, cross a creek, climb over a chest-high downed tree, and then climb up a cargo net draped over a hill on the other side of the creek.

It sounds way worse than it was. The toughest part was getting safely down to the creek. Climbing up the net wasn't materially more difficult than an A-frame cargo net. The mud was a non-issue. The biggest issue was just people moving slowly ahead of me.

The bucket carry was as awkward as usual, and also involved climbing directly up a hill and back down it, like the sandbag had. So sketchy coming down.

The barbed wire crawl was legitimately difficult. It was super muddy, and the mud was deep. You couldn't just lie on your side and roll. You really had to crawl, and it was as exhausting as it was filthy. There were exhausted people everywhere, who couldn't go another foot without recovering, and you had to navigate around them. I got covered in mud. My shoes got filled with mud. My hands were covered and slippery. It was surprisingly difficult.

I remember wiping my hands on every tree I could until they were dry. I don't remember if the multi-rig was before or after the barbed wire. I want to say that it was after, and that I was worried about muddy hands. My hands were dry by the time that I got to it, and the rings weren't a problem, but the pipes spun! The pipes in Nashville didn't spin, or at least I didn't notice if they did. But these did, it caught me by surprise, and I almost slipped. Fortunately, I didn't, but yikes!. Now I know!

Somewhere in there, we had to run up a long, fairly steep hill, and I walked for a hundred feet or so. That was the only walking I did.

After running through a familar section of trail, with a bunch of tight switchbacks, we popped out in the steeplechase field and the rest of the obstacles came in quick succession. I don't have photos from them, but they included the spear throw, z-wall, rope climb, hoist, slant wall, A-frame, rolling mud, and of course, the fire jump.

I managed every obstacle, except for the spear throw. I'd even gotten it 3 times in a row, in practice before the event. Maybe next time.

I also remember that the hoist was right after the rope climb, my hands were tired, and again, it seemed way heavier than Cody's hoist. I was able to hoist the bag, without tremendous difficulty, but it really wanted to get away from me when I let it back down, and the rope burned my hands a bit.

Done!

It's funny, between podium ceremonies, they kind-of don't care if you get up on stage and take pictures.

We didn't really get 1st, but it's fun to pretend!

I don't remember how well I actually did, and I'm too lazy to look it up, but I want to say that I did better than Nashville. I think B did too. The course was a lot harder - the hills were steeper, there was a lot more singletrack, there was more running all at once, and then the last group of obstacles were all clustered one after the other.

It was super fun though. We were both pretty well recovered before we got home, and the drive wasn't exhausting or anything. It might be time to try a 10k.

So, I felt good immediately after the race, but the next day I felt beat all to hell. I wasn't sore per-se, just beaten up, and my legs didn't want to work.

To remedy this, I got on the road bike and spun out to Hiram and back. By the end of the ride, I was putting in actual efforts, so I figured I was recovered. The next day, I took the mountain bike to Cochran Mill, figuring I'd rip some miles, but nooooo, that was not happening. I barely made it back to the parking lot after a lap of the yellow loop. Beaten up was the best way to describe it. The road bike had been ok the day before, but the impact of mountain biking was just too much.

I ended up taking Tuesday off, riding the comet again on Wednesday, then just resting and staying off the bike until the following Sunday.

It was a rough couple of days, for sure!

Simpsonwood

I was signed up for a Spartan Race on March 16th, so between March 10th and 15th, I did a couple of easy rides just to keep myself warmed up, but nothing too tough. Me and Indi also went for a hike around Simpsonwood near her place, one evening.

I looked up a map online, and downloaded it into my phone, but it was pretty difficult to follow. There were a bunch of side trails that weren't on the map, and some of them looked like they were more popular than the official trails.

Classic.

It was a nice place to hike though, and the weather was great. It was warm enough for shorts, but not warm enough to sweat.

After milling around, getting a little confused, figuring things out, and milling around some more, we eventually came upon an "Old Chapel"...

...which, I guess was old in the sense that it was built a long time ago, but not old in the sense that it was in ruins.

There were some proper ruins near the Old Chapel though.

Trilliums were just starting to poke through the leaves, too.

They weren't "everywhere" yet, but there were a good number of them.

We eventually ended up down by the Chattahoochee...

...and we could see people walking on the other side. It would appear that there are trails over there too.

It's funny, every now and then, I realize... I've hiked all over North Georgia, including a ton of off-trail hiking and exploration, but I've never hiked Kennesaw Mountain, or very much of the Chattahoochee NRA, despite both of those being basically in my backyard. It doesn't seem like it would take a lot of effort to expore them either. I really should do that.

[continues not to...]

Indi!

...with her cute little dog hat!

She'd hiked there before and seen lots of deer, but we didn't see many that day until it started getting darker, then it seemed like they were everywhere!

At one point, a bunch of guys on mountain bikes passed us in the opposite direction. I have no idea what the official rules are there re. bikes. I don't remember seeing any signage one way or the other, but I think it's rare that bikes are allowed in the Chattahoochee NRA - Sope Creek being a major exception.

Toward the back of the park, we found all of these old moonshine tanks.

It's funny too, because I had just been describing moonshine tanks to her a few days earlier, but I'm not sure what I described made a lot of sense - especially that they were held together with nails. Metal tanks, held together with nails... How would they seal? But, here I was actually able to show them to her in real life!

On the left side of the park, we found a map nailed to a tree that actually had all of the trails marked on it.

We expected the QR code would go to a website with that same map, but it went to some other site that advertised something else. I forget what, now.

We managed to get a general sense of the major trails in the park, but didn't have time to really explore everything before it got too dark to continue. We talked about going back, but we ended up breaking up a short time later, and I haven't spent enough time on that side of town since then to check it out again.

Sadly, the GPS data that I collected that day was irreconcilable with any map that I had, including the one on that tree, so I wasn't able to do put it on my trails site. Maybe I'll go back some day and do a proper exploration.

OCR King Compound

Continuing to step through the backlog...

Between February 26th and March 6th, I didn't ride at all. It doesn't look like I even ran. On the 7th, I did a local ride on the Comet Vomet trails, but it wasn't the standing Thursday night ride with the rest of the guys. Daniel's wedding was in the middle of all of that, but that only accounts for one day. I was dating Indi at the time, so it's possible that we were just going out a lot back then, but that would just account for the weekends. My mid-week rides would have been during the day because it gets dark around 5 in February. I honestly don't remember exactly what kept me off the bike. I did go for a short run on the 8th, and it looks like I went to the OCR King Compound on the 10th.

That place is pretty great that time of year. You don't really sweat much, so your hands don't get slippery. It's cold when you start, but you warm up quick. I love it.

We apparently did this workout...

...but I don't have a good memory of how it went. Odds are good that I didn't complete 2 full laps of it, but they're also good that I almost did.

IDK, I guess this is why I shouldn't procrastinate!

Oak Mountain and Tannehill

This past February, not long after my birthday, me and the boys got ourselves over to Birmingham for a weekend of some pretty good riding. Some of the details have been lost to time, but I remember a good bit of it, so here goes...

I met John at his place and he drove us over to Oak Mountain. We ended up leaving Atlanta right around the same time as the rest of the guys - Mark, Marc, and Erick, and we all arrived at the park at about the same time.

On the way over, I was trying to remember the last time I'd been to Oak Mountain, and I couldn't. I had to search this blog to figure it out. Turned out it was in 2012. Twelve years ago! In the intervening years, there had been many interesting developments.

There were tons of new trail.

There was also, now, a bathroom right next to the parking lot. Historically, you had to take a little trail around a hill to get to the bathrooms. Everyone would try to ride their bikes along the trail, in street clothes, with their riding clothes in one hand. Not a huge problem on a random day, in the summer, but if it was cold then you had lots of extra clothes to carry, and it was always possible you might drop something. If it was wet, it was awful if you dropped something. On a race day, there was bidirectional traffic, including folks on foot. It could be a mess.

But no longer.

The urinal cake holder thing was super weird...

I didn't immediately realize that the upside down triangle thing was a stylized tough guy. I though it was... something else, lets say, and the implication was that you were a tough guy if you could... enjoy what I thought that it was. Of course, that wasn't the case. At least, not explicitly...

Yeah.

Moving on.

There was also a classic bronco in the lot...

...which I expected that Mark would be a big fan of, but I got distracted and didn't end up pointing it out to him. I wonder if he noticed it.

We all got kitted up and headed out. Historically, you'd ride down the road until the trail diverged from it off to the right. Then, at some point, they built a "family trail" over behind the bathrooms. Then, a bigger loop off of that. Then, finally a trail that led from that loop around the lake, over a bridge across the spillway...

...and eventually right up to the point across the street from the main trail. It took me a second to re-figure all of that out, but we figured it out, and rode all of that before eventually getting back onto the old, familiar trail.

The trail was mostly familiar. There were a couple of reroutes here and there, and it looked like a couple of jumps had popped up over the years, but I remembered it pretty well.

I've raced at Oak Mountain a bunch of times, and every time, there was one section that I'd use to gauge what kind of day it was going to be. There's a section of trail called "Chimneys" that features a chimney from an old homestead, off to the left, and not long after passing it, there's a set of switchbacks. If I struggled on the switchbacks, then it was going to be a painful race. Otherwise, I'd be fine. That day, I had an ok time on the switchbacks. No suffering. So, when we got around to the big fire road climb, I felt like I was going to be ok.

And, so it was. I followed my brother up the climb...

...and had a pretty easy time of it. I was even comfortable climbing the really steep kick before the bridge.

At the top, we waited for the rest of the crew.

From there, we took Boulder Ridge across the top, for a while. I'd ridden that trail before, with John, way back, but I remembered it differently. I'd have sworn that earlier in the trail, you had to ride longer sections of rock, and I didn't remember the sketchier sections at the end at all. Here are some of the guys riding one such section.

...which, looks like nothing in the videos, but in real life, looks kinda sketchy.

I didn't remember the very tail end of the trail either, which was super rough.

Was it different, in the past, or did I just not remember it right?

After regrouping there, we took some "new" trails back down the mountain - Thunder and Lightning. Thunder was super rocky and chunky. Lightning was more of a flow trail, with jumps and berms. We ran into a guy and his girl on a tandem at the top of Lightning. They didn't finish too long after us, and I was somewhat impressed.

The very bottom of that trail put us back on Chimneys somewhere, and we climbed the fire road again.

This time, we took it across the top for a while, before taking the West Ridge Trail, and eventually coming down Jeckyll and Hyde. The first bit was much like Thunder - super, super rocky and chunky. Then it suddenly became perfect, swoopy, pine-needly singletrack glory for quite a while, before eventually teeing into Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. I guess the lower half is Jeckyll and the upper half is Hyde.

From there we picked up the Family Trail again, and that was it.

Done!

Right at 30 miles in total. Historically, we'd ride 3 laps, which was like 35 miles or something? I forget. The 30 miles we rode that day were tough and taxing, though, even with all of the downhill. It was just so rough, and the trails across the top were tougher than riding the fire road.

Woo! Great ride.

We packed up our stuff and headed over to the Hampton Inn, where our room had no hot water, and no working phone with which we could notify them of the situation. John ended up going down to the front desk to talk to them about it. Turned out the hot water in some entire section of the hotel didn't work. It would be fixed in a few hours. They could move us to another room, but they only had rooms available in that same section. Whatever. We didn't really care. The water wasn't "cold" per se, just not hot, and it felt great to be clean, either way.

I'd grabbed some Zapps at the gas station on the way over...

...and I kicked back and enjoyed them while John showered.

An hour or two later we all met back up and rolled over to Charm Thai for some pretty satisfying dinner.

The menu cracked us up a bit.

Anyone for some Soft Shell Grab?

I like my vegetables tossedaround.

There was also a guy at another table wearing a shirt that said "Woke up gay again".

Ha! I wanted to take a photo of that.

And the humor didn't stop there. On the way out, I noticed an ice cream shop, so we stopped by on the way back.

The innuendos...

I'm sure they know. I'm just sure they know! And, just check out the casting couches inside of Cream and Cones. That's all there is to sit on in there.

So many jokes.

We all got good sleep that night, and the next day we checked out and headed over to Tannehill Ironworks State Park. The rest of the guys had ridden a 24 hour race there the previous year, and alleged that it was a great place to ride. Little did I know that I'd be doing that same race this year, but that is a story for another day.

I'd gotten some GPS data of the park from Tim Winters, in like 2010, and always meant to get over there, but just never got around to it. Apparently, like Oak Mountain, in the intervening years, lots more trail had been built, and it was apparently some really great trail.

The park itself is fairly elaborate. There's a store, and an ice cream shop, and a bunch of camping, and an old iron bridge, and a light guage rail train that you can ride, and they have an open air flea market there sometimes. And, of course, trails. Lots, and lots of trails.

We arrived, figured out where to park, got dressed appropriately, milled around a bit...

...and then began to shred.

Not that there wasn't any climbing...

But it was mostly shred.

I remember the trail really well now, having ridden a 24 there since, but at the time, I really couldn't tell where we were or what was coming up. It was just tempo climbing and flowy downhill, all day.

At some point, we rode along a creek for a while...

...and that trail was kind-of rough, but the rest was just perfect no-brakes singletrack and old roadbeds.

Eventually, we ended up over by the old ironworks itself, and man was I excited to see it. There are a bunch of old furnaces and kilns in Bartow County, but most of them are relatively small, and the wood has long rotted away from all of them. Not so, at Tannehill. Well, I mean... I'm sure that's not the original wood, but the furnaces have been restored to look the way they would have looked when they were in operation.

And, the furnaces themselves are just so impressive.

The Cooper Furnace at the Allatoona Dam is similar, but it only has one arch. There's a Cooper-sized furnace at Tannehill, with an entire double-arched furnace next door.

The old mill house and wheel have been restored too.

Sadly, there aren't any mock-up bellows, but hey, you can't have everything, right?

Apparently, there was a much older and smaller furnace at the site, originally...

...which was eventually supplanted by the larger ones. I didn't take a photo of the plaque on the old furnace, so I'm not sure if it was just a bloomery or what. I'm sure the internet knows, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

The trail even led under the ore bridge.

That's where ore would be wheeled out and dropped into the top of the furnace.

From there, the trail wound around to the top, and you could look down the bridge itself. I thought I took a photo of that too, but apparently not.

We thought we rode everything, but we ended up missing some little part of the trail over near the furnace. I only noticed when I got home and uploaded the data to strava. I guess I'll have to go back someday and pick up that last little bit.

We only rode about 15 miles that day, but everybody seemed satisfied with what we'd done, so we packed up and hit the road.

I want to say we stopped at like Jason's Deli or something like that near the interstate, but I don't 100% remember. I don't remember the drive back either, but apparently we made it home safely because here I am today!

All in all, it was a really good trip. Great trails, and I always love riding with those guys, and just hanging out with them, in general. We definitely need to get out together more often.