Biking the White Rim Canyonlands Trail With Young Bucks

Introduction

Every year or so I get together with my friend Peter to do a monstrously difficult bike ride. This year would have been in celebration of forty years of friendship, except that neither of us actually noticed this milestone at the time. (I did just now.) Just to mix things up, we brought along Pete’s son H— and two of H—’s friends from the Colorado State University cross-country running team. This is a little bit like inviting Godzilla to your garden tea party with his pals  Megalon and King Kong, expecting them to sip daintily and take just a few cucumber sandwiches instead of trampling everything. If you like the idea of me suffering, well, read all about it right here.

This was a one-day assault on the Canyonlands White Rim Trail, which Strava says most riders complete in two to four days. Pete had done it in three days with H— a couple years back, and this spring H— decided it would be a pretty good idea to hammer it out in one. (So honestly, it was me being brought along as an afterthought.)

Executive summary

As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, I’m not a big astronomy fan. The old cliché about staring up at the stars and saying, “Kinda makes you feel insignificant, doesn’t it?” doesn’t seem that profound to me, because all kinds of things make me feel insignificant (like being middle-aged, and an empty nester, for starters). I don’t need to travel to some remote place where there’s no light pollution just so I can feel like a trivial little speck.

Meanwhile, I learned through this exercise that if you travel to a sufficiently isolated place—in this case Canyonlands National Park near Moab, Utah—you can be so dwarfed by giant reddish rock formations towering above you that you never need to see the celestial heavens again, if feeling insignificant is your thing. In the photo above, look how Peter (the farther-away dude, in black) is so diminutive compared to the rock wall next to him. (If you can’t even make him out, click the photo to enlarge, which goes for all the pictures in this post.)

And yet, this being by far the longest mountain bike ride of my life, I feel like my Man vs. Nature battle didn’t come out so very badly. Despite a protracted ordeal in an unforgiving landscape, I find myself “still alive and bitching” (to quote the philosopher king Marshall Mathers). You might be alarmed to know we were out for almost 11 hours with virtually no shade but I barely noticed … we had far bigger difficulties to surmount than that. For example: the CSU brat pack; the relentless pounding of our tires over unforgiving landscape; and the formidable Shafer climb (starting at mile 75). If all you care about is the fact of us pulling this off, congratulations, this Executive Summary is all you need, and you can click here for dessert. Otherwise, read on for the gory details!

Short version

Dinner the night before, at our AirBRB (a nickname I’ve just coined, I think), was De Cecco pasta with trailer-trash sauce. This sauce is made by sizzling some crumbly house-brand Italian sausage in a pan, glugging some jarred sauce in there, and heating it up. Since I drove like a thousand miles for this get-together, I splurged on some weirdly high-end sauce that’s like $10/jar. (Did I pay that? Of course not. I had a digital coupon or something.)

I slept poorly the night before because a) I’d eaten way too much pasta, and b) during the two-day drive out to Moab I adopted an all-taqueria-all-the-time approach to dining, so I had percussive flatulence all night, loud enough to wake myself up (and probably some of the 100 or so species of arthropods we can presume were sharing my room, if this dwelling was typical). Did I regret all that Mexican food? No. Not even considering the long hair I found in one of my burritos, which was from a forlorn taco truck in the middle of a giant dirt lot in a remote part of Provo. I kept pulling on that hair and it just kept coming, like a magic trick. And yes, I did finish that burrito. Think of how many hairs are discovered and removed just before restaurant food is served, or hairs that we actually ate, unawares, because we were eating too fast. (Or is that just me?)

My breakfast on ride day was a seriously overripe banana (peel almost black) with peanut butter, and coffee blacker than the banana peel. The AirBRB had a coffeemaker, but they’d stocked the wrong size filters, so it’s a good thing I brought my own pour-over cone and filters from home (along with my standard-issue ground Peets). These items had saved me at the motel the morning before as well, where the only teabag-style “coffee” they provided for their stupid coffeemaker was decaf. I’m strongly considering bringing ground coffee, my cone, and filters with me every time I leave the house from now on.

During the ride I ate an untold number of Clif and Kind bars, washed down with about nine  or ten bottles of water. Knowing the precise number of bars wouldn’t properly document the actual caloric intake, because there’s a lot of chocolate in a Kind bar, most of which melted due to the desert conditions and couldn’t be extricated from the wrapper. I felt kind of foolish eating these bars because all of my riding pals ate almost nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I really need to get in on that.

By the time we finished the ride, showered, limped back out to the cars, and drove into Moab for dinner, not much was open. We hit the Moab Grill which was still hopping. I knew as soon as we sat down that a) I wanted wings, real bad, and b) Pete would refuse to have anything to do with them. He’s above wings, apparently. We’ve argued bitterly over it in the past, sometimes after brutal bike rides such as this, and never order them. (It’s not that I couldn’t eat a whole plate of them by myself with no appreciable dent in my appetite; it’s that they’re meant to be shared. Solo winging would be like drinking alone.)

Of course we had the three young bucks at the table, but what if H— took after his old man with the buzzkill no-wings-ever policy? And what if the other two dudes, G— and T—, were, like, vegans or something? You never know with elite athletes. So I tentatively asked, “Would anyone be into getting an order of wings?” G— grinned and said, “That’s practically all I’ve thought about for the last two hours.” Score! God, those wings were good. Buffalo style, with ranch, of course. I miss them. I just love how you can shove an entire wing in your mouth and then zip the bones out in one motion, leaving all the delicious meat to be exuberantly chomped. I also had a Reuben that was pretty darn tasty, on marbled rye that the waiter specifically recommended, with hella fries dragged through mayonnaise. I also inherited like half of H—’s “Dyablo” burger (jack, bacon, jalapeños, roasted red peppers, hot sauce) that was super good despite the misspelling. I don’t know what is wrong with that kid that he doesn’t even finish his burger after a 105-mile mountain bike ride, but at least he likes wings. And it’s not like I’m complaining about the secondhand food.

The really messed up thing is that I’d brought a four-pack of Fieldwork IPA all the way from California to drink with Pete après-bike (or should I say après-vélo?), but we were so shattered from the ride, we just didn’t feel like drinking. And we didn’t. Okay … now are you getting a sense of how hard this ride was?

Long version

This long version is truly long, even for an albertnet post. What can I say? It was a long ride. If you think reading this is hard, go try riding White Rim sometime.

You may have noticed from the map above that there’s almost nothing on it but the crenulations representing topography, and one little actual paved road, that being Country Road 143 that we were on for a few miles. No towns, no trailheads, no warming huts, no bailout roads to civilization. Granted, if the map were more complete it would show the little visitor’s station we stopped at, ~80 miles into the ride. Other than that there was just nothing and almost nobody. But we had each other.

Wait, did I just imply that having each other was a good thing? Honestly, endeavoring to keep up with three NCAA Division I cross-country runners is one of the dumber things I’ve ever done. Yeah, sure, they were on bikes, which is more Pete’s and my thing, but then, fitness is fitness, and youth is youth. Plus, they had their inevitable rivalry, leading to irrationally exuberant accelerations. For the first 40 miles, it was more or less a death march hanging on for dear life behind them. It wasn’t just hard physically (I mean, duh) but psychologically too … I kept thinking, wait, we’re only 20 miles in  and the temperature is climbing and I’m already suffering and shouldn’t I be saving some energy for later, and specifically for that monster climb, instead of accepting this breakneck pace? I didn’t realize until I looked at the bike computer data afterward that these first 40 miles were almost all uphill. That’s because everything is so wide open, you can’t get a sense for gentle gradients. I just thought it was the rough terrain and the pace that were making it so hard.

Obviously it’s only the shallow climbing that’s invisible. It’s pretty hard to miss a steeper climb like this one:

That’s the Green River in the background there, BTW.

Climbing on a road bike, on asphalt, is hard enough, but at least that’s just a matter of turning the pedals. On a really rough trail—and I was surprised how legit and rocky and complicated a lot of this trail was, compared to the dirt road I’d naïvely imagined—you also need to steer around the bigger rocks, bumps, etc. because at such low speed, they can stop you cold. Sometimes you can’t avoid an obstacle and have to use body English to pop your bike over it, one wheel at a time. Meanwhile, the whole time you have to lean really far over the front wheel or else it’ll lift up off the ground (even if only slightly) at which point you lose the steering and your brain shuts the whole operation down so you unclip from the pedals and are dead stopped. Riding with your weight this far forward, you have barely enough traction on the rear tire, so it slips from time to time, costing you priceless forward momentum. Add in that you don’t know how long the climb goes on, and it’s hard to have faith you can make it to the top.

Sometimes we did give up and walk our bikes, which was a major letdown. For example, check out the pitch shown below, coming at the end of a prolonged section of brutally tough climbing. Pete almost made it. I was maybe 2/3 of the way before realizing (or at least imagining) that if I waited until the even steeper bit ahead to bail out, my shoes might slide out from under me. Pro tip: as you start to walk your bike, grab the rear brake to lock that wheel, or the bike will drag you backwards down the slope.

By the way, the shade you see in  the above pic is almost all we got the whole day.

We started getting some nice downhills. I don’t mean the super-steep technical ones where you’re hanging your ass over the rear wheel to keep from face-planting (though we did get those too, and they were glorious) but the more relaxing easy ones where all you have to do is steer around the larger rocks (because who wants a flat tire or other mechanical out in the middle of nowhere?). Unfortunately it’s really hard to take photos or make movies while doing these, but one of the young bucks somehow managed:

It was bumpy enough that I lost five bottles, only four of which I managed to retrieve. Three losses were from the side pockets of my CamelBak. I didn’t use the bladder with it, because I needed room for tools, the first aid kit, food, and five water bottles. (If you’re interested in everything a seasoned mountain biker has in his pack, click here.)

The trickiest part of these downhills was that you’d occasionally hit soft sand, which can sometimes seem to grab your wheel and twist it, so your bike starts to jackknife. Gave me the heebie-jeebies every time.

We stopped for rests periodically, especially in the more scenic places like this chasm we peered into.

Here is our lunch stop. (This happened to be around 1 p.m. but really, every food stop was lunch. It’s like when you’re in the grocery store checkout at like 4 p.m. and the manager says to your cashier, “Go take your lunch now.”) Look at H— peering at his PBJ. He’s probably thinking, “Come ‘ere, you.”

At around the southeastern-most point of the loop, at say 5 o’clock (i.e., the position of a hypothetical minute hand on a clock, not the actual time), several of our phones chirped because we randomly had a cell signal for the first time all day. We stopped and fired off some emails, because after all this was a workday. Kidding! But I did snap the below photo and texted it to my brother, and he actually got it!

By the time I tried to send the same pic to my daughter, the signal had evaporated. Probably it had been bounced off a passing jet, maybe even a spy plane, and was a flash in the pan.

I was about to type a thousand words about how majestic and architectural the landscape was, but instead here’s another photo.

If you’ve ever wondered how these formations got to be how they are, and especially if you’re a female reader, let me explain (or mansplain) it all from a geologic perspective. Wait! Come back! I was kidding! I have no idea how this land got to be this way. I’ve had it explained to me half a dozen times over the decades but I never listened. It’s complicated. Something about sedimentary, igneous (or is it Ignatius?) deposits, once submerged by an ancient ocean, or was it crushed by a glacier? I actually have no idea.

You might be wondering: does Canyonlands have anything to compete with the amazing pupfish of Death Valley? Well, not that I saw, but there were occasionally these darling little cactus flowers. (Bike tire included for scale.)

I count at least two or three species of insect in there. It’s like a big bug party in the desert!

While we were stopped for that photo and some chow, an SUV rumbled slowly by. A puffy middle-aged woman was in the front passenger seat and gave us a bored glance. She was wearing one of those ring-shaped neck pillows people use on long airline flights. Perhaps she was just doing this drive for the commemorative bumper sticker and couldn’t wait for it to be over (though that’s exactly what she was doing).

At around mile 60, an inventory of pain had assembled itself in my brain and my inner voice was whining. My back hurt (mainly from the strain of climbing). My right collarbone hurt where the strap of the (overloaded) CamelBak was pressing down, because of the heads of the screws holding the plate in there that fixed my once-broken collarbone. All my toes felt broken, which tends to happen on really long rides (despite my excellent footwear). Perhaps most of all, my hands hurt from my bike’s continuous impacts with rocks and hard-edged slabs we kept bumping up on and down off of. I’d brought long-finger cycling gloves and short-finger ones, the former without padding and the latter with gel, and ultimately opted for the long-finger. I don’t know what I was thinking … they’re just what I normally wear mountain biking, for protection against poison oak. But was I going to find that here? (I can sense you shaking your head.) I couldn’t switch to the padded gloves because G— had forgotten his gloves and was thrilled I had a spare pair. Would it be a dick move to demand that he trade with me now? Yeah, it would, dang it. So my palms were really raw. Have you ever gotten a little overexcited while tenderizing a pork chop, working out some demons perhaps, and you realize the meat has become so roughed up and soft it’s almost like moss? That’s how I imagined my hands had become.

Eventually we made it to the base of the dreaded Shafer climb. G— and H— took off ahead, ostensibly to make it to the ranger station before it closed. We didn’t actually know its hours, and it was already 4:30 p.m. with zero chance of getting there before 5 anyway, but the young bucks were out of water and thus desperate. Here’s Pete looking back at me as if to say, “Okay, they’ve got enough of a head start. I’m going hunting … see you at the summit.” The look I returned, as I snapped this photo, said, “Release the hounds!”

(Full disclosure: Pete’s look back surely meant nothing of the kind, nor did my return glance. I’m adding these subtexts only now, to give this report some drama and the shimmer of fiction.)

In the photo above, if you look straight up from the top of Pete’s head (zoom in!), you can see the switchbacks we would have to face.

Pete’s chase was swift and ruthless. The climb was ruthless but not swift, not for me. This next photo is from two minutes later. Not only has Pete caught H— but look how far ahead he is of me! I think I even used my camera’s zoom for this shot!

I rode my own pace, having released myself off the back on my own recognizance as I so often do. I know better than to try to run with the bulls. Here’s a little video documentary I made.

If you pause video that near the beginning to look at my bike computer readout, you’ll note I was going only 4 mph. Go ahead, mock me … but also consider the grade was 14%. (See what I mean about the wide open topography making the grade look shallower?)

Almost twenty years ago, my wife and I did a mountain bike vacation in Moab and, for shits and giggles, took a sunset river cruise narrated by a quasi-historian. The script he read from was cheesier than all-you-can-eat fondue. Our favorite line, delivered toward the end after a long pause (calculated to build suspense, I suppose), was, “And now, in the darkness of night, we ponder the legacy that is ours.” So pompous, and so meaningless! My wife and I like to trot out that utterance from time to time. And perhaps pondering our legacy is what G— was doing when I came around a bend to see him stopped.

Or maybe he was just enjoying the shade and taking a breather. I’d kind of been counting on these runners to eventually tire so they’d ease up on us. I’d asked beforehand how long their longest event is; it’s the 10K which takes them like half an hour. Obviously their training runs are longer, but then nobody runs for eight or nine hours at a stretch … and yet this kind of duration is typical for Pete and me on our monster rides. (Our 2022 slogfest took 8:37:47 and our 2023 gravel adventure took 8:37:32.) H— , T—, and G— are like greyhounds, whereas I’m more like a lobster lumbering across the ocean floor. As I distance cyclist I am kind of made for this, or more to the point I kind of made myself for this. We’d only ridden for six or so hours; I was just starting to find my groove.

I could still see Pete and H—, utterly dwarfed by the canyon wall.

The landscape was so literally awesome, so  sublime, that I kept trying—but always in vain—to  capture its grandeur with my phone camera. Perhaps my best effort is this accidental video, that was supposed to be a still photo. Though it’s obviously pretty sloppy camerawork, I think it captures the feeling of this climb better than any of my stills.

Switchback after switchback, the climb went on and on. Obviously I was suffering hugely, but at least the trail was smooth here and I settled in to a rhythm of sorts. If you read my posts from my epic French Alps cycling “vacation,” you’ll understand my point when I say this kind of suffering is the devil I know. (If you missed that series, cancel all your meetings and click here.) I felt like I could pedal like this all day, and probably would. At least it was easy to appreciate the progress I’d made, as shown by this photo. (SUV and T—, or maybe it’s G—, included for scale.)

Just before the summit of the climb, I caught Peter and H—. (The only explanation for this is that H— was hurting and had slowed down, and Peter hung back for some quality father/son time, to witness the lad’s suffering.) At the top, H— wobbled off the trail, set down his bike, and lay down on the ground to rest. Pete and I rode a couple miles to the Visitor’s Center to see about water. It was closed but had a spigot and we filled all our bottles. Bringing them back to the young bucks gave me a welcome paternal feeling, and I reconsidered my earlier plan to file charges of Elder Abuse against them.

We woke up H—, topped up everyone’s bottles, and set back out for what we thought would be a 20-mile descent, the first five miles or so being on actual asphalt. Instead it was rolling (if mostly downhill). That might not sound too bad, but each time the road tipped upward, it was like a slap in the face. Our group broke apart and regrouped a few times and over the last few miles I did some quality wheel-sucking behind T—, who’d caught a second wind at like mile 95. At one point I actually hallucinated and thought I saw buildings, like a small town, in the distance, indicating that we’d made a horrible navigational error and were screwed. “Do you see those buildings down there?” I asked T—. He looked at me as though I were crazy, which I suppose in the moment I almost was.

Eventually we reached the cars, our ride actually done, and busted out the cooler. There were only three Cokes, which were snapped up by the lads, but Pete and I were happy to make do with beers. Here is our official post-ride Beck’st:

Fortunately Mother Nature had put out some nice furniture to relax on. I love how, in this final photo, H— appears to be deep in thought, doubtless pondering his life choices and how he ended up here.

I can’t wait to return next year. With an SUV. And a neck pillow.

Stats

• 105.1 miles
• 8:44:05 ride time
• 12 mph average speed (really not bad for mountain biking…)
• 7,283 feet cumulative elevation gain (based on Pete’s Strava, presumably more accurate than the bike computer value shown above)
• 6,207 feet maximum elevation
• 120 bpm average heart rate
• 157 bpm max heart rate
• 4,316 kilocalories burned

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Should E-Bikes Be Allowed on Nature Trails?

Introduction

A member emailed our bike club a photo of a trailhead sign banning e-bikes. This spawned a brief debate among our members about whether it’s reasonable to ban e-bikes, but not regular mountain bikes, from multi-use trails. In this post I provide my two cents … for free.

What is an e-bike?

Part of the problem here is that not all e-bikes do the same thing. The most subtle version is the illegal racing bike with a tiny motor hidden in it and I won’t go into that (other than to say I kinda want one). Among consumer products, there are three major types of e-bike, as described here. Class 1 helps out when the rider pedals, and can get the bike up to 20 mph. (This is the “pedal-assist” model called out in the photo above.) Then there’s the Class 2 that doesn’t even require you to pedal, and can also reach 20 mph. This is the kind that might have huge tires, and the rider is often just slumped over the thing, slack-jawed, languid, sometimes almost catatonic, his only input being the hand on the throttle. The final type, Class 3, doesn’t require pedaling unless you want to hit its top speed of 28 mph. And then there are the rogue companies putting out e-bikes that can go 55 mph if you snip a wire or otherwise disable their governor. So they’re basically motorcycles in disguise.

If a community wants to regulate e-bike use, the most practical way is across the board, even if the Class 1 might not be a particular menace.

What are e-bikes for?

Let me just say I love the concept of e-bikes. I’m not some purist who gets annoyed when some dude blows by me on the road, his cadence having nothing to do with his speed, like he’s just kind of floating along, pretending to exercise, like the person on the Stairmaster at the gym supporting all his weight on his hands. Who cares? At least he’s on a bike.

That said, I think the sweet spot for e-bikes is commuting. Sure, the world would be a better place if everybody were super fit and commuted everywhere by regular bicycle. (It would be Holland, basically.) But if somebody isn’t fit enough to ride to work in a reasonable amount of time, and/or just doesn’t want to show up red-faced and sweaty, and/or has a big hill that’s too much to handle after a long workday, and/or has cargo or a pet or a kid to carry … go for it! I’m not comparing this rider to a Tour de France racer; I’m comparing him or her to a car, which takes up too much space and wastes too much energy and somewhat endangers cyclists and pedestrians.

This isn’t to say I’d begrudge anybody for using an e-bike for exercise. Cycling is hard, and my favorite rides around here feature serious climbs. If I somehow lost half my fitness, and had to choose between riding on the totally flat Bay Trail on my current bike or continuing my beloved hill climbs on an e-bike, I guess I’d choose the latter (at least until I could somehow get my fitness back).

E-biking on trails? I’ll get to that in a minute. But first:

Whom are e-bikes for?

I’ve been Mr. Nice Guy so far but now I’m going to be less generous: e-bikes are not for the young. First of all, if a kid or teenager doesn’t have the energy to schlep himself or herself around on a regular bike, he or she isn’t being parented properly. Buying your kid an e-bike is just throwing in the towel on their poor fitness. It’s also, arguably, endangering your kid. Check out this article about the disturbing uptick in bad accidents involving teenagers who lack the skill to pilot an e-bike safely, and lack the sense to even try.

Safety is why allowing e-bikes on trails is problematic. I don’t have an issue with older folks taking up road cycling, though if they choose e-bikes they’d better be careful. (I wouldn’t want to tell them not to do it, since managing the risk is really their business. If they hit a car, it’s not like the driver is gonna get hurt.) I also have nothing against older folks taking up mountain biking—after all, as a high school mountain bike coach I actively recruit parents as assistant coaches. But these parents are not on e-bikes, and that keeps things safe. Given how rigorous it is to pedal up a steep dirt climb, new riders develop gradually, and their skill builds along with the range they can cover. This is all for the best. Older folks learning how to ride off-road on e-bikes is just a recipe for trouble, and the danger extends to other users of the trail, who don’t have two tons of steel protecting them.

Then you’ve got your ageing former bikers, who at some point put on fifty pounds and gave up the sport, and now want to drop $10K or so on a fancy e-MTB and pick up where they left off. I was on the backside of China Camp a couple years back and came upon one of these guys. The backside has some gnarly descents, but the climb getting to it hits pitches of over 20%, which normally keeps the novices, and the out-of-practice, from partaking. This (rather stout) dude had motored his way up there and found out the hard way how much his skills had atrophied since the last time he did this descent. His collarbone was clearly broken and he was being carried out by EMS.

What, and whom, are trails for?

Now let’s step back and come at this issue from the other direction: the purpose of nature trails. I love mountain biking, and I also love (well, like) hiking. There’s a fundamental difference, in my opinion, between road cycling on the one hand, and mountain biking or hiking on the other. On the road, you have to contend with cars, along with other aspects of humanity like buildings and of course the road itself. So even though it’s super fun, it’s not exactly communing with nature. Biking on a trail, I can enjoy more of a Grizzly Adams experience, and have a relief from the crush of humanity I normally have to tolerate. (Yes, I’m an introvert.) And when I’m hiking, free of the need to operate a machine, I suppose I’m even closer to this bucolic bliss. I don’t appreciate being spooked by a bicyclist whose sense of a safe passing speed may be radically different from mine, but fortunately this is a rare occurrence.

With all this in mind, as a mountain biker I do my very best to respect the hikers I encounter. I slow way down; I offer a greeting so I don’t startle anyone; I am gracious when a hiker doesn’t feel like acknowledging me. We MTB coaches teach our student athletes that they need to slow down enough that when they say hi, the hiker has the chance to say hi back. (This is a lot to ask of a teenager but we’re tenacious about it, and they generally behave.) With this as the model, I believe that mountain bikers deserve the privilege of sharing trails with hikers. That being said, I’m totally fine with some trails being for hikers only, and I’m stoked to have encountered a few trails specifically set aside for bikers. But not e-bikers, because of the…

Unique problems e-bikes present on trails

Since I started mountain biking in the early 1980s (when the sport was brand new), I have observed how tenuous the relationship can be between bikers and hikers. In the mid 1980s, I loved riding the Shanahan Ridge and Mesa trails in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado … until the city heard from too many angry hikers and closed every single trail to bikers, a ban they still uphold. (I attended the city council meeting where this was argued about, and—being an unprepared, clueless teenager—made an absolute ass of myself and was laughed at by the entire room, which is why I have so much character today.)

The debate about regular mountain bikes on trails will never end, which is why I think we need to be really, really careful when it comes to e-bikes. This technology presents several unique problems.

First of all, as I mentioned before, part of why regular mountain bikers do okay on trails is that they have to pay their dues, fitness-wise, before they have a lot of gnarly descents to contend with. By the time they’re passing hikers on a steep downhill, they’ve acquired the skill they need not to lose control and take somebody out. With an e-bike they’re going everywhere, ready or not.

Second, with increased speed comes extended range, which means more total encounters with hikers. I mean, if I could ride twice as fast on an e-bike (which I probably almost could), I’d go twice as far, and automatically pass a lot more people. And as careful as I try to be, I’m going to encounter some hikers, usually older people, who cannot abide mountain bikers in any form. Even on a regular mountain bike, with all the politeness I can muster, I can’t do right by some of these folks. I could dismount my bike, greet them kindly with a tip of my helmet, hand them a $100 bill and say, “I’m pretty sure you dropped this, even if you don’t remember doing so,” and then give them some homemade chocolate chip cookies and a hand-knit sweater for their dog, and they’d still scowl at me with a look that says, “Go back to your gutter, you filthy vermin.” Meanwhile, at the other end the spectrum, you’ll always have a few mountain bikers who are rude and/or incorrectly gauge the socially acceptable passing speed. If, due to a surge in e-bike popularity, the trails suddenly had twice the number of bikers going twice the distance, the number of pissed off hikers would surely increase, and as I said before, this détente between hikers and bikers is already precarious. In a nutshell, I don’t want e-bikers tipping that balance and ruining the party for us regular bikers.

Third, e-bike motors are allowed to produce up to 750 watts, which is half-again more than Lance Armstrong could sustain for a single climb at the height of his dope-fueled career. This kind of power could surely enable an e-biker to spin the rear tire on climbs, not just half a pedal revolution at a time like I might accidentally do here and there, but more like a motorcycle can. They could totally peel out and some yahoos probably would. I suspect this could really damage a nature trail, which is not designed for such stuff. (And remember, not all e-bike manufacturers play by the rules, power-wise, to begin with.)

Finally, there’s the douchebag factor. Some e-bikers just wanna pretend they’re motorcyclists and will get all armored up and go treat the trail like it’s a motocross course. I was hiking at the Rockville Hills Regional Park, where e-bikes are disallowed, and this dork on an e-bike with a full face helmet and knee and elbow pads was riding with his buddies who were on regular bikes. He kept zipping on ahead and passing my wife and me, and then circling back to rejoin his friends, then passing us again. My impulse was to knock him to the ground and beat him about the head and shoulders with his bike, but it would have been too heavy given my spindly bike-racer arms. Lucky for him, I didn’t think of seizing his battery pack and flogging him with that. Granted, the prohibition against e-bikes hadn’t stopped him from riding there, but presumably the park rangers are licensed to kill and that dumbass is no longer bothering anybody.

What is to be done?

The majority of trails I encounter that allow mountain bikes also allow e-bikes, so far. It appears that the trail managers are either struggling to figure out how to regulate e-bikes, or are adopting a wait-and-see approach. As you have surely gathered by now, I’d favor something more assertive. Fire roads are fine, as there’s plenty of room for everyone, but any single-track trail that allows mountain bikes today should err on the side of caution and ban e-bikes initially, until they’ve figured out the best way to govern them. Anyone wanting to use an e-bike for exercise can go buy an (albeit sexist) Pinarello Nytro and pick on old school roadies like me, or do their shopping on an electric cargo bike. Leave the trails for nature lovers.

(At least, that’s my take, for now. I hope I’m more thoughtful than in my teenaged years, with that disastrous presentation at the Boulder city council meeting.)

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Cycling Smackdown - Middle Ring Tale

Introduction

I am an assistant coach for the Albany High School mountain biking team. The age difference between the student-athletes and me keeps growing, and my bike isn’t getting any younger, either. In fact, it sports a triple crankset, a technology that has all but disappeared from the mountain bike racing circuit. One of the kids said, “We were trying to imagine you on a modern bike with a one-by, but it just wouldn’t seem right.” So this configuration has, for better or worse, become part of my “personal brand.”

What’s that, you ask? What’s a “one-by”? It’s a crankset with only one chainring, which is what most modern mountain bikes have now, paired with a  wide-range cluster of gears in the back (the opposite of the “corn cob” I coveted as a youngster). The problem with the one-by setup is, how do you properly execute the maneuver required for a Big Ring Tale?

I did not coin the term “Big Ring Tale”—at least, I don’t think I did, having used this term since the early ‘80s—but when I googled this phrase just now every single hit was this blog. Suffice to say, “Big Ring Tale” refers to a story of a showdown on bikes, with the climax coming when the hero, just before launching his final, devastating attack, “throws it in the big ring”—that is, shifts into his bike’s higher gear range. But this tale takes place on a climb far too steep for the big ring, which is why we’ll have to make do with a smaller one.

Middle ring tale

Our team rides are largely on dirt trails, but getting to them and back requires some asphalt. There’s a classic climb we do, on the road, that’s short but very steep. It’s called Canon Drive and it gains 244 feet in 0.39 miles, for an average grade of 11.7%. The top stretch is a fricking wall, topping out at 24.7%! Canon Drive is the last big hurdle we must get over during our weekday rides before descending all the way back to the high school. Most kids hate this climb because we usually have to tackle it when they’re already pretty knackered. They’ll beg for crazy long detours just to get around having to face it; one coach calls this chorus of whining “the ABCs,” for “anything but Canon.”

In my group (only the second fastest, but hey, I’m old!), there’s a kid named S— who is what we call a pocket climber. His physique is just ridiculously spare and lean, his upper body an inverted trapezoid from somewhat aerodynamic shoulders to an ideally narrow waist, and the inevitable “ripped” (i.e., lean) legs. He looks like a Pixar character, someone who could feature in the next “Incredibles” movie or something. On the big climbs I can almost never keep up with him. Today I was hoping he’d be tired enough, this having been a long ride, that I could prevail on this last, beastly climb.

So, I took the front right from the get-go, hoping to perhaps demoralize everyone into just slacking off (being teenagers, after all). I kicked out the hardest pace I could handle, which had my heart into the low 160s, which is over 90% of my maximum heart rate. The wimp that lives in my brain said, “Anyone who can come by me when I’m going this hard deserves to drop me.”

(Obviously the above photo is from a different ride when I had the opportunity to futz with a phone camera. Note the heart rate percent-of-max display, in the upper right, showing 84%, with the “ring of fire” showing in red how close to maxed out I am.)

Notwithstanding this fatalistic sentiment, my self-talk in such cases isn’t all negative. Much of the time I’m simply marveling how high I can get my heart rate when I’m riding with these kids. On no level do I feel like I need to beat them, or that anything is at stake; it’s just that their verve is infectious. Overall think my spirit animal is the cat; that is, I’m kind of a loner. But these team rides bring out my inner sled dog and I can’t help but exuberantly run with the pack, no matter how hard that is.

Soon enough, S—, the pocket climber, as if following a script, came drilling it past me. This was about 5/8 of the way to the top. (Why don’t I just say “about halfway”? Easy for you to say, armchair reader. On a climb like this, practically every foot of every effort is metered out.) S— started to pull away and I thought, “Well, he’s gone, but at least maybe I can hold off Z—.” Z— is the head coach’s kid, who has been putting the hurt on me more and more on every ride, in the process of eventually becoming faster than I, which most of these kids do (and which, let’s face it, is the whole point of coaching them, though it’s a bittersweet experience when they leave you, often literally, in the dust). Sure enough, Z— pulled level a moment later: the next thread in my weave unraveling.

Except it wasn’t Z—! It was this other kid, T—, who is a bit stockier than the others and generally isn’t a factor on the climbs. He’s not naturally built for uphills, perhaps even less than I am, plus he’s pretty new to the sport. Something about how he squares his shoulders, especially when I see him next to a pocket climber, makes me think of Frankenstein’s monster. And, when the hammer goes down, he really thrashes, body rocking all over the place. But here he was, totally going for it, attempting to burst forth and chase S— down, just flying in the face of Fate, despite the iron seeming stone cold!

It was such a cheeky move, so dismissive of  the established hierarchy, it inspired me! So I thought, heck, I’m already in the middle ring, which isn’t bad, on a grade this steep, and even though we’d just reached the final wall, where I would normally shift into my largest cog in the back, I thought: what if I just fricking shifted UP, into a harder gear? Or, even, like, two gears up? As in, what if I put the bike in the gear a real man would use here if he were going to lay down a rubber road straight to freedom?!

(Yes, I know in a classic Big Ring Tale I’d be honor-bound to throw her in the big ring at this point, but let’s be real. The grade is more than 20%. I guess I could have taken some liberties and written that I’d been in the little ring, and now threw her in the middle, but that would be false. Could I have called this a “smaller cog” story? No, that just doesn’t make any sense. And one more thing: if “lay down a rubber road straight to freedom” confuses you, you need to go watch “Mad Max” as soon as possible. I believe the expression has to do with accelerating so hard, even when already at highway speed, that you spin the tires and burn rubber.)

Could I really do this? Decide to shift up two gears, and just honor that crazy commitment? Well, my back to the wall, I was just crazy enough to try it. So I stood up (so I’d be standing already when the shift was complete) and clicked the lever twice. My derailleur is pretty bent, so under load it takes a while to shift into a smaller cog, and during this process I kind of lose some power, so mid-shift Z— finally came up next to me, like I’d known he would...

Except it still wasn’t Z—! It was this French kid, G—, the son of a fellow coach who is a brilliant world class physicist living in the US for a while helping America’s best scientists solve some crazy problem using a giant multibillion particle accelerator, but I digress. He (the kid, not the physicist) is normally off the back on these climbs, given the elite group he’s in, but he was having the ride of his life! He had dropped Z— and A— and was about to drop the fricking coach, that being me!

But it was not to be, because suddenly my bike was in gear and I fricking went! I accelerated with astonishing effect and I heard G— make this kind of odd noise, between a sigh and a puff of air bursting from his lungs through his mouth as his dream was instantly scuttled.

Okay, so, at the risk of exhausting your patience with another aside, I need to get something straight here, because when I regale my wife with tales such as this, she doesn’t quite understand the dynamic and to her, these acts of aggression are puzzling, even disconcerting. She ran track in high school but it was mostly a social thing, without much rivalry within the team. But the fact is, high school mountain bikers are just aggressive. Every climb, every descent, heck, even the rare flat section, is an opportunity to thrash your teammates. It’s automatic. It’s not the same as the road teams I was on at their age, where we were on a team with adults who let us ride with them so long as we behaved (i.e. rode predictably). And when we teen roadies went on long rides together, sure, the hammer would go down from time to time, but we also chatted quite a bit, at a casual pace, and at other times relied on each other for a good draft, taking turns facing the wind because it was a long way home. Mountain biking is different. The rides are shorter, more intense, and generally a free-for-all. And as a coach, my job is to lead, inspire, and demonstrate the subtle arts of tactics, psychology, and (when I can manage it) brute force. This isn’t like other team sports where the coach just does a lot of talking from the sidelines. We NICA coaches suffer right along with our student-athletes, on every ride. And, in the faster groups, we coaches pwn these youngsters whenever we can because our window for doing so is slowly but inexorably closing. We know it, and the kids know it: virtually anybody who sticks with the program for all four years can look forward to eventually surpassing the coach. Until that moment, we coaches are all-in, comfortably confident in the knowledge that even the most solid drubbing we can inflict won’t discourage these kids. They look at us: we’re old, we’re oddly fast, but we’re mainly old, and eventually, one day, vengeance is theirs. They will repay. [Insert winking emoticon here.]

Okay, where was I? Ah, yes, I’d completed my brave upshift and launched my quixotic attack. I was drilling it like a madman! Now, as you already know, anybody—even a guy who’s already hammering, even at >90% of his max heart rate—can stomp on the pedals and accelerate for a little while, maybe 50 or 100 feet, before he totally detonates. Such accelerations are impressive until they fizzle. Except that I didn’t! I just felt this crazy surge of power, like a giant wave had just swept me up and was hurtling me toward the beach—except it wasn’t a beach, it was a wall! The ruthless final stretch of Canon Drive! And I was flying!

The pain was so severe it just triggered some altered state where nothing could stop me, and I flew up that hellish pitch with absolutely no regard for the abuse I was inflicting on myself, much less for the laws of gravity. I felt like a squirrel running straight up a tree! It seemed impossible to catch the other two, except that suddenly they were in great difficulty—the difficulty I should have been in, but somehow wasn’t—and I was gaining on them with a quickness!

As I raged up the slope, fate caught up to T— and he detonated, right near the top, less than fifty feet from the prize, and as I overtook him I was in striking range of S—. As we went around the ridiculous corner at the top (where it’s so steep it’s impossible not to peel out in your car after stopping at the stop sign), I squeezed past S— and just nipped him at the line! Or did he nip me? There was no photo-finish camera, but either way, he must have been astonished I was even there, after having been so thoroughly distanced earlier. I looked down at my heart rate monitor, and for the first time ever, I mean in my entire life, it read 100%! So this was kind of a triple-victory! Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Man, and Man vs. Himself! Daaaaaamn!

So was there a victory salute? Applause? A ticker-tape parade? An engraving in some memorial plaque? Of course not: just a fist-bump and a breathless “NOOICE.” Of course in the moment this tête-à-tête felt like kind of a big deal, as in “What a rush!” but it was ultimately just another hill, just another sprint. And when intense, all-in suffering like this becomes routine, that’s when the humble teenager becomes an athlete, ideally for life.

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Race Report - 2022 Fort Ord CCCX XC MTB

Introduction

Last year I started a new tradition—the Non-Race Non-Report of the Bike Race That Didn’t Happen—and was looking forward to continuing it. But a number of complications arose: the COVID vaccine enabled groups to gather again, so the Albany High School Cougars mountain bike racing team (for which I’m an assistant coach) started back up; the Fort Ord CCCX Cross Country Mountain Bike Race returned to the calendar; I somehow built up enough fitness to decide to have another go; and, crucially, I realized the Non-Race Non-Report format was already too tired a concept to spawn a sequel. And so, here I am again to report on my agonizing attempt at glory in an actual race.

Note: if you care about the race itself, and my tactics, and how they played out, and all that other chess-game-on-wheels stuff, you’re in the wrong place. (Perhaps you got here because I stuffed my report with juicy SEO-friendly search terms like iPhone, Tesla, Marvel, Netflix, Disney, Coca-Cola, bacon, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, Minecraft, Halo, and PUBG, in which case I apologize.) In keeping with a long race report tradition, I focus herein mainly on the food.

Executive summary

• I gave up beer for five weeks to lose weight for this race (and it worked, I dropped 7-8 pounds), which gave me the gumption to train and race extra hard so my great sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain
• My pre-race dinner was so extra
• I rode super hard through the Start/Finish section every lap but I’m not sure my student-athletes were even watching and thus may still view me as a concierge, not an actual athlete they can take seriously
• I suffered in a novel way, which is kind of remarkable after forty years of this
• I got poison oak again
• I buried myself far more successfully than last time, trading short-term agony for the blissful avoidance of at least a year of self-loathing
• I ate well post-race
• For only the second time in five tries at CCCX, I made the podium

Executive limerick

CCCX is a course for the fearless,
Racers who shrug off the crash or the near-miss.
Alas, I’m so old that I’m utterly timid,
Braking, then having to sprint at my limit …
Doing okay only ‘cause I’ve been beerless.

Short report

Race stats: 19.9 miles (vs. 22.4 last time); 1,987 feet of vertical gain (vs. 2,362 last time); 13.6 mph average speed (vs. 13.3 last time); 156 bpm average heart rate (vs. 153 last time); 174 bpm max heart rate (vs. 164 last time); 0:07:40 at redline (vs. 0:00:27 last time). Conclusion: I was 2% faster than two years ago, and averaged a 2% harder effort, with a 6% higher peak effort, despite being two years older. This reverses a three-year trend of slowing down every year. Before this race I had almost given up on myself, so to achieve this (albeit modest) redemption has me chuffed to bits. (Note: if you’re thinking of attributing my higher average speed to the flatter course, you have a point … but I actually do better on the hillier courses. As mentioned in my limerick, fast, technical courses like this one favor the bold and skilled, whereas hillier courses give me a chance to take back ground.)

Pre-race dinner: The bar at Los Laureles Lodge in Carmel Valley

As you’ll surely recall from my 2020 report, last time I did CCCX I carbo-loaded the night before with a delicious pasta with cream and steak tips, so you can imagine my excitement to see a similar item, creamy steak fettuccine, on the Los Laureles menu. But the price was $37! There’s no way I can do that. To be honest, I know my way around homemade pasta, not to mention a real cream sauce, so for $37 I’d have to be blown away. I couldn’t take the risk, being The World’s Cheapest Man. So I went for the $18 loaded burger (swiss, griddled onions, bacon, avocado, etc.), which was roughly the size of a cantaloupe. I had to unhinge my jaw to take a bite of that bad boy. I felt like my friendly neighborhood squirrel must feel when he eats the face off our Jack-O-Lanterns. It was a good burger, too … it was cooked rare (pretty red inside) and was really greasy, so the grease was just oozing out all over my fries (more on those in a minute). This wasn’t that gross kind of grease you’d get at an inferior restaurant, where the fry king has to occasionally skim off the skin that forms on top and/or fish out the cigarette butts. This was, like, high-end organic fair-trade grease, that had an innocence about it, almost like broth. The bun was just coming completely apart because how could it stand up to the sheer mass, and juiciness, of that burger?

Now, about those fries. They were freaking good, like they had some kind of special second-starch coating so they fried up crispier than just a strip of potato. (I know I’m not describing this very well, but what am I, a restaurant critic?) They were just great—and the portion was crazily, grotesquely, irresponsibly huge. There is only one person in existence with a high enough caloric need to justify such a huge portion, and it’s a lucky thing that person happened to be me.

Was there bread, a salad, an appetizer, a drink, or dessert? Hell no. What would be the point?

Breakfast: in the team tent at the race. I had a firm banana and an onion bagel. It’s funny: I’ve been more careful about my diet lately, so when I saw the bagel this voice in my head scolded, “Bagels have like five times the calories of a slice of bread—nobody should eat them!” How strange. Then this other voice said, “You know damn well you can’t get a real bagel outside of NYC.” That wasn’t as unexpected, because I recognized it as being my own voice. I really have no idea whose voice the first one was (and in fact a bagel has only three times the calories of a slice of bread). But the bagels weren’t from a grocery store—a team parent had taken some trouble to find fresh ones, and they looked good. So I told both voices to piss off, and slathered that bagel with cream cheese and wolfed it, chased by black coffee. And I’d do it again. Take that, diet plan! I’m back!

During race: four bottles, each two-thirds full, of fruit punch flavor Gatorade, mixed strong. The bottle I drank on the first lap was just for the sweetness, which improves performance irrespective of calories (as explained here). The second and third bottles were to fuel me, obviously. The fourth was just because it tasted good and I wanted whatever psychological comfort it could provide, and because our recently revived team had some fresh blood in the feed zone who could use the bottle hand-up practice. Speaking of blood, the drink was dribbling all down my chin, and one of our kids commented after the race that I looked like a vampire. “That’s because I fill my bottles with the blood of my rivals!” I declared. He then accused my rivals of doping, and thus me as well, by extension. These modern kids … so cynical!

Glycogen window treat: in the team tent. There were various sugary treats available to aid in my recovery, but some part of me was just too elitist to partake … I really miss the oatmeal cookies that I had in 2020, baked by the (then) team co-manager, E—. Her son L— graduated and they moved away, so she’s no longer co-manager. But L— has returned as a coach and was at the race … so why weren’t there cookies? He probably stole them, in which case all I can say is: well played! I’d have stolen them myself. Anyway, there was chocolate milk which I got excited about for a moment, but it was lactose-free and though I have no problem with lactose-free, I also have no problem with lactose so I figured I better leave most of it for whatever Cougar(s) can’t handle lactose. Besides, what did I need to recover for? My work is done for another year!

Lunch (post-race): in the team tent. Our team’s co-manager of 2020, F—, isn’t around anymore either, which, from a barbecue standpoint, is kind of like the Edmonton Oilers losing Wayne Gretzky. But some new parent was doing a yeoman’s job grilling up sausages and burgers. I had a sausage that was delicious but the entire time I was eating it (about ten seconds) I was keenly wishing there was sweet pickle relish for it. I’ve never in my life been as preoccupied with the absence of a condiment. Don’t get me wrong, I was very glad for the sausage, but that relish became an obsession. Maybe I’ll bring relish to the next race, even though I’ll only be coaching.

Dinner (post-race): back home. My wife made some innovative three-bean chili with pumpkin in it, I’m guessing for the high iron content. (Yes, I know it’s only the pumpkin seeds that are high in iron, but who actually eats those? Perhaps the proximity of the pumpkin flesh to the seeds works like a homeopathic remedy.) She also made, from scratch, macaroni & cheese. I washed it all down with a long overdue beer.

Post-race Beck’st

Here is the “Hardware Beck’st” I sent to my pals just before dinner. (I know I said a second ago that I washed dinner down with the beer. I didn’t. That’s just an expression, a nice idea. I drank the beer first … it’s best that way.)

(If you don’t know what a Beck’st is, get thee to a brewery! Or better yet, click here.)

Full report

I’m of the school that says your race number is always an omen. This year I got 101: how cool! It represented how I was about to get totally schooled in the race, and also how terrifying bike racing is (cf. Orwell’s “Room 101”).

I had a strange problem during my warm-up on the stationary trainer: I was listening to my workout megamix and my Bluetooth earbuds somehow got out of phase. The music in my left ear was a fraction of a second out of sync with the music in my right. The effect was extremely jarring for complicated cognitive reasons, and in fact made me almost nauseous. Meanwhile, pondering inconsistent Bluetooth latency isn’t conducive to a focused warm-up. Fortunately, being absurdly well-organized, I’d brought backup headphones and was able to proceed.

Due to some problem out on the course, they kept us sitting on the start line for at least twenty minutes. We passed the time with bike tech-talk, so you can be glad you weren’t there. I had a slow leak in my tubeless rear tire, and hadn’t gotten around to reinflating it, so instead of confidently saying, “I’m running 23 psi in the rear for the sandy conditions,” I could only describe the tire’s firmness as “al dente.” One of my student-athletes, meanwhile, was running his tires “pillow-soft.” By the time the ref rang the bell to start the race, I was no longer warmed up. Alas.

The course starts on a slight uphill, and is a wide, straight road for about a quarter mile before you turn onto the single track, so there’s no excuse for not hitting that dirt near the front (except of course being slow). I started the single track in second place. Before long my teammate M—, a fellow Albany High coach, passed me and took the lead, which was fine with me. I wasn’t feeling so hot. My legs were oddly okay, but my throat was burning and I could taste blood. My breathing was way harder than it should have been for my (albeit elevated) heart rate, and I was feeling stressed, frustrated, anxious, and agitated. In short (I suddenly realized), I had COVID! Exercise-induced COVID! Is that a thing? But I kept at it, and decided that having a burning, raspy, blood-flavored throat could become part of my new normal, like everything else. So I relaxed a bit mentally (but not physically!) and just settled into the burn.

Just a couple minutes later, on a descent, the guy ahead of me suddenly slammed on his brakes. I was like “What are you doing!?” and he said, “We missed a turn!” Dang it! By the time we got back on course, I had no idea how many guys were ahead of me.

Oh my god, I am so sorry … this is so freakin’ boring. Suffice to say, I somehow found the motivation to hammer much harder than last time for the entire race. At least some of the credit goes to my younger daughter, who—though she’d never shown much interest in my cycling before—surprised me, when I left for Fort Ord, by wishing me luck and saying, “Dig deep!” (It’s not that she’s not into sports, being a wrestler who describes herself as “secure in my masculinity.”) So I did dig deep, and it worked. By the end, I was totally satisfied with my race despite having no real idea how I’d placed. I’d given it everything I had, hadn’t miscalculated my pacing, and was perfectly empty by the end. And, as I mentioned before—and will probably mention again, until everyone is sick of hearing about it—I managed to snag a spot on the podium … which distinction I’m not sure I’ll ever achieve again.

All the guys on our podium (this being the Category 2, 45-54 group) are high school coaches. The guy on the second step is my Albany teammate, who breaks my legs twice a week. Look at the dude who got fourth … why are his legs so filthy? Did he find some puddle on the course and try to cool off?

Epilogue

No, of course I didn’t really have COVID. And no, exercise-induced COVID isn’t a thing. I confess I just worked that in to seem more timely, and to help this post perform better in search. Say, that reminds me: iPhone Samsung Galaxy Android Tesla Silicon Valley Oscars Billie Eilish Leonardo Dicaprio Emma Watson Ethereum Fortnite.

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Non-Race Non-Report - 2021 Fort Ord CCCX XC MTB

Vlog

It occurred to me that some of my readers might be the types who unconsciously mouth the words they’re reading, as though they were reading aloud, and that others might be the type who turn their entire heads instead of just moving their eyes to track along the lines of text. Either of these types of people might get mocked while reading my blog, and I don’t want that. Meanwhile, still other people (I’m told) simply prefer a video. Thus,  I’m providing the vlog format here, and for everyone else the text follows below.

Introduction

It’s become a tradition for me, at this time of year, to head to Fort Ord in the Monterey area and do a mountain bike race. Normally, I’m a high school cycling coach and this is an opportunity for my riders to watch me suffer. But this year the NorCal League and our team are shut down due to the pandemic, so we didn’t get to go. And this means I don’t get to blog about my wretched, ill-fated race … another tradition stymied.

For a moment, I considered embracing the fake-news zeitgeist and writing a purportedly true but actually totally fabricated race report. After all, as we already knew but formally learned by watching The Social Dilemma, false information is much more interesting than the truth. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Then I considered doing a short story, but in my experience, people seem to prefer their fiction be labeled fact.

What follows is a completely honest report of the race I didn’t do (inspired, perhaps, by a story I dimly recall from the early ‘90s called “We Didn’t,” by Stuart Dybek). In accordance with the high standard set by my bike team for race/ride reports, I focus on the food, and provide the report in various versions, starting concisely before waxing verbose.

Executive summary

• We didn’t have our annual team dinner in the windowless back room of the Monterey Brewhouse (slogan: “We’re actually in Salinas”)
• The GPS didn’t direct me to a lonely stretch of a desolate road in the middle of nowhere only to announce, “You have arrived”
• No student laughed so hard a French fry came out his nose
• The portions weren’t so small I had to beg for the shrapnel from my daughter’s plate; after all, she’s off at college now and the meal never happened
• At the team tent that wasn’t erected in the morning, nobody forgot to bring the coffee, thus the lack of coffee was actual
• During the non-race non-warm-up, I didn’t fail to secure a student’s bike properly to the trainer, thus he couldn’t literally crash at zero mph
• All the training I didn’t do never had a chance to not pay off
• The race did not knock the stuffing out of anybody because there was no race and no stuffing
• I did not make an endless speech afterward, during which the parents clapped politely and the teenagers suffered silently
• When I didn’t return home because I hadn’t gone anywhere, I did not pour a beer and toast my own robust good health, nor did I drown my sorrows over the loss of my cycling fitness, though that loss (and my beer) are very real

Short report

Race stats: 0.00 miles (vs. 22.4 last year); 0 feet of vertical gain (vs. 2,362 last year); 0:00 race time (vs. 1:41:07 last year); 0.00 mph average speed (vs. 13.3 mph last year). 

Conclusion: I have no reason to believe I will ever again have the fitness necessary to race a bicycle. As far as I can tell, life will not go on—not in any recognizable way. You might say wait, that’s not true, this COVID pandemic shall pass. To which I respond, perhaps. Only perhaps. Consider these words from the writer Vladimir Nabokov: “At best, the ‘future’ is the idea of a hypothetical present based on our experience of succession, on our faith in logic and habit. Actually, of course, our hopes can no more bring [the future] into existence than our regrets change the past.”

Non-Pre-race Dinner (the night before I didn’t race):

• Lamb steaks that were deliciously rare because they caught fire under the broiler and had to be pulled out prematurely
• Mashed potatoes with salted butter and extra salt
• Sautéed zucchini
• German-style purple cabbage
• Rocky road ice cream with hot fudge because what do I need to be fit and trim for?

Breakfast (on the morning I would have raced)

• Two eggs, scrambled, burnt because I was too impatient to gradually wait for the pan to warm up and instead put a big flame under it so it was too hot—I could tell it was too hot because the butter smoked, and I knew I should hold back the eggs, take the pan off the heat, let it cool, wipe out the burned butter, and start over—but damn it fuck it all I just didn’t care and poured in the eggs in the pan anyway
• Two slices white bread that I thought would be wheat because the package said “Whole Grain Oat Nut” which was a lie but I was caught off-guard because the bread aisle was disorienting because my glasses were fogged up by my mask and I wasn’t at my normal store, where they require a reservation, a temperature test, a long line, a letter from your doctor, and support a maximum occupancy of like five, and I’m only slightly exaggerating
• An apple that just wasn’t very good because see above

During the non-race: nothing but half a bottle of water because my legs just kind of petered out halfway up South Park because I’m just so tired from the work week since my colleagues, newbies at teleworking, take all the time they would be commuting and pour it into working more, which in a perfect world would help everybody finish early, but instead everyone just launches more projects, generates more deliverables, and creates an overall culture that brings to mind that study NASA did of spiders given too much caffeine.

Unnecessary glycogen window treat: more ice cream because it’s so rare to have it around the house and even with one daughter no longer around, I better get the ice cream while I can; also a macaron that my daughter made, from a recipe that was incredibly complicated and took like a day but then a) the cookie was amazing, and b) what else is she gonna do with her time?

Full report

To my discredit, I was not very successful in looking around at the start and deciding who the fastest guy was likely to be, because there was no start line and no racers, not even myself. As soon as the race did not start, I didn’t get right on the wheel of the fastest guy, but if I had, he would have passed everybody during the slight uphill asphalt run-up to the dirt. I would have hit the single-track in second position, and then died on the guy’s wheel for a few minutes, and then the single-minded, sport-obsessed, totally unbalanced evil tech titan quasi-retired uber-fit bike bastards would have started passing me. It would have been a long race, four or five laps, and my strategy would have been to pace myself and wait for the guys ahead to start detonating so I could pass them.

If I were in racing form this year, that would make uphills a blast, obviously. I could be at the CCCX race and see a horrible 12% grade looming ahead, and I’d think, “Yeah! Bring it!” I’d look at the guys around me with something like pity. But of course I’m not in racing form; why would I be? I’m taking this shelter-in-place opportunity to develop the physique better suited to my current lifestyle: more like the shape of a Coke botte, or a bowling pin, or those inflatable clown bop bags or a Weeble that may wobble but it won’t fall down. That would stabilize me in my desk chair. Maybe if I can add some flesh to my face, I won’t look so gaunt, and thus so old, and after all nothing below my waist shows on a videoconference so why not develop a big soft woman-y butt? Perhaps an extra fifteen or twenty pounds would give me an air of gravitas.

Anyway, notwithstanding my new COVID physique, the non-race wasn’t too bad. I mean, how bad could it have been? I did find that on the climbs I wasn’t doing that I could, or perhaps couldn’t, put the hurt on any of the people who weren’t there. I’d heard these climbs described as “really long” but they seemed really short, as in actually literally nonexistent. It was a fun race, if only in my mind. But that’s actually overstating things. The race did not exist even in a reverie … this is the first time I’ve thought of it even hypothetically.

It’s been rainy in the Bay Area so there would have been several very deep puddles on the course that we’d have bombed through, sending water gushing up everywhere like one of those amusement park water rides. Oddly, only my trailing foot would get splashed. By the end of the race I would have had a drenched left foot and a bone-dry right foot.

On the last lap of my race, had there been one, I might well saw have seen this guy I’d remembered from the previous years’ races whom I’d have been chasing for the whole race (though most of the time he’d have been too far ahead to even see). His jersey would have said something pompous like “Woodside Beasts,” or some other rival high school team, meaning he’d be a coach too. I’d have started to close in on him on the final climb, right toward the end of the race. It would’ve looked like I wasn’t gaining fast enough and that he’d hold me off, except that I’d have been able to tell he was just dying.

I’d have dug deep, deeper, and deepest, and literally 50 feet from the end of the climb I’d have finally passed him. Damn, what a sucker-punch that would have been! He’d still be pissed off about it! The tricky part would have been holding him off on the fast, technical descent to the finish line. I’m not that great a downhiller because my wife would kill me if I crashed, but I’d have gone for broke, and presently on a narrow single-track section I’d have come up on a young high school girl who wouldn’t have been going that fast. I’d have realized that if I got stuck behind her, the Beast would catch up and surely pass me in the twisty bits near the finish line. On the other hand, there would be no place to pass except the thick bramble alongside the trail. Bramble is a notoriously tricky surface to ride on, because the ground can be really bumpy, even rock-infested, beneath the brush, and you won’t know until you’re on it. You could run over a rock, a beer bottle, a human skull, an empty bottle of hand sanitizer, maybe even a landmine because what the hell, this is all speculation anyway. I’d have taken the gamble, and though it would’ve been indeed bumpy—my bike would have heaved like a bucking bronco—I’d have made it past the girl, returned to the single-track, and never saw the Beast again.

After the finish line, feeling truly shattered, I would have been filled with the sublime feeling of having truly given it everything, so it wouldn’t have mattered how I’d placed—which would be good, because I would really have no idea about that. It’s better that way, I think, to decide how it went without worrying about the more or less meaningless matter of how I compared to those who happened to show up and race my category. Had they actually shown up. And had I.

But instead of being at peace no matter the result, I feel only a gap, a void, a lack, a profound sense of nothingness, the absence of any feeling about the race because there was no race, there was no course, there was no pit zone, there were no team tents or trailers, there was no podium and there was nobody there at all at Fort Ord, in the gentle dunes that would have been the course. Well, to be really accurate, surely there were hawks, and rodents, and earthworms, and it’s possible one or more of these creatures perceived something different this year, no groaning of cars and trucks and racers, no whirring and clunking of chains, no ticking of freewheels, no static-sound of tires on dirt, no cheering, no PA system, no nothing. This year, there was only—to quote the poet Peter Kane Dufault—“one huge hush the whole day.”

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