Endless Mountains

Yeah, anywho.

Dude, how was Endless Mountains Gravel? Right?

You won

the 430.

So it's amazing what three hours and just like a little bit of time off the bike can do.

And I think that's more valuable than trying to, to push through.

So, um, yeah done the sleep deprivation thing it's just you know not for not for me but it depends on the terrain like again 430 you know grabber worlds i think is 305 or something unbound xl is 350 like those you can you can like you can get through the whole the whole thing with that um there's like zero zero plan for sleep there but unbound is super flat relative to endless mountains as the name implies um grabber worlds is even relatively flat like they're not they're not 100 hundred feet per mile kind of ratios so yeah um all in all i chose to sleep ended up having to sleep two nights so still longer than i originally planned and i was kind of where the fkt slowly slipped from from the grasp uh the whole light situation all that obviously didn't help but and the pouring rain i mean it was just trying to descend some of those super sketchy kind of rutted out to sense with just a headlamp like a spotlight uh you know i'm a pretty confident descender i mean you've been with me plenty of times like even i was just a little little hesitant on things because i just couldn't couldn't see so i was like i was on the the brakes a lot losing time um you know i also faffed around a little bit plenty of times but uh otherwise i mean i think it was all to plan like as much as i could have like i planned for the backup plans um the weather just didn't didn't quite play out but that's that's how it goes i mean that's what it the beauty of a grand depart is is everybody had to deal with the same thing so maybe not an fkt overall but like still the fastest this year like through the same environmental conditions that that we all started with that same day like i ended up still being able to to get through that so yeah a long drawn out answer to your question on sleep deprivation but i feel like that was my sole like determining factor on what I was and was not going to do for this particular mileage and amount of climbing that it was like, it was a big piece of my, my planning process.

And it seems like you, like, when I talked to Mike last week, it's not that he doesn't plan, but he plans very differently than you do, it seems.

The hard layers were left as a bewildering succession of ridges with flat tops.

A single ridge may double back and forth so often that the region well deserves the old Indian name of the Endless Mountains.

Southwestward, the valley grows narrower, and the ridges which break its surface become straighter.

Everywhere they are flat-topped, steep-sided, and narrow, while between them lie parts of the main valley floor, flat and fertile.