Who’s with me? Meet at the corner of Spring Creek Road and Wall Street Road, and we’ll storm some turkey farms, or knock golfers off their carts, or something.
At 9:00 a.m. today, I started the Big Woods Run half-marathon, the longest running race I’ve done to date. I trained pretty hard for the race, and that training paid off in a good effort that wound up being a few minutes behind my target. But I had a lot of fun, and certainly feel good about the result.
Facts about the Race
Factoids about the Race
Before your children actually acquire verbal skills, you should develop and memorize answers to the following questions, which your child will ask you roughly a hundred times a day between the ages of 3 and 7 (or later):
For extra fun, take the negative of each question, too. It’s important to memorize your answers, because there will be pop quizzes, and because discrepancies between answers will not be tolerated.
Minnesota Public Radio ran two irksome stories almost back to back this morning. The first story described how a GOP leader in the state legislature is attacking local school boards that are seeking to renew tax levies to fund school operations. Thing is, he’s the freaking chair of the education finance committee, and thus has presumably had a hand in cutting state funding of the schools to disastrous levels. Taxes to help schools? BAD.
The second story, a few minutes later, touched on the ongoing attempts by the Vikings and their legislative allies to get the state – the same state that can’t properly fund its schools – to help foot the bill for a new stadium for the team. Taxes to help billionaires? GOOD.
If this is the nature of the public debate in Minnesota, we’re doomed.
3 Killed in WreckThree men were killed early on the morning of April 29th when the Carden-Johnson-Clyde Bros. Circus prop semi slammed into a railroad bridge at Houghton, Mich. Three other men who were also riding in the truck were injured, one seriously.An eyewitness said he heard a semi coming coming down the hill on Bridge Street in Houghton – faster and faster it came — people were screaming – it crossed busy US 41 – and crashed into a Soo Railroad bridge. One survivor said the last thing he remembered was the sound of leaking air — then awful silence.A borrowed truck was used to bring what props could be salvaged to the show’s engagement at Menominee, but gone were some sections of the ring curbs, the organ, drums, amplifier, the PA system and lights, plus some props and rigging.A turnaway crowd was on hand to greet the circus for both shows that day, as local citizens welcomed the circus in its moment of tragedy. It was a sad show, but a good one, is the way one spectator expressed his reaction.Killed in the accident were Carl A. Nordin, 43, of Lubbock, Texas, driver of the truck; Anthony Gilio, 61, of Corona, New York; and Wayne Lee Sater, 38, of Springfield, Mo.
We’re all not killed on the roads every day.
Yesterday, in the course of a couple blocks of my ride home, I saw a woman who didn’t look up from her cell phone for the better part of a full block, another woman who hurtled through a three-way stop at about 35 miles an hour, and two guys in their pickups parked side-by-side having a chat in the middle of the road. A few blocks later (after I checked to make sure my helmet strap was tight) I saw a teenage girl drive a good fifty feet while using both hands to put her hair in a ponytail and then two kids on bikes zoom straight out into the road without so much as checking for traffic.
A few weeks ago, my colleague Nancy Braker, the director of Carleton’s Cowling Arboretum, sent out a message seeking volunteers for the Arb’s yearly tree inventory. I’ve been waiting literally years for a chance like this, so I asked about the time commitment, which turned out to be quite manageable. Since my office work is very flexible during the summer break, I signed up. Today was my first shift, working with a student worker to measure trees in a section of the Lower Arb.
I can’t say the conditions were optimal: at 12:30, just before we went out into the field, the temperature was 95.9°F and the heat index was 118°F. Nancy recommended working slowly, standing in the shade as much as possible, and drinking a lot of water. Honestly, I was looking forward to the challenge of being outside in that heat as much as the opportunity to learn a little about counting trees. And I couldn’t complain much: my coworker/trainer had spent all morning outside in similar conditions, and she was still up for an afternoon’s work!
So we headed out, clad in heavy pants, long-sleeve shirts, socks, hiking boots, and hats. We were completely soaked in sweat after 30 minutes of tromping through our section of the Arb. Perspiration aside, the work was fairly simple, if messy: we set up a long 100-meter line (a “transect” in tree-countingese) through the trees and underbrush, then established shorter, 25-meter lines every 25 meters to create a series of quadrants. This is what that looked like. See my coworker’s shirt off in the distance? Yeah, me neither.
In each quadrant, we looked for certain types of invasive species and measured a few of the trees in that quadrant. Well, my coworker did that stuff – I just wrote down the information on some neat water(sweat)proof paper. The section included few trees of any size, most of which were red oaks planted in 1997. I can now reliably identify red oak, Quercus rubra or, as tree counters call it, QURU. Did you know that there’s a whole system of USDA letter codes to identify plants? Shut up: unless you’re Dan Hernandez, you didn’t.
All told, we spent a little over two hours on the four sets of quadrants, which seemed like a good pace. I felt much better at the end of that period than I had after the first 30 minutes, when I was sweating, as they say, profusely, and my heart was beating at the same pace as a slow run. After a half hour or so, my body adjusted, somewhat, and the sweating slowed down to a rate that would have been ridiculous under normal conditions but was probably pretty normal for these ridiculous conditions. All in all, I’m eager to get back out there next Tuesday. I just hope it’s more like Rice County summer, and not Rio de Janeiro summer.
Right now, a Northfield cyclist named Ben Oney is 1900 miles into Tour Divide, an insane bike race that starts in Banff, Alberta, and follows the Continental Divide all the way down Antelope Wells, New Mexico, on the Mexican border. (You can track Ben online; he’s currently about 1,900 miles – yes, miles – into the race, holding onto a top-15 place.)
Intrigued by this race, last night I watched Ride the Divide, a documentary on the 2008 running of the race. Endurance-sports documentaries are not always very good, so I didn’t know what to expect. Happily, I was blown away: the cinematography is amazing, the narrative of the race is gripping, and the three racers followed most closely are all cool, tough, interesting people. If you like cycling or endurance sports, you’ll love the documentary, which is available for purchase or rental online. (I rented it through iTunes.)
Ride The Divide Movie Trailer from Ride The Divide on Vimeo.
Lately I’ve had less and less sense that there’s any real future to the U.S.A. American society seems more and more likely to fall apart (or at least be dramatically transformed for the worse) in the next few years – by the time my kids are young adults. This sense is probably due partly to the stagnant economy, partly to the ongoing bullshit in the national and state governments, partly to the continued rampage of big corporations, and mostly to the very existence of Truck Nutz™:
This is what I saw as I biked up the hill that ends near my office building:
At the end of the day, though, I saw nothing but a wall of early-summer rain. There was nothing to be done about it, so I saddled up and rode home. My pants were damp before I reached the street, soaked before I turned the corner. My shoes lasted a few more blocks, but soon enough they were so wet that water squished out of them with every pedal stroke. The good thing about being wet is that once you’re soaked, you can’t get any wetter. It still felt good to strip off all my wet, gritty clothes when I got home and put on dry clothes for dinner.
In the lengthy first part of my Almanzo 100 race report, I dealt mostly with the overall shape of the experience for me. This second part relates some details that I want to remember, that fill out the Part I post, and that might be interesting to other cyclists who want to ride the Almanzo, other gravel events, or just gravel in general. (For much, much more of the same, see the collection of other riders’ Almanzo and Royal race reports…)
Continue reading No Plan B: Almanzo 100 Race Report (part II)
Trying to accommodate my athletic-endeavor verbosity, I’ve divided my race report into two pieces: this summary of the race and a separate, more detailed description of the experience, to follow soon. These 800-odd words are the one to read if you’re just passingly curious. And if you’re not even that, I don’t blame you!
The Almanzo 100 is a hundred-mile “century” bike race on gravel roads around Spring Valley, Minnesota. As the organizer, the inimitable Chris Skogen, said, “These are challenging courses. 100 miles is no small task… and when you ride them on gravel they become something entirely different. It is going to punish you, but it is definitely manageable if you pace yourself and understand the big picture.”
True enough, but the hundred miles we rode on May 14 were different still, thanks to 40°F temperatures, 15-30 mph northerly winds, and a steady rain. It was – as one racer wrote online – “Hellmanzo.” The proof is in the final results: “730 people signed up to race, 177 people finished. Of the 177, 151 people finished the Almanzo 100 and 26 people finished the Royal 162” (a new 162-mile gravel trek).
More than anything, I’m pleased and surprised to be one of the Almanzo finishers. The rain and gravel combined to turn the course into a ribbon of sloppy gray-brown mud that quickly covered everyone from the leaders to the red lantern, and the wind helped make everything cold and wet, but I never really thought about quitting. Maybe it was sisu, the Finnish sense of determination, or just forgetting that I could stop. And actually, I couldn’t. Unlike apparently a lot of other racers, I had no Plan B – no car-driving friend meeting me at crucial spots, no stopping point to call for help – so I just kept going, turning the pedals over and over and over.
Apart from having no Plan B, I was also enjoying myself – a lot. For one, I’d never been on the race’s Fillmore County roads, so literally every yard of gravel was new. And it was spectacular: endless straightaways through rolling farm country, high-speed descents with “holy shit!” corners, and long grinding uphills through woods and limestone road cuts. The Almanzo course covered fantastic cycling terrain that became borderline magical when everything began glowing from the rain and my eyes went fuzzy from tiredness.
I bonked hard twice during the race – once around mile 60 for probably a half hour and then again for a few minutes around mile 80. The former bonk was one of the strangest experiences of my life: my body felt totally powerless and my brain felt like the bastard son of exhausted and drunk. After what must have been several miles of slow, slower, slowest pedaling, I realized that I had bonked – maybe I even said it out loud – and I dug a gel out of my bar bag. Those hundred calories did the trick, and brought me back to something like reality – making 10 mph instead of 6.
The bonks were the low points of the race for me. The terrain itself was one of the race’s high points, while another was the near-religious sensation of pushing my body to an extreme for a long, long time. A third high was talking with other racers as I passed them or they passed me. Unlike running races or even ski racers, there’s a lot of talking, about all kind of things: the shitty conditions, our bikes, gear choices, the shitty conditions, whether we’d missed a turn, food and drink, the shitty conditions…
The race was too hard and too long to remember much except for some snippets, but I do recall a few things: being surprised to see that other riders’ faces were just two eyes in a mud mask, studying the Specialized bike logo tattooed on one guy’s calf, wishing I had a rain jacket, wondering if another kind of shoes would have handled the wet better, laughing out loud at five black cows lined up from calf to bull watching us pass, gasping with happiness when we found a huge vista at the top of one mammoth climb, listening to the weird din of a poultry farm with all the birds in individual pens, enjoying the pleasing shock of the knee-deep water crossing, talking for a few minutes with an old guy who was out collecting cans in the ditches, nodding at a farmer who was standing at the end of his driveway clapping for us and saying “Dedication!” over and over, fantasizing about having two cups of coffee (one in each hand)…
The end result was that I rode for 9:08, averaging about 11.5 miles an hour and maxing out at 37 mph on one of the early white-knuckle descents. (I didn’t crash at all.) On the bike, I consumed six gels, two nutrition bars, two peanut butter sandwiches, 40 ounces of carb drink, 48 ounces of water, and 24 ounces of (flat) Coke. Against that, I burned something like 6,000 calories (about 2.5 days worth of calories). If I averaged about 90rpm, I would have turned my cranks about 45,000 times. And in the end I finished in 80th place out of 150 finishers – who were themselves less than a quarter of the 613 registered male, female, and tandem entries. Not bad: the top 15% of all registrants.
* This photo is a crop of a shot taken by Craig Linder and published to Flickr. Thanks, Craig!
The torrent of stuff about the Almanzo 100 is just starting to trickle onto the web, but here are a few good items. First, the race director, Chris Skogen – who stayed the finish line to shake the hand of every single finisher, even the poor bastards who finished at 11 p.m. – shot this video of the end of the rollout, about a mile in:
Untitled from Chris Skogen on Vimeo.
At least two excellent photographers have already published great photosets to the web – a small set by David Gabrys and a gargantuan set by Craig Lindner on Flickr. The latter contains this wonderful shot of what looks to be the lead pack, sometime in the first 50 miles. We all looked like this by then:
And here are two shots of me at different hill-cresting spots in (I think) the middle third of the race. I don’t even have the wherewithal to look at the camera! Bikes don’t need fossil fuels to go, but I was gassed by then.
Here’s how my body and my face looked just a few minutes after the end of Almanzo 100. Not pictured: the extreme soreness in my neck, the crazy butt cramps (TMI?), or the insane toe-to-knee mud that was washed off around mile 80 when we had to wade through a creek!
Seven days from right now, I will (with luck) be well done with the Almanzo 100 – my big spring race, 100 miles of gravel roads around Spring Valley, Minnesota. I’ve been training hard since well before the snow melted, and I’ve liked the way my work has been paying off. I’ve never felt fitter in my life. The next seven days will be largely devoted to keep the mental and physical stoke high and filling my body with as many calories as possible. The former task is easier when I read stuff like the race organizer’s blog post on last-minute preparations and expectations, including this bit:
These are challenging courses. 100 miles is no small task (and 162 is certainly nothing to balk at) and when you ride them on gravel and they become something entirely different. It is going to punish you, but it is definitely manageable if you pace yourself and understand the big picture.
I’m eager to get out there!