By Rob Lichtenwalner

VisitPa.com's mountain bike team was in full force over Labor Day weekend racing the four person expert division at Seven Springs Mountain Resort’s 24-hour race. Our four-person team consisted of our team captain Ray Adams who blessed us the entire weekend with positive energy (and consumed about 2000 calories per hour), our team maniac and air freshener Mike Hebe, our secret weapon substitute Dirty Dan Timmerman, and myself, Rob L. Our behind-the-scenes team members were Nancy Adams (aka ‘The Nanstress’) and Ben Lance. Nanstress kept our tummies full and kept us aware of time splits and Ben served as the world’s best mechanic. Ben also suffers from OCD as his tools had to be in order from smallest to biggest and in order from least-used to most-use. His twelve-step program starts later this month.

The weekend started Friday night with a huge fireworks display, which was timed beautifully with my arrival to the venue. After going over some race details it was time for some sleep. Our accommodations were real nice. We had a sweet chalet at the base of the mountain with lots of space for the team to eat, sleep, and hang out – big thanks to Seven Springs for the hook-up.

The race kicked off at noon on Saturday and we had Mike “The Legend” Hebe take the 1st lap after the hellish Lemans start. A Lemans Start is a short running start in order to spread out the racers before getting on their bikes. The Legend pulled off a very fast 59-minute lap and had already established a gap of two minutes on second place team, Dirty Harry’s. These guys are no joke and would take some effort to stay ahead of. Next to go off was X-Ray, who pulled off another fast lap of about 1:01. I was up next and pulled off a little over an hour as well. The three of us were quite close with lap times. Last to go out was our last minute replacement racer, Dirty Dan. Dan pulled off a freakishly fast lap of 54 minutes on my borrowed Cannondale 29’er. His lap time was never beat for the remainder of the race. He was a bit disappointed with his next lap time of 55 minutes. Boo-frickadee-hoo was basically our response to that.

The rest of the race was like clockwork. We eventually lapped the second place team sometime late at night. I'm guessing it was because we were running insanely bright Lupine light systems. We used the Betty and Wilma models, which use LED technology. Racing these light systems is like cheating. Visit Gretnabikes.com to start your cheating today.

The morning finally arrived and it seemed as if instead of backing off a bit due to our lead we did the exact opposite. We race-paced the morning. This was probably fueled by Hebe's energy level, which never let up. We were all getting very close to the one-hour lap times again. I wanted to back off and do my last lap at a social / casual pace but didn't want to let them down. So I pegged it and ended up with a very fast final winning lap of 1 hour flat.
In the end we won by two laps and everybody did their best, which paid off. We all had a great weekend and it was very rewarding. We could have never done it without the help of Nancy and Ben, though. They kept us rolling. Thanks to all our sponsors as well, who always help with our wins:
Visitpa.com, Cannondale, Lupine, Deuter, Ergon, Psycho Lube, Northwave, Rudy Project, and Suunto.

Thanks!