I’ve been analyzing it all morning. Unfortunately, it hasn’t provided me with the anticipated clarity I’d hoped for 
I’m headed up there on Friday, and will pre-ride a few sections of the course on Saturday … but by that time, it will likely be too late to change tire choice. I’m going to ride-or-die with those Schwalbe 40s 
(Couple all of this with the fact that there is a 30% chance rain in TC Wed/Thu of next week and it is creating a perfect cocktail of pre-race indecisiveness; anxiety)
I really am not familiar with east of traverse so with that being said, I think there is going to be more sand then the stated 1.2 mile of tire-sucking sand and you will find a lot of sand pockets all over the place.
I would be interested in hearing your feedback for next year
I’ve ridden/raced parts of both MTB trail sections and are pretty smooth. The first trails should look like this:
I think Wafer skips this, but the second MTB trail and road climb leading into it looks like this:
I did Broken Pedal 50 a few weeks ago. It was the first iteration of the race and about 40-50 people showed up. Amazing course and solid crew putting it on - I fully expect it to grow over the coming years. It ended up being about 60% unpaved (“normal” gravel for the area) and 40% paved. Super beautiful scenery going through bluffs near Wabasha.
Any updates on the course? I have 5 teammates going and non have pre-ridden.
The course has been posted, but I have not ridden. Heading there on Friday.
Sorry for confusion, when you posted you were going to ride there on Friday I thought you meant Friday 9/30/2022.
Good Luck!
How did BWR Michigan go? You did the Wafer correct?
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:
This seems to be the norm in “gravel races” lately. Rock Cobbler is that way, Heart of Gold, even RPI had elements more suited to an XC bike.
TLDR outside of Unbound, “gravel” seems to be flexible depending on the organizer and location.
But how was your tire choice LOL
This sounds just like BWR NC to me, not exactly a gravel race. They are fun races although, my wife asked me last night if I wanted to go to NC for a family trip and if I wanted to do that BWR again, I simply told her that the race can be dangerous and that although im confident in myself anything can happen haha.
LOL for sure
Actually, given that my tire choice was “wrong” much of the time, I was pretty happy with it. I don’t think I could have picked a better tire (40mm Schwalbe G-One R). They were obviously over-matched on the singletrack … but on the gravel they were perfect and on the pavement they were fast.
Part of me is curious to how they would perform at the Barry Roubaix. But the other part of me knows that I’ve had good results running 35mm at the Barry. So I probably won’t change. But if somehow I could find a guarantee that they would roll just as fast, the Barry would truly feel like riding pavement. They really just float over the bumpy stuff.
Tough and frustrating race. I was afraid of course marking because the Vasa trail network is known for a spider web of off shoot routes. I’ve been frustrated racing in that area with poor signage and their apparent refusal to use “Wrong Way” signs at confusing intersections. A kid I coach was in a group of 20 and they all went the wrong way following GPS. By the time they realized it they were lost and eventually just rode the last sections and took the DNF.
Some inaugural growing pains for sure, but also poor course design and organization.
I saw Dylon Johnson was on a MTB fork. However I guess that wasn’t the answer either because he finished 6th some 20+ mins back. There were absolutely no group’s coming in, everyone was solo with big gaps.
Considering what the race turned out to be, I’m not too sad I missed it as I would have been quite annoyed as well. Good effort @batwood14! I think if I sign up next year it will definitely be the Wafer.
I would say about 10% of the riders I saw were riding MTBs. Like I said, no matter what bike you picked at some point it was going to be the wrong bike. The first 20 miles were FAST – I think my average speed was 23-24mph and I hit a top speed of 40+ mph, I thought that was super fast on my 40mm tires with small knobs. I can’t imagine the power penalty you’d have to pay to keep up that speed for that distance on a MTB – even it you manage to stay in the wheels, that feels like your watts have to be 20% higher than everyone else. I’m not sure what the actual math would be, but it feels like a huge penalty.
The top 5 wafer riders came in mostly as a group it looks like – but they were all U23 or Junior hot shots. The last 8-10 miles were either singletrack (rooty, and not flowing at all) or the disastrous Cx course/funhouse. I’m not surprised there were no groups … it feels almost impossible that anyone could stay together through that after such a long race. I was happy to be solo at that point because I was really picking my way through it with the drop bars 
Thanks for the extended write up, I enjoyed reading it and felt very similarly.
This was my second BWR event (I did the Wafer…or at least I tried to do the Wafer…more on that in a bit). My first was earlier this summer at BWR Asheville which was a pretty epic ride and fun experience. This past weeked up in Traverse City…not so much. Being from Michigan I was excited for a trip up to TC for the weekend and knew that the race was going to be sandy and the whole BWR schtick is to throw the unexpected at you. What was super disappointing to me was how poorly the course was marked and to learn that they changed the GPS file without emailing everyone (I did not attend the rider briefing the day before).
Look, I get its a new year and marking two courses spanning 200 miles of road/gravel road/seasonal road/trail/singletrack has to be a monumental task. However, for all of the hoopla that BWR puts on, the course should be the #1 priority. I was able to hang on to the front group through the first aid station at 22 miles and felt awesome about that…I knew I wasn’t going to stay there but for me that was a giant leap ahead of what I thought I could do. Then, to get lost on the singletrack section because the course wasn’t marked, then to get lost even worse later on with a larger group…it ruined my day. We all paid a lot of money to participate in that event and to me is unforgiveable to 1) not mark the course correctly and 2) change the course last minute and not send an email to all participants telling them to re-download the route.
Anyway, bitch session over but I think this was a bad look for BWR in general and for the local race director. I will not be back next year and honestly it makes me rethink doing any more BWR events in general.
I bet those would shred at Barry - it might be a little sketch at sager but fine everywhere else IMO.
To me, this is the most unforgivable part. I couldn’t believe they just made it as a “by the way” announcement at the rider briefing.
The mystery to me is how did the riders who were on the right course get the correct GPS file? I went and updated mine that evening and still had the wrong course. Maddening.
Even crazier - the correct route (per strava) ended up being 71.5 miles. Which means in addition to 3 wrong turns, I rode 4 extra miles. Now I’m certain it cost me more than 30 mins 
I’d recommend sending constructive criticism to the race organizers.
The incorrect Wafer route was brought to the attention of the race organizer the week before. The correct GPS file got updated on the momitt website but not any of the BWR links. I mentioned that to someone at BWR Friday night that the last email that went out still had the incorrect GPS route. He said they were still “finalizing” the course and would send out the correct route but guess that never happened. The correct route had you turning right on Townline rd off Dockery not Hanyes rd. Fortunately I pre-rode and knew most of the course.
Yep … that was the final spot I missed a turn. I read Paige Onweller’s recap just now, and she and 3 other top pro women made the same singletrack mistake that I did at mile ~24 as well.
At least now I know how some folks got the correct GPS file, and I did not.
Maddening.
