I didn't get a chance to catch up with everyone after the race and there are always good stories to be had from that little adventure so cough em up.
It was a mixed day for me. The ride out to the check point at mile ~60 was all good, enjoyed every minute of it, but my inner self had completely misrepresented my memories of the Berkie. For some reason I recalled it as a good section to recover on and I was counting on that so when the reality hit that it was annoyingly bumpy and hilly it broke me mentally even though my body was doing alright. After that I just couldn't get the spring back into my step and ended up putzing it back in.
I also think that there was a shortcut or an extra loop that threw off a lot of riders somewhere in the first 20 miles which were pretty sparsly marked, my suspicion is that some of us wound up on a bonus loop of a mile or two. The metric race started 15 minutes after the 100miler but about a half hour into the race Jin and I found ourselves suddenly mixed in with a big group of metric riders that were all riding at the same pace as us, then shortly after that the really fast metric guys started flying past us, so something clearly didn't add up.
Memorable moments include having a close call when I took a turn wide and hard which dislodged a good sized boulder that I rode for a few feet as it rolled away, rolling past a violently vomiting rider just as my stomach was getting a little sour, breaking my chain twice in the last 10 miles and getting annihilated by mosquitoes trying to fix it (which took multiple tries with a foggy head), being Tim Ek's sounding board as he vented about taking a wrong turn, and just thoroughly enjoying the first 60 miles of the ride because chequamegon is packed with great singletrack.
