bicycle.net -- World Road Championships 2009 :: cycling news, product reviews, original essays, podcasts & video

Okay, so this year it seems the common thread of logic, is that to attract good money-paying racers one has to claim they’ve got the GOD AWFUL HARDEST race course e-e-e-ever.  

In our case, it’s called Hellbender – but not for reasons you would think – and it proclaims it is BAR NONE the hardest race in Missouri.  Okay, first, the Hellbender name alone almost got me to no-show, till I learned that’s the name of a large endangered Salamander hereabouts.  Slimy, but lacking teeth or poison, that critter.  Seems like the name fits for more than one reason…but more about that later.

Okay, so I came into the Hellbender race jaded, because as I wrote about recently, I’d just a few weeks back ridden in a new road race in Hermann, Missouri which was about as pleasant as being waterboarded by Dick hissownself Cheney.  No kidding, a bust-your-youknowwhat race that tossed in an absolutely vomitous hill right after the neutral section leading out of town.  Now that’s just plain mean-spirited.   

Okay, so we’ve all got hills.  What makes these hills so ba-a-a-a-ddd?  Allow me to paint a few pictures from my memory of that heinous day.  My first memory, other that I was only maybe 5 miles into the circuit and already contemplating how to hook a ride with the wheel-truck, was that another rider who had dropped me on this little eye-opener was now cresting it ahead of me, and HE STOPS and PUTS HIS FOOT DOWN.  Then he rests and gets riding again.  

For God’s sake, we’re 15 minutes into the race and guys who can beat me up the hill are blowing up!

Next flashback:  You go out to some website that has photos of the race (yeah, just Google it) and you’ll see pictures of guys in the 3/4 category DOING S-turns up the damn thing.  Granted, they were on their second lap, so they’d already had a taste of that particular jalepeno, but I’m just sayin’…

Oh, by the way, my team, we got like a total of two photos that day.  One shows one of our guys doing the aforementioned newspaper delivery boy routine.  The other shows one of our mates doing an even more embarrassing U-turn on that very hill.  Finito.  Fertig.  Estas todos.  

So, the good folks running the Missouri state championship believe their race is actually harder than the Hermann one described above.  

Well, Hellbender is certainly LONGER — 35 mile circuits vs. 22 in Hermann.  But Hermann had 3k feet of climbing with grades exceeding 20%, followed by a sea full of “whitecaps” we spent the day going up and down and getting a mouth full of froth in the process.  By contrast, Hellbender totaled 1700 feet of climb over 50% more miles, and the single “wall” never got much past 10% grade.  So, the tip of the hat for ex-wife mean and angry has to go to the little race course devised by the kindly folks in Hermann.

For those readers from Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Texas, and other vertically-challenged states, it’s hard to explain what a 20% grade is like, but it is, in fact, steeper than your worst highway overpass.  Trust me.  It’s more like that little area by the ramp to the highway overpass, where the dirt slopes up steep enough that you wonder who in the heck they get to mow it, you know?  

For those of you from Idaho, Colorado, Montana and certain sections of the rest of the country, forgive this whole discussion about what are, in fact, veritable speed-bumps where you come from.  You’ll notice I didn’t call them “mountains.”