Earlier this month, shortly after I spent four days straight hiding 19 treasure jars all over the Rocky Mountains for edition three of the KETL Mountain Treasure Hunt, I had planned to do the MoCo Epic 100-mile mountain bike ride with a group of friends.
The MoCo Epic has seven different ride distances that they do every year to help support MORE, the amazing trail stewardship that maintains all of the trails in the greater Maryland area. Spending an entire day riding mountain bikes on ~95% singletrack through beautiful fall leaves in Maryland sounded like a fantastic way to spend a Sunday.
Unfortunately, prior to the event weekend, MORE decided to postpone the event until the following weekend because of a pending nor’easter rainstorm. I wasn’t going to be in town that next weekend, so I told the boys we should just do it anyway and see how the weather turns out. If it rains too hard, we’ll pull-the-chute and go home, but you never know with the weather, so let’s just gamble and see what happens.
We took off at 8 a.m. Sunday morning to do the whole thing self-supported, with our own personal support crew that we would see every 25 miles to re-up on water and food. There were countless laughs, several crashes, a few mechanicals, and some extremely sore butts. The weather held off for the most part with only some light rain and drizzle for the last six hours. The trails were impeccable.
It took about as long as I expected, given the crew of guys I was with and their experience level, but everybody survived and finished it. We had a ton of fun, which was the entire point. - Jeff
