A Costa Rican Stage Race on a Fat Bike?

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Fat bike, meet La Ruta de Los Conquistadores. Si, the famous Costa Rican race that climbs over 20,000 feet in three days. That bisects Central America from west to east. That transverses jungles, crawls up a volcano to 10,000 feet, is more pocked than a WWI minefield, and that begs for a full suspension 29er, or 27.5. What is doesn’t beg for is going fully rigid on a fat bike, four-inch-wide rubber sucking the mojo out of ever freewheel cruise on the flats.

Unless you’re Will Muecke and his buddies at Team CoreCo. Muecke is an equity investor based in Costa Rica, with his company closely devoted to Costa Rican causes, from community health concerns to funding the only bottle-to-bottle PET (plastic) recycling plant in Central America. And how does that add up to riding a fatty so far from snow and sand?

The short answer is that it doesn’t.

The long answer is that Muecke, an American, got the desire to race the  Iditadrod Trail Invitational, or ITI. Muecke is fit enough; he’s a La Ruta veteran and a masters-level rower, but you have to qualify for the ITI, which meant being in Alaska this past January. No sweat, he did that, qualified for ITI, and in the process got hooked on fat bikes and especially training on them so he’s ready to race the 2014 ITI.

And since nothing is better for training to race than racing, Muecke, who apparently has some influence in the Costa Rican race scene, managed to convince La Ruta organizer Roman Urbina to open a fat bike category for this coming October’s event.
You’d guess going fat would be grueling, but Muecke claims otherwise. “Getting back from Alaska, I rode my typical mountain bike routes on the fattie as just good training, but as the routes got more technical and the terrain steeper I discovered a couple of things.”

Muecke says his Alaskan-made Fatback tips the scales at 30 pounds, nine pounds heavier than his Niner Jet 9. “But the wide footprint provides tractor-like traction in loose and super-steep climbs. On pitches where I would normally walk, I had better climbing power and could spin my way up and through the crux sections of the climb without ever breaking rhythm.”

La Ruta is well known for its soul-crushing climbs; most racers, even the pros, find themselves walking, but Muecke says with a 22-tooth granny in front, he has enough torque for nearly every ascent; the only adaptation was to switch from a double to triple up front so he has more power on the molasses-slow flats.

Whether the category will grow is another story. Muecke is noncommittal, but running a fat bike in La Ruta is drawing a lot of publicity, both to the idea and to CoreCo’s causes, and that’s motivation for Muecke and his growing team of six fat-bike riders to keep at it.