La Ruta 2002 by PF

Day one was the hardest day. Day two was the hardest day too and of course day three was the hardest day as well.

Good grief what a race, the hardest ever? Well it was actually billed as the ‘toughest’ mountain bike race in the world, I didn’t think they really meant it. Surely they were joking. Yes, they were joking but they weren’t lying. Just laughing at my expense.
The first twenty miles beat me up. I realised how I could sue the race organisers. The toughest mountain bike race in the world wasn’t a race, it was a fight.
65 miles of fighting on the first day. I think some of the battle was ignoring the distractions. Such as the hissing.
There was hissing as I was riding through thick mud along a track through the jungle. There was no one else around so I feared the worst. I looked down, forwards and backwards. I was fine, it was only a snake or something. Phew, what a relief, I thought it was a puncture. In all that mud whilst I was already exhausted, no thanks. Walking up the slippery slidey mud slopes caused my invisible socks to disappear inside my shoes. How can something invisible disappear? Mind you water is pretty transparent and that just seemed to disappear inside me.I drank at least ten litres of fluid a day each day. This was okay but I peed about twice. In three days. This was how hot it was. Actually on the first day before my body had adjusted I peed maybe four times. The second pee was just after carting myself and bike through mud and sand. Of course my hands weren't completely clean from the aforementioned mud and sand, so I ended up with sand in my shorts. Chaffing. Chaffing of delicate parts is something I really wouldn't recommend. Sore testicles as you sit on the saddle really isn't fun. Of course it gets worse. My fourth pee was like treacle. Try pouring treacle, it doesn't flow well but I was in a race so hurried the experience, put myself away and set off again. All the salty liquid wasn't gone and found it's way directly to my now raw right testicle. I was rubbing salt in the wound.To save further information it didn't get any worse. Apart from the pain but by now I felt so beaten up I couldn't even care about that, what with the annoying bits of pineapple stuck between my teeth. The sandy hands experience deterred me from putting my hands in my mouth to pick it out. I did stop to remove most of the stones from my shoe eventually though.
Hey, stopping and taking off shoes loses valuable race time. I was actually quite surprised by how many stones came out when I finally emptied my right shoe. Of course I then carried on with only slightly fewer in my left shoe because they hadn’t passed my annoyance threshold.
So a sore testicle, stones in my shoe and pineapple string bits between my teeth when I arrived at the final checkpoint of the day. I thought there was still about thirty miles to go so when I was told there was only 19 km to go it’s no wonder I set off crying with happiness.

The 19 km to go information also turned out to be true which was unusual because everything else I was told, despite believing was always a lie.
“You’re looking strong.”, “Only half an hour to the next checkpoint/top of hill/end of this section.” were the most common ones.
I was first told I looked strong on day one at checkpoint three. I didn’t. I looked f***ed. It worked for me though, I always believed it and could carry on feeling better and more upbeat. Also feasibly I looked less beaten up than most before me at checkpoint three. This was because 2.5 miles before the checkpoint I had actually lay down at the side of the track. For fifteen minutes. I spotted a bit of shade after a baking climb in the sun and had the most comfortable lie down ever. I think this fifteen minutes of just letting my body adjust to the conditions and letting it know I wasn’t going to run it completely into the ground was the wisest thing I did. The daftest thing of course was simply to enter the race. How foolish was that looking at this moment in time?
The big lie though was the half an hour lie. Everything was half an hour away. Perhaps it was the only English those at the roadside knew but it was just a big lie. Nothing was half an hour, everything in the race lasted at least an eternity. Perhaps even longer. All sections seemed to go on forever.But I somehow made it to the end of day one and I never had to go through that again. Some of the people in the race had done it about five times before. In fact few were there for the first time. Did they have no memories or something? Sunstroke. That’s what it was. I had brilliant suntan lotion which worked. My mind wasn’t frazzled.

The big climb was on day two. The big climb. Which big climb? I guess I mean the big climb. This came after a big climb. Somewhere in between the two it wasn’t a big climb. And before them both was a road section to get out of San Jose. I spotted a guy that I thought looked like a roadie and sat on his wheel for a few miles as we seemingly sailed up the peloton. How can someone on a mountain bike ‘look’ like a roadie? I obviously wasn’t the only one that thought so though. He must have looked the part as before the road got really steep there was quite a line of us in his slipstream. But the road then hit vertical and away he went, like he was looking for a contract with Kelme somewhere over the hill. I and the rest were left to struggle for the next half an hour and the next good few half hours after that too.
Up and up and up and up.
Admittedly much of it was on road but it was still up. And up. With a bit of down and also we went through a strange small concrete village painted all blue. Or perhaps that was just the sky that I was riding up into and seemingly through.
And up.
I was with a Costa Rican who’d ridden the race twice before and eventually he told me when we were half an hour from the top. Or half an hour from somewhere because it certainly wasn’t the top. I remember looking at my watch an hour and a quarter later and I was still going up.
But of course a check point was finally reached and we had three miles of rocky descent. Descent that was over far too quickly before more climbing and a slog along a very muddy track and past the final check point until it was 15 miles to go. 15 miles to go and it was all downhill. No it really was. 15 miles of extreme concentrating watching every bit of ground that came shooting up towards you and under the front wheel. Never mind choosing the right line, that got too mentally challenging. Just ride over what ever was in front and stay on the bike.
Not everyone did. I came flying round one corner to find some guy sprawled across the track a short distance from his bike. Somehow all his wounds were only superficial but this was the descent where elbows and collarbones were broken.
I also stopped by two guys who’d punctured and were in need of a spare tube. Unfortunately I had the wrong valve for the small hole drilled in the rim.
And then the day finished. Well stage two finished and I crossed the line.
Only one day left to go, I was home and dry. It was that easy to convince myself of this and just blatantly ignore the fact that I was exhausted, that tomorrow was the longest distance and I’d covered less than two-thirds of the total distance. I was happy as I sat chatting with James, another British guy doing the race. His companion Gareth was at many of the checkpoints as I arrived and was brilliant. He’d re-fill my water bottle and get me cups of Powerade whilst I stood around like a zombie for a couple of minutes trying to recouperate before I set off on my merry way again. I’d especially felt like the living dead at the checkpoint ‘half an hour’ from the top of the hill today but that was now all over and I was alive again eating my rice and beans and drinking my fresh juice. Tomorrow was another day.


I wasn’t wrong, tomorrow was indeed another day. Another long hard suffering day that went on forever again. I’m sure we set off with a climb but today will mainly be remembered for the train track. That bloody train track. Even the train had given up and no longer ran. Ha! There never was a train. This track was put down just to torture poor demented souls who’d entered La Ruta.
I also got lost for the first and only time. A truck must have been parked in front of the marker arrow because when Jose and I cycled the two miles back to where we’d gone wrong and both independently missed the turn the three huge luminous green arrows were blatantly obvious.
At least it meant we were together and could work as a pair along the next stretch which was about ten miles of tarmac on the state highway.
What’s this? Something positive about the race? No. It may have even been a gradual downhill but we now had a strong headwind. We took it in turns doing a mile each on the front but I was so fatigued. Really tired. I looked round at one point and nearly had us both off at about 20mph as I lost concentration and my front wheel smacked into Jose’s rear one. Somehow we both stayed on. I apologised profusely.
Jose was Portuguese and I’d seen him at some point of the race every day. Today I learned that the Portuguese pronounced their j’s like the English did and so his name phonetically was Joe-zay and not Ho-zay like the Spanish. This of course meant my Spanish fireman joke didn’t work for a Portuguese fireman.
i.e. What does a Spanish fireman call his twins? Hose A and Hose B. (Read it out loud to somebody!)
Anyway we finally turned off the highway and followed a road through a banana plantation. By now there were three of us but I was too tired to stay in the group and had to drop off and make my own way into the prevailing headwind. And so I ploughed on until I saw the blue banners in the distance. The final check point and then only five or so miles to go. I began fantasising that it wasn’t the final check point but the finish. Oh please let it be the finish, I was so tired. But as I approached it became obvious that it was a checkpoint. Oh well, at least…..
And now the really demoralising bit. Today really was the longest day. Much further than the previous two, this wasn’t even the last checkpoint. There was still 40 km to go. FORTY KILOMETRES. That’s twenty-five miles. But I wanted the race to be over now, I’d had enough. I didn’t think I could ride another 25 miles. On some Sundays that’s more than a whole day’s ride. Let alone after already riding 60 miles that day. Much of it down a bloody train track. Bumpity bumpity bumpity bumpity over the damn sleepers. Stop, get off, lift and carry bike across a 100 metre long railway bridge over a river. Now the gaps between the sleepers were 50 foot drops into the river below. Who cares if there were crocodiles in the river, just got to keep going. Keep going down this endless railway track with varying sized sleepers and numerous bridges. Bumpity bumpity bumpity bumpity.
I drank my usual litre of Powerade and water at the checkpoint, had my customary pieces of fruit. Banana, papaya, pineapple, more papaya. Twenty-five miles. I had some more Powerade and a bit more papaya then forced myself to set off. For a couple of miles I managed to sit in behind somebody else but once again had to drop off. Alone again for a while I trundled on. The track changed direction and the headwind dropped. I was going to finish. I would complete La Ruta. I was invigorated and carried on. I even caught Jose and some others. Small bunches began forming and disintegrating as we all started powering towards the end before fading individually then getting bursts of energy.
A bit of fruit and a quick drink at the last checkpoint and I was on my way. A thick set Costa Rican and myself slipstreamed each other for the remaining distance and we crossed the finish line together.
Finished.

What a great race. Brilliant, What a great race. I really must learn Spanish before I come and do this again. I caught myself thinking I wanted to do the race again some year. But I did. I was elated. Did I mention what a great race it was?

For half the duration of the race my mantra was "at least I never have to do that bit ever again". How long after the race did it take me to think, "I can't wait to learn Spanish and come and do that again"? The second I spoke to other people who'd finished. How? Why? Well for three days I wasn't a tourist or a traveller or anything like that. I was part of Costa Rica. People came out of their houses to watch and cheer me on. OK so not me specifically, but hundreds of people cheer you and every kid in the villages you're riding through wants to high five you. The race was reported in the national press and on Costa Rican television. People gave me packets of honey and fresh oranges to keep me going. And I should mention they have no military here, a fact that makes me want to cry with happiness.
The Costa Rican people were wonderful. Every single one of them.
The race was very well organised and I could bore anyone within earshot back home that I had done the toughest mountain bike race in the world.
Where did I come? I finished and that was all that mattered to me. 40% didn’t but I was 139th. About halfway out of the finishers but still room for improvement.Improvement? Ha, I’ll be happy to finish again next time.
Breakfast everyday is rice and beans. Fortunately I love rice and beans.

Paul Facer