Here’s my race report of the Belgian Waffle Ride - Michigan. I’ve attached my power file at the bottom for those interested.
EDIT: This is long. Might be too much info for most … still fresh in my mind (and on my body) and clearly I’m having some “feelings” about how it played out.
The Details:
– I did the Wafer route, which is the shorter version of the BWR at “only” 74.1 miles / 119.2 km. You might notice if you look at my power file that I rode 75.5 miles. More on that later.
– The terrain was road, gravel, two-track, singletrack and the final mile was cyclocross-esque with a mix of everything from wood chips to grass to sand. It should be noted that this part of the course concluded the race with a climb up the side of a ski hill. Ski hills are steep. Again, more on that later.
– Result: 42 of 163 overall / 12 of 51 age group
The Good:
– I was on really good day. My goal for the race was to stay at the front and make it over all the climbs at the pointy end for the first 22 miles, and then let it play out and ride as strong as I could. The reason for this distance goal was that at mile 22 the race turned into the forest and the terrain and the ability to pack ride would be uncertain.
– I will note that the Wafer race was won by a pro U23 mountain biker (Kyan Olshove) who recently took 4th at U23 National Championships. I knew the top end of the talent at this race was going to ride away from me at some point.
– Not only did I stay at the front, I led the group up several climbs (for sag climbing purposes). And was positively adrenaline-loaded to find myself leading the entire race into the woods at mile 22. I was absolutely gassing it, and feeling a bit over my skis. But it was cool 
The Bad:
– This gets to the maddening part: while the overall event was well directed and organized. It was plagued by navigational challenges. Course markings were sometimes ambiguous, sometimes completely wrong. The course runs through a state forest that is both famous and notorious for having 30 miles of marked trails, and something like ~200 miles of unmarked trails. So what happend repeatedly is you would be on a single-track trail which crossed a jeep track and there would be an arrow marking the race … but it was pointing at, literally, three single-track trails that all looked like they were straight ahead. This is how I lost the lead (to be fair, I wasn’t going to keep it anyway) initially … I came to a crossing, saw three trail heads straight ahead and went to the middle one. This was wrong. I was supposed to go slightly to the right. Trying to follow an single arrow sign when you’re racing and pinned in such ambiguous terrain is really tough. Someone yelled from behind that I was going the wrong way and I quickly had to dismount run through 20-30 feet of sand, re-mount and get going on singletrack. About 15 riders had passed me at this point.
– It should be noted this was a common theme at the finish line … many, many riders were frustrated at the wrong turns and navigation/course-marking problems across the board.
– As I tried to follow the lead group and catch back I found myself losing touch with them, but still leading the main chase group. And then, again, we came to another ambiguously marked trail crossing and I choose the straight-ahead path and all the riders behind started shouting that I was going the wrong way again … so I pivoted to the left at where they were telling me to go. However, this time I was right and they were wrong. We ended up riding down a 1/2 mile of singletrack completely off course … when we noticed our GPS units were completely off-track we had to back-track to the trailhead and find the correct route. As we were back-tracking on the single track we kept running into more and more riders who had made similar mistakes and wrong turns causing us to dismount to get by them as the cluttered up the trail trying to turn around themselves. I put a screen shot of this below … you can see it looks like a spaghetti plate of trails around a two-track road.
– We got back to the correct trail that led to a gravel road but any cohesion had been lost … Wafer and Waffle riders (who started 20 mins earlier that us) were all mixed together and many were frustrated. I decided to just put my head down in time-trial mode and ride the race. Eventually a group formed and we hit normal road and gravel again, when we got to the point where the Wafer broke off from the Waffle route I was pretty happy to find that I seemed to be in a small group of Wafers going forward. I took this as an encouraging sign.
– More bad …
–The night before the race at the rider briefing the organizers announced that we needed to re-download the map to our head units again because they had made changes in the last 24 hours. 
– #1 this was frustrating news to hear because I had arrived to town as prepped as I could, and re-downloading/re-uploading GPX files, etc., at the last minute makes me unsettled because of the variables in introduces. But I obviously did it. But I also ABSOLUTELY knew that not every single rider attended this “mandatory” briefing. Meaning: not everyone was going to get this news.
– #2 if you make a last minute change to the course – ANY COURSE – you need to broadcast/communicate this in any possible way: email, text, bullhorn, smoke signals, etc. BUT, the only place this was communicated was at the verbal briefing at 5PM the night before the race.
– Back to the race … I was now in a group of 20 riders on the road and we were whittling it down and I was riding strong, sitting-in when possible, pushing climbs, etc. I was happy with my ride. Then, at mile 50 my freshly downloaded GPX told me to go straight ahead on the gravel road, but there were clear course-markings telling us to turn-right. As a group, we deferred to the course marking, unknowingly turned down a private road that was not intended to be a part of the race and the land owner came running out with his dogs yelling at us. Kind of scary. We quickly retreated – backtracked over previously dropped riders who were making the same mistake and got back to an intersection where we realized that between the 10-12 of us we had 3-4 different versions of the GPX course file. There was arguments about which way to go … not ideal. At the end of the day – even though I downloaded the updated route the night before, it was still incorrect.
TL;DR – I found my way back to the route … the group we were with split up and went different directions I found myself in a group of 3, I was able to ride away from them and soloed the last 10 miles home to a disorienting 12th place after riding 1.5 miles longer than the original course - most of the extra miles were singletrack or sand. Some riders at the finish had ridden shorter than the intended route.
My ‘results’ goal going into an event is generally to get an age group top-10. I have no doubt that the GPS misadventures cost me somewhere in the range of 20-30 minutes, maybe more. With group riding at play, it’s really hard to know. In conclusion: I was really happy with my ride, but frustrated with my race. Given that this was ticketed as my “A” race, it leaves me feeling conflicted. It is what it is.
Notes on the BWR overall:
– This is not a gravel race. To be fair, I don’t think the organizers intend it to be a gravel race. This was a “trick” course … meaning it was intended to put you into conflict. At many different points race you were going to be riding a bike ill-suited for the terrain. It’s the biking equivalent of a steeplechase. I think some folk who rode the BWR in North Carolina observed the same thing.
– I think the organizers outsmarted themselves – even without course-marking issues and last-minute GPX file changes, following this course was going to be difficult in this part of the state. It is incredibly dense forest and the track was so narrow and winding at at so many points (while running parallel to other trails) that my GPS wasn’t keeping up even when I was on the correct trail, which caused me to stop several times thinking I may have made a wrong turn, only to find that I was on the correct track. They could have made navigation more straightforward while also designing a challenging course.
– Finishing on a cyclocross course with a ~20% ski-hill climb over grass and sand that only a MTB could get through (or Alexey Vermuelen, who won the Waffle) was a silly decision and, overall, a sh!tty way to end the event. Everyone was off their bike for a portion of that climb – including many who were actually riding mountain bikes – and thus not feeling good about their ride and/or themselves about 2 minutes before they cross the line. I stayed and watched some finishers for about 5-10 minutes after I crossed and there wasn’t a lot of fist pumping and smiles. And there was a lot of grumbling.
Some takeaways:
– Try not make your “A” race an event you’ve never done before. Course (or area) knowledge wouldn’t have solved navigation issues, but it would have helped. The Traverse City locals clearly knew where they were as they had a full week to recon the course.
– Definitely don’t make your “A” race an inaugural event. Doing an event where the organizers have worked out the kinks would have been a smarter choice.
– Overall, the only variables I want to have in an “A” race are: 1) my fitness; 2) my race/bike skills (or lack thereof); and 3) how the race tactically plays out.
As always, good luck! 
Bad turn #1
My power file:
