2017 Brain Freeze Race Report

Race: Brain Freeze 6 hour race

Team Name:

YERT / Sufferfest NW

Team Members:

Darren Steinbach

Ben Brewer

Stephanie Green

Kadee Mardula

Time to finish:

Right around 6 hours

Favorite parts of the race

The amazing viewpoints! On both the fat bike section and the snowshoe section we were able to get to some really great vantage points and traverse a few ridgelines. Several times I regretted not having some sort of camera to catch the scenes around us… I suppose I’ll just have to go back. This was also the first race that ‘required’ some glissading, but this was also my first winter adventure race.

Where we suffered

The route we chose at the end of the fat bike required a lot of bikewacking through pretty thick manzanita. I could hardly see my teammates a few feet in front of me through some of the shrubbery, and many of the bushes were taller than Stephanie. At the end of the race we were told that if we had stuck to the road we could have quickly ridden aroundthe route we took, but at the time we had already been pushing our bikes for a while and it didn’t seem like the conditions were getting better.

I also personally had a hard time during the snowshoe trek. Almost immediately a rivet in my left snowshoe broke and the whole shoes started turning sideways on me. Ben had a spare strap so we were able to do a quick field repair but my shoe still liked to hit my ankle about every ten minutes.

Lessons

Fatter tires are better. In this race the snow was so soft that I’m not sure it would have done me much good, but it sure seemed like the more flotation a racer had on their fat bike the better off they were. If this race is around next year I’ll hopefully have a fat bike that I own and have trained on as well as snowshoes that are tougher and hopefully owned by me as well.

Gear

The spare snowshoe strap that Ben carried was a lifesaver, I need to remember to have one of those in my bag next winter for general exploration. I also had some Ibex medium cushion wool socks that kept my feet warm enough in my wet trail runners. The only time my feet were genuinely cold during the race was at the end when we crossed Tumalo Creek, but once we started running again they quickly warmed up.  My Leki thermal gloves were also clutch, my hands stayed really warm almost the whole time as well. I actually picked up those gloves as a prize at a previous Bend Racing event, it was nice to be able to put them to good use in another race.