La Ruta De Los Conquistadores 2002
Posted on October 26, 2007 by Andrew
By: Andrew
The summary of La Ruta de Los Conquistadores (or our three days of mud, pain and suffering in Costa Rica). Our group was comprised of John Wilder, Joey Machado, Scott Henry and myself. Scott had done this race before, finishing 5th overall two years ago, and is a Trek team rider. For those who don’t know, the rest of us are 40-ish Expert class racers, but nowhere near Scott’s level. La Ruta, as the race is called, is billed as the toughest mountain bike race in the world. It is run in mid-November from the Pacific to the Caribbean Ocean – across the width of Costa Rica - in three days. The distance is advertised as being 300 miles, but is in reality only about 250 by my estimates. There is a total of 26,000 feet of climbing, however, to go along with all that mileage. Rules are similar to NORBA – you must finish the day on the same bike you started and be entirely self-sufficient, accepting no outside help except for food and drink at the authorized check points. About 400 people entered the race this year, mostly Costa Rican, but also from as far afield as England, Australia, South Africa, Ecuador, Mexico and Canada. Here’s how it went down:
Day one, Friday.Jaco Beach, Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Rained all freakin’ night. We’re talking tropical thunderstorms here, people. 5am start time in pouring rain on asphalt (still dark). Hit the dirt in about 5 minutes. Have no idea where I am in the pack, since we can still barely see. Very slick and muddy. Soon we’re all pushing our bikes up the hills. Mud so clingy the wheels won’t even turn any more. Grabbing sticks from the side of the trail to scrape it off every 5 minutes or so. All around me a I hear the Costa Ricans cursing the mud; “puta, puta, puta…”. I start to hurry the pace a little because I know that the more people go through the mud the harder it gets to push. Back starts to hurt from bending over and pushing so much.
Been riding and sliding about two hours when I come upon a group of riders having a conference in the middle of the trail. It’s the two lead teams (Dos Pinos and Pizza Hut) also Scott Henry and a bunch of other riders. This is the lead group, including the eventual winner of the race. We have apparently been lost for hours. More riders join us. After lengthy discussion, they agree we are too far gone turn back and must push on and find an alternate route to check point one (which we would have reached in one to one and a half hours had we not been lost). We are about 60 riders strong at this stage and we proceed, looking for the route to CP1. I am crapping myself that I will get dropped by the lead group and find myself lost in the jungle. We are in a very remote, rural area with only a few scattered houses here and there and even most of the locals don’t have a clue as to where we are. Also, we are carrying only enough energy food and water for about two hours (having been expecting to hit CP1 way earlier to refuel).The lead group starts to put the hammer down and the peloton splinters. I find myself at threshold trying to stay with a group near the leaders. Every so often we look back and see other riders dropping off. Just stopping by the side of the trail, pulling into the occasional house, hitching rides on a passing truck. The group spreads and dwindles. We stop and fill water bottles from an outside faucet at a house. Water very suspect. Lots of climbing and descending, granny gear hills, some pushing. We start to get close to CP1, catching some of the riders who were dropped earlier. Finally at 10am we reach CP1. Both of the lead teams plus about thirty riders are just hanging around, washing bikes, eating, waiting for instruction, wondering what to do. We’ve been riding hard for 5 hours. Everyone is pissed off.Continuing seems like a stupid idea since we are so far back and technically we are disqualified, having not reached the check point under the time limit. The lead teams are clearly done for the day and are waiting on the team SUVs to pick them up. Most of the support crew has left since we were all supposed to be through CP1 hours ago. Apparently the organizers realized a bunch of us were lost and sent motorcycles after us to turn us back, but the guys in the lead group (us) were too far gone. No transportation around to take us back. A couple of brave souls get back on the bike and try to continue. One of them is a guy named Eric who apparently won the Iditabike race a couple of years ago. What a stud. Scott Henry knows a friend, Nat, who has a truck at CP1. We shoehorn 6 guys and bikes into the pick-up and continue to CP2. I am very happy to have squeezed on to the truck – I had visions of hanging out at the remains of CP1 all day.En route we encounter the race organizer, Roman Urbina on the road being harassed by a group of riders. We talk to him and he assures us that due to the screw up, everybody will be given even time for Day 0ne, except the winner who will get a 30 minute time bonus. He tells us that somebody removed the directional arrows from a tree early in the race and that this was turn we all missed. This is no big deal since most of the best riders were in the lead group and will easily overcome this time deficit on Day Two. We drive on looking for Nat’s son who is in the race and was lost earlier with us.We come across John Wilder at CP3 looking very calm and collected. He clearly has a strategy – go slow on day 1 – save the juice for the next two days. He also almost took the wrong turn and got lost with the rest of us, but a local guy persuaded him that that was the wrong way to go so John followed the guy and got lucky. We encounter Niles, a 13 year old kid doing his second Ruta (he didn’t finish the first). His whole family lives in Costa Rica and they race it every year. Rom, the oldest son, is with us in the truck having also been lost with our group. The father is racing as well: No shirt, Tevas, manky old Trek Y-bike, long white/gray hippy hair and beard. Niles looks like shit – hot, tired and struggling up the hills. I don’t think he’ll finish.We go down to a creek, get out of our muddy bike clothes, wash the bikes, bathe. We see Joey very soon after that looking pretty pooped. He is in the worst situation – he was lost early like us, but way further back, so he got caught by the chase motorcycle and turned around, effectively adding about an hour and a half to his day. We drive on, eventually getting to CP4 where we see that Niles has made a miraculous recovery and is looking stronger heading into the finish. I feel guilty seeing all the other riders struggling after hours on the bike, so I lube up my chain, get dressed again and ride the last hour in.John Wilder comes in later after over 11 hours on the bike, Joey staggers in at dusk after 12 and a half hours. He is barely able to keep himself upright and tells us he is about to throw up. There are a lot of shattered looking riders around. We line up for the one cold shower available. Guys are getting IV drips and massages. I change my brake pads, lube everything and change tires in preparation for Day 2.I get us a spot on the bus back to the hotel, grab Joey’s bags and we wait for the driver. That night at the hotel John is so shagged he doesn’t even come out to eat – just drops into bed. Joey looks like death warmed up. He was too pooped to clean and prep his bike the night before and so will have to do it Saturday morning before the start. Scott Henry has picked up a stomach bug from day 1 and has a nasty case of Montezuma’s Revenge. Not pretty. Some riders have been moved to a different hotel and are (understandably) very peeved about it: After a full day in the saddle they now have to pack up all their stuff and bus across town to another hotel. Lots of grumbling going on right about now.I talk to a woman called Karina who says that, despite Urbina’s statement about the directional arrows being removed from the tree, we all got lost because the arrows were never put up in the first place. I ask her how she knows this and she says the arrows were in the truck she rode in to the race start and she knows that they were never removed because they were still there at end of day…Day 2, Saturday6 am start in downtown San JoseGuys frantically running around the streets trying to get their bikes ready for the day. There are many totally mud-encrusted machines that need to be prepped for the impending day Scott Henry has warned us will be “a kick in the nuts” (sounds very pleasant).We start the gentle climb out of town towards Irazu volcano, many thousand of feet up. We have Camelbaks loaded up with rain jackets, pliers, spare brake pads for the nasty descent, energy bars, Ziploc bags with Accelerade, extra tubes, water, pump and lots of chain lube. Soon the climb gets nasty and we are pushing a smaller gear. The road turns to dirt too technical to climb and so we are off the bikes pushing again. There’s no rest from the climbing.We come to CP1 after about two hours. I stuff a chunk of papaya and a banana down, stretch my aching back and get back on it. We alternate between asphalt and bumpy jeep trail for the next hour. The occasional screaming downhill breaks up the climb and gives us a little rest. Eventually we are on the main road. I look up and it’s just steep switchbacks as far as the eye can see, all the way into the permanent high altitude rain and cloud towards the peak of Irazu. My Camelbak is really starting to hurt now and I have to pull over and stretch. I’m in the granny gear, just trying to spin up the Tour de France-like slope. Darby, our California friend has been with me pretty much all day. We keep passing each other and commiserating. All of the Costa Rican riders are barely carrying any water bottles or Camelbaks. Despite the rules, they are all getting support from cars all the way up. I ride next to a guy for a while who is being handed hot drinks from the team SUV as he rides. They give him his rain jacket so he doesn’t even have to dismount. I’m thinking about the 6 pound Camelbak I’m dragging up this freakin’ mountain and I’m not happy. He offers me food, tea, energy drinks from the SUV. I grumpily decline.The rain intensifies and it gets colder. I’m glad to be wearing tights and have a good rain jacket at this point. The summit is nowhere in sight. Visibility is about 50 feet at this point through the fog and rain. Back hurting, legs dying, I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing here suffering when I could be back in Austin on a fun ride. I swear I’ll never come back and do La Ruta. Then, as if by magic, CP3 appears through the mist. This signals the end of the climb and the beginning of the descent. I’ve been climbing for 4 hours solid, 10,000 feet. The lead group blew through here about 45 minutes ago. There are some riders still 2-3 hours behind me.Darby appears out of the mist. We chat, lube up, mix Accelerade, chow more papaya and get on the downhill. From here on out it gets pretty surreal: The descent is a very tricky, technical rocky jeep road made all the more sketchy because the thickening cloud reduces visibility to about twenty feet. It’s a total blast! I push the pace as fast as I can and discover a happy fact: The little Costa Ricans can climb, but they can’t descend worth a damn. My full-suspension Titus is eating up the bumps and I’m blowing by riders in droves. The descent is very much like the Hill of Life in Austin in parts, but endless and wet. At one stage I see a dead horse on the edge of the trail.Some guys are actually off the bikes walking the more technical sections. This makes me feel even more studly since I am bombing them. The trail becomes gnarlier, but we are out of the cloud now and so we can see. I have dropped Darby and am still passing a lot of riders. We hit a couple of technical, wet climbs, then ride through a nasty pasture of soupy black mud and cow poop. Not pretty…Finally I hit CP4 and eat more and talk to the guys who assure me that the finish is not far. This is probably bullshit since Costa Ricans are notorious for not having a clue about distance and time. (Ask two guys the same question about how far it is to a town, say, five miles away, and you’ll get answers ranging from 5 minutes to three hours. Seriously. They just want to give you an answer, so even if they don’t know, they’ll make something up).Darby appears out of the mist as I’m getting back on the bike. He is looking strong. I push the pace and then, oh no, get a pinch flat. I drag out the tool kit, Instaflate etc. and put in a new tube. I crank on the Instaflate, but no air comes out. It’s not working. Bugger. I reach into the Camelbak and pull out the reserve pump and hand pump the tire. This all takes about ten minutes and 15 or so guys, including Darby, blow by me. Very disappointing.I get back on and big-ring it hard to get back on. Five minutes later I blow by Darby who has suffered a similar fate and is also fixing a flat! About ten minutes later I hear a bike coming up fast behind me. This is the only rider who has overtaken me on the whole descent (flat debacle excluded) so I want to get on his wheel. We talk whenever we can as we descend. His name is Tom, from Boulder, CO and he’s on a new Maverick FS with disc brakes. He’s just tearing it up and it’s all I can do to keep him in sight.We hit the asphalt which means we have only 10 miles to go to the finish in Turrialba. Tom is incredibly daring on these super-steep twisty mountain roads and I’m really glad to be behind him since there’s no way I would go this fast on my own. We catch a Costa Rican rider after about five minutes and he gets on our wheel to try and draught us down the mountain. We don’t know where the finish is, but he clearly does.We hit a hairpin bend and then a flat section and the little bastard comes around from behind and tries to drop us into the finish. Clearly the line is just ahead out of sight. I give it everything I’ve got and pass Tom to get on the CR guy’s wheel. Tom knows he’s toast and swears at us as we go by. The crowds are cheering the CR guy on but I outsprint him to the last turn into the finish. With about twenty feet to go he surges and takes me by a wheel. Que lastima! Oh well, lunch was great, the cold shower was OK and I got my bike power washed pretty quickly. I finished in 6h.05m which I’m pretty happy with.My back is killing me, so I get a massage. John Wilder comes in about an hour later looking calm as a cucumber. He really enjoyed the downhill. Still no sign of Joey. Scott Henry, despite the bad stomach has finished 8th on the day, but is feeling terrible and has decimated the lone seatless toilet with extreme prejudice. He and I get on the early bus back to San Jose to recuperate. As we climb out of the Turrialba valley to San Jose we see Joey just beginning the asphalt descent. We discover later that he got lost again, rode right through CP3, and almost reached the summit of Irazu. He is going to be one tired puppy tonight. Some guys with altimeters tell us we climbed a total of 12,000 feet today.Day 3Turrialba to Limon (Caribbean coast)This is the long (100 mile) day to finish La Ruta. It’s mostly downhill and therefore theoretically easier, but we have a lot of miles in our legs right now and the cumulative output is going to make this a tough ride. Scott Henry has withdrawn from the race because of the stomach bug. I’m really bummed for him, since the Day Three route played to his strengths and he would certainly have kicked ass.It’s a bright sunny morning as we roll out of the Turrialba valley. We start climbing some rollers almost immediately and the legs start complaining just as fast. My quads feel like they are going to cramp up and die any minute now. Joey has given me some electrolyte tablets which I am chugging to try and avoid cramping. I also drop a couple of Advil for the still painful back.No real problems for the first hour. We just climb and descend pretty regularly. I’m trying to stay 10 beats below AT so I don’t blow later. We hit a long screaming fast asphalt descent as the rain starts. The asphalt turns to jeep road and the rain gets worse. I pity the guys behind us. It’s hard to see and the rain makes it technical. I see a lot of flats being fixed on the side of the trail.After about another hour we come to the one major climb of the day. It’s very steep and wet and long. Like seven Hill of Life’s in a row, not so technical, but wet and just as steep. Granny gear all the way. I pass Darby about halfway up. I ride with a Costa Rican for most of the climb. Like all the others he is getting team help from a truck, including guys jumping off the truck, running next to him, and lubing his chain with spray cans of WD 40 as he rides. He is a pretty cool guy and he encourages me to be “fuerte” when I start to suffer. 
The team SUVs are a pain in the ass since they need to pass us to get up the trail and they sometimes take the best line up the sketchy roads, making us take a tougher route.We hit CP 2 at the top of the climb. I chow down on everything I can find. My legs still feel like shit so I drop another electrolyte cap. One of the guys at the CP says it’s all downhill from here. And, for the most part, it is. Darby comes up, we chat and get back on it. Long road descent through many towns, over train tracks, locals out in force.We go over a series of crossing train tracks and Boom!, suddenly I’ve crashed and I’m on my ass. I look back to what caused my fall and see a little kid quickly run up and bury one of the tracks under loose sand in preparation for the next rider. This is the one I slid out on. The little bastard has clearly been laying traps for the riders all day, much to his friends’ delight since they are cracking up at my misfortune. I talk to Darby after the ride. Apparently he got nailed in the exact same way. We are obviously two of many…We are forced to ride on train tracks for a while, having to dismount and carry our bikes over the many small creek crossings. We soon hit a long road section and luckily I end up in a group of about 15 riders with Darby and his buddy Paul. We get a good pace line going and make good time for a while. Soon we reach another group of guys in Team Festina jerseys. They join our group but refuse to go to the front to do any work and just stay in mid-pack sucking wheel. Darby, Paul and myself try to get it going again, but these guys are content to sit in and shoot the breeze. Every time we try to attack and break away they do just enough work to catch us and then sit in again. Very frustrating. Our average speed drops about 3-4 mph from when we had the pace line going.Finally we hit an extended dirt road section and the pace picks up. We are big-ringing it through potholes full of water on pretty sketchy roads, but as least we’re hauling ass now and the Festina boys are working a little. Then we hit the section we have all been dreading: the 10 miles of train tracks. These, apparently, have improved significantly over last year in that they have been filled in a lot with gravel. However we are still riding over railway ties down the middle of the tracks and it’s not much fun.
Every so often we come to a bridge - some short, some long - where we are forced to dismount and carry our bikes across. 
Many of the railway ties have rotted away and the gap has been repaired with boards nailed between the remaining good ties. It’s wet, so footing in bike shoes is very sketchy. There are some big rivers we cross, so if you slip, it’s a long way down.Finally we are done with the bridges and it looks like train tracks forever. I am still in the middle of our group of about twenty and they are going a little too slow for my taste. I see a small, rough path on the side of the track, so I do the cyclocross dismount, run the bike to path and hammer as fast as I can to overtake the group. I get back on the tracks ahead of the group and start to hammer. My FS bike is just eating up the bumps, no problem. Next time I look back they are out of sight.I reach the last check point, chow down a lot of food, stretch, mix some Accelerade and get back on it as the rest of the group rolls in. I am now riding at sea level on a jeep trail parallel to the beach. It’s raining again and the road is, as usual, muddy and full of water filled potholes of varying depths. I decide to try and keep my gap on the group and start to do the Lance Armstrong high cadence time trial technique along the trail. I figure the end must be in sight since I am hearing pretty consistent distance estimates from the thickening crowds on the side of the road: “15 kilometers, ten kilometers, ocho kilometres…”
I keep looking back to see if the group is catching me but I think I’m opening more of a gap, since they are nowhere in sight. Finally I see a sign that says Playa Bonita (our finishing town) and I know I’m there. I roll into the finish at 5h45m on the day and I couldn’t be happier just to be done. I dismount and stagger around for a while and here comes John Wilder just three minutes later still looking like this was all just a walk in the park for him. He has really enjoyed day three, running over the rotten bridges around guys, eating up the railway sections – just what an ex-Marine enjoys, clearly. He caught the group I was with and passed them on the last road section.We swim in the ocean to wash off the mud. 
Later we meet Scott Henry who has been given Cipro (the Anthrax - prescription drug) to combat his ailment and is feeling much better. We shower, throw the muddy bikes in the truck (there’s no washing facility today) and have lunch. Joey rolls in soon, looking like he could have ridden all day. He has obviously recovered from Day One completely. He has had a disposable camera attached to his Camelbak and has been stopping to take pictures throughout the race. It’s pretty funny to see a guy in all the technical cycling wear with a little Kodak camera bouncing around on his back. There’s a party starting at the beach, but being old farts, we opt to get on an early bus and go back to San Jose to chill.We get to the hotel after dark and wait for the other buses and the truck with the bikes. Much later the other riders’ buses arrive. It’s pouring with rain now in downtown San Jose. A lot of them are a little drunk from the post-race party. The truck with muddy bikes arrives and the hotel manager says no way those bikes are coming into the hotel. We negotiate with him and he assigns the janitor to wash the bikes off outside. We put on rain gear, go out into the street and unload the 100 or so muddy bikes and proceed to wash them. Most of the bikes’ owners aren’t even here, they are either staying at another hotel or are on the last bus and haven’t arrived yet. We get them all washed and store the unclaimed ones in the hotel courtyard, taking our own bikes up to our rooms (mine gets the deluxe warm shower wash a little later).The next day we hang out in down town San Jose with Darby and Paul, showing them the wonders of a country with legalized prostitution and gambling. Darby and Scott hit the casino, the rest of us wander around. We leave the following day, already thinking about next year.
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