What a day, man. The big event was that the Supreme Court handed down its ruling that legalized gay marriage thought the U.S. Somehow this made family seem even more important to me, so I was happy to get home in time for a great dinner – made by the girls! – and a long evening of warmth and sun.
The girls and I did a little bit of everything. In the full light, we played basketball and catch out front,
then went for a bike ride to watch the swallows catch mosquitoes over the ponds and admire a colossal cumulonimbus cloud far to the southeast.
As the sun set, we went to the backyard to watch for and try to catch fireflies. We also saw a couple bats, which was great.
Then after dark we set up Vivi’s telescope to look at the moon (which our neighbor Meg told us is called tsuki in Japanese), and Julia got put her guitar to play a few notes.
Summer is only four days old! I’m spent. Time to finish this beer and go to bed.
Today was one of those humid, hot days in which summer practices for July and August. What the day lacked in truly unpleasant heat and humidity, it promises to deliver in thunder and lightning…
I was only snuck into the race after I mused to a friend that I didn’t have any races on my calendar between the Almanzo in May and the Maah Daah Hey 100 in August. As it turns out, he knew a guy who could get me into the Cheq, and another friend, Galen, happened to be going up there to volunteer.
Things having fallen into place quite neatly, I headed up north on Thursday with Galen. We planned to camp each night and help set up the course on Friday. I’d race on Saturday while he hung out, and then we’d do a bit of riding on Sunday before coming home.
Our leisurely drive ended at a lovely little campsite at Two Lakes Campground in Drummond (just a couple miles up from where we saw a bear crossing the road!). The spot was idyllic, dominated by greens and blues and very quiet except for loons.
Two Lakes Campground, Drummond WI
On Friday morning, we helped set up a chunk of the course (which had the added benefit of acquainting me with a gorgeous and fun piece of the trail)
The Buffalo on Esker Trail, CAMBA
and then did some riding on the infamously hard Rock Lake Trail, a savagely difficult stretch of rocky, rooty singletrack. It was as hard as anything I’d ever ridden, and I was riding it with fresh legs in good, dry conditions. If I do say so myself, the Buffalo looked awesome:
On Rock Lake Loop
For various reasons entirely under my control, Friday night was less restful than it should have been, but I was up and moving by 5:30 a.m. to get to the race, driving over with JB, a fellow Northfielder. Just as forecasted, a heavy, chilly rain started falling about a half hour before the start. By 7 a.m., everything – roads, trails, riders, bikes, gear – was thoroughly soaked. But off we went!
The opening few miles are on a gravel road, so we were not only wet but muddy even before we hit the needle’s-eye opening to Rock Lake. The single-file line of racers jockeyed as we moved along the singletrack. I let quite a few people pass me when I either bobbled an obstacle or pulled over to let them through. I was not enthused about giving up spots, but I could tell that I was in for a long day – my bike computer was showing an average speed of well under 6 mph – and I wanted to conserve every bit of energy rather than go hard just to keep a spot for five more minutes. When we reached a super-steep rocky drop called Wall Street, I was amazed to see many riders take the A-line down the drop rather than the easy dirt B-line. I took the B, and was pleased to scoot around unscathed. Discretion and valor and all that.
As I wound my way through Rock Lake, other racers became fewer and fewer. A couple friends like JB went by me, and I pulled back a couple people who’d gone out too hot, but I was pretty much on my own, and happy enough about it. That’s not to say I was happy, exactly. In addition to the oddity of my hearing aids popping and buzzing from rain getting into my ears (and my consequent fretting that they’d die on the ride), I was uncomfortably filthy, the mud was already causing the Buffalo’s drivetrain to act up, my front brake suddenly stopped working, and my tires were proving to be terrible in the mud.
And I was crashing a lot. I went down at low speeds and at slightly less low speeds. I went off the bike to the right, scraping my legs on the chainring and chain, and off to the left, trapping myself under the Buffalo. I went over the bars more than once, including one idiotic time when I simply steered into a tree and then flew into it when, sure enough, the tree stopped the bike. Just as I started thinking seriously about how I could lessen the chance of an irreparable bike problem or of breaking an arm or leg, we came off Rock Lake and I had a short respite in which to eat, drink, and calculate that I was on pace for a 21-hour finish of a hundred-mile race.
This was an impossibility. I didn’t have enough food or water to race that long, and I didn’t have any lights to ride at night. As I thought about my options, I came up on my friend JB, sitting in the grass at a road crossing, his face covered in blood. “I hit a tree,” he told me. “My nose is broken.” I dug out my phone to find the number for the race director, who’d need to know JB was dropping out. (As it happens, that was a fateful move, as my phone got soaked and stopped working later that day.) As JB organized himself to head back to the start, a couple other riders pulled up, talking exhaustedly about dropping out. One even claimed to be hypothermic, which struck me as odd given that the temps were in the high sixties and that he was wearing a long-sleeve jersey and knickers – all coated in mud and muck.
I headed back onto the race course as they were leaving, and at around that point the race became as blurry and indistinct as the view through my filthy sunglasses. I rode the Buffalo for at least eight more hours after that point, but I remember only little moments in the race. For one thing, the course is so complicated and my knowledge of the trails is so thin that I have little or no idea where I was at any particular time. The only constants were my efforts to get over the muddy, mucky trails, to focus on making the turns, to strive to enjoy the sound of the rain in the trees and the sight of the weak light through the trees, and to try not to crash over and over. In between the usual array of earworm music, dumb but profound sayings popped into my head, like how success is often just rising one more time than you fall. In this race, this was literally true!
At some point, a racer caught me from behind. We talked for a bit about conditions. She said she’d heard that many people had dropped out. I corroborated this. She said she was wondering if we could switch to the shorter, 62-mile race at the spot on the course where the two races diverge. I said I didn’t know for sure, but had heard as much. We traded a bit of intel about the track ahead of us: a short gravel-road section, then a really tough loop around mile 30. She headed off up the trail away from me, leaving me to consider my options. Since I was only getting more concerned that I might wind up with a broken bike or body, I started to really like the idea of switching into the short race, especially if – as seemed likely – that meant that I would still get in a solid ten or more hours of hard riding.
Amidst all that, I enjoyed the swoopy fun of the Danky Dank and Esker trails, which were challenging but not obscenely so. I did not enjoy Hildebrand Loop, which is rated as “Very Difficult” and might better be rated “Very Effing Difficult.” Racers who must have been the leaders of the 62-mile race caught me in this section, as did a number of others like my friend Finn Sunboo. I crashed my way through the loop, walking plenty of hard sections, including the dicey, wooden “No Hands Bridge” over a creek running into Hildebrand Lake. Relieved to get off Hildebrand, roughly a third of the way into the 100-mile course, I decided to reward myself with the Red Bull I’d been carrying in my frame bag. I eagerly dug it out, almost tasting the sugary fizz. The can was, however, empty: it had been punctured in one of my crashes and all the caffeinated elixir had dribbled out into my frame bag.
Expletives were uttered here, and I decided to definitely shorten my day by switching into the 62-mile race. Now, though, I had to make it to the course split and then ride 20 miles after that to the finish. Back out on a gravel road, my chain, which had been creaking and catching all day, finally jumped off my biggest cog and lodged itself very, very tightly between that cog and the spokes. I needed a good 15 minutes, or maybe more, to fix it, in which time drivers in two passing trucks asked if I needed help. Nice folks, Wisconsinites!
Getting the chain back in place was in some ways the last test of the day, because the rain stopped around then, and after the repair had a long, fast gravel-road section that my computer suggested would end at or near the magical course split. I hammered the road, feeling very much at home in the big ring, head down near the Buffalo’s bars. The rollers and sweeping curves carried me past mile 35 and on to 40. Just as I started to wonder if I’d somehow made wrong turn, I came across a guy sitting in a lawn chair on the edge of the road. “Almost to the checkpoint!” he shouted as I rolled past. I pushed a bit more and got there: a pop-up tent, some muddy trucks, and a few volunteers wading through the soupy mud. I tried to make my stop quick, first confirming with the race director that I could in fact switch to the 62-mile race, then drinking a Coke and devouring some sugary food.
I dunno how long I was stopped, but I felt refreshed and relaxed when I took the Buffalo back onto the course. The trails were now a little drier than they had been in the morning, and these particular trails were also much more fun to ride: aerobically challenging, but technically just right. In the woods, I realized that I could hear birds singing for the first time all day, and that I was really dripping sweat – also for the first time.
I enjoyed the work of trying to punch the climbs – including the ascent to the course’s high point – and then letting the Buffalo run down the descents, including some truly amazing corkscrewing descents that got less and less frightening with each turn. I stopped crashing, and even went long stretches without putting a foot down. More racers caught me, including some 100-mile racers who were now hours and hours up on me. But I felt like I was on the home stretch. The trails – now the long northwesterly Ojibwe (or Ojibwa, depending on the sign!) – continued to be much more fun than work, and far easier to ride than those early in the day. I almost – almost – regretted that the race was coming to its conclusion, and then looked down at my filthy legs, my muddy bike, my clanking chain, and thought, “Naw, a hundred kilometers will be fine.”
Around the time my computer said that I’d gone about 55 miles, my fatbiking friend Wisconsin Mark caught me. He was shocked that I was ahead of him, since I am way slower than he is (even through he’s 18 years older than I am), and then very relieved to learn that he was actually about 40 miles ahead of me, having done the full 100-mile route. I tried to hang with him as we wound through the trees toward what had to be the road section to the finish, but he got away from me.
Then suddenly I saw his red jersey on a switchback ahead of me, riding out a descent that was paralleling a road and thus had to be dropping to the end of the Ojibwe Trail. A few minutes later, the Buffalo took me down that descent, under a nice little archway, and out onto the gravel road to the finish in Cable. I put the bike into the biggest gear that was still working and pushed as hard as I could, seeing Mark off in the distance. When the gravel turned to pavement, I knew I was done. A couple more turns and I pulled into the finishing area, completely and thoroughly worked.
My friend Galen met me with a grin and a few words of sympathy. All told, I logged a solid 100 kilometers in a pathetically slow but brutally hard 10:45, good enough for 18th place in the “metric” field. Notably – and leaving out the complication that some of us stepped down from the long race to the short one – only 35 out of 131 starters finished the 62-mile short race (a 27% completion rate), while only 63 of 130 (48%) finished the 100-mile long race. (Even weirder, the winner of the short race needed 8:05 to do those 62 miles – almost ten more minutes than the winner of the long race needed to do the full hundred!)
At the afterparty, Galen offered to loan me his car so that I could head home early on Sunday while he and another Northfielder – neither of whom had raced – did a bit of fun riding. The drive home was slow and easy, and included way too many stops to take on and let out food and drink. I got home in time to have a great Father’s Day, which was perfect.
Two days later now, I am sure that I will be back to try the race again in 2016. I’ll definitely approach the race differently, in big and small ways. Assuming I can maintain my endurance base, I will have to orient my training around the challenge of singletrack. I need to get much more practice on true singletrack trail, for one thing. I also need to practice handling rough trail – logs, rocks, mud – when fatigued, which is a very different thing than handling obstacles fresh. I’m lucky in these respects to have some fun local singletrack to ride now – and to have the Maah Daah Hey as a goal and a gauge, exactly 40 days from today!
I’ll definitely also need to figure out how to eat and drink on a mountain bike. Unlike either fatbike or gravel racing, a MTB racing seems to offer very few opportunities for eating my preferred “real foods,” like trail mix and jerky. I survived the Cheq on energy chews, but I could kill two birds with one stone by using an energy drink that provides water and nutrition at the same time. And I definitely need to use water bottles, not a Camelbak bladder in a frame bag! (I dislike wearing a backpack, but maybe I need to go in that direction again anyhow…)
I’m even feeling a perverse pride in having some of the ugliest legs in Minnesota right now, thanks to all those crashes. They’ll heal.
Today was my eleventh Father’s Day, and one of the best. I had been gone since Thursday for a bike race – too long, and full of missing the girls. I got home today just before the sun-baked girls and Shannon came back from the pool.
We had a great couple hours doing this and that while I unpacked from the race; I loved hearing their breathless recaps of all the goings-on while I was gone. (True to form, Shannon kept them very, very busy the whole time I was gone!) Listening to their rapid-fire, overlapping stories is to me the essence of fatherhood: not exciting or even notable, but pleasant and normal and good. One of the many things that the girls were excited to tell me about were their Father’s Day gifts and cards, which they finally shared with me after dinner:
In addition to a package of coffee and a gift card to a local coffee joint, the girls and Shannon made a "candy bouquet" and each girl made her own cards slash gifts: a buffalo-themed card from Vivi, some art and a card from Julia. (Shannon’s card jokingly entitles me to be right for 24 hours. Little does she know I’m going to parcel out those 86,400 seconds in ten-second chunks over the rest of my life.)
All in all, today was a great Father’s Day, and a wonderful reminder that it’s good to be a dad!
Growing up, I always wanted to learn to throw a football with a nice tight spiral – that is, I always wanted someone to teach me how to throw a football with a nice tight spiral.
Alas, neither of my parents knew how, and I never played any kind of even marginally organized football, so I never really learned.
Then Vivi came along. The girl loves to play catch with baseballs, soccer balls, frisbees, footballs – basically anything that one person can propel through the air and another person can catch. Our little kid-sized footballs turn out to be perfect for learning how to throw a spiral, whether you’re an eight-year old girl or her dad. We both look pretty much just like this now.
This was a long and wonderful early-summer weekend that included errands, playdates, birthday parties, plenty of ice cream, the first trip to the pool
Sunday afternoon pool
and two good bike rides, one each evening.
Saturday’s outing was Vivi’s first on a new-to-her Trek mountain bike – a bike she loathed right up until I brought it home (at the suggestion of my bike shop’s owner, who knows from selling bikes!). Once Vivi saw the bike in all its 24″ glory, she was ready to rock, and so we did:
Crushing Hall Avenue
We rode a short gravel hill near our house and then tooled around on some paved paths in the next subdivision. She loved the bike’s speed, and Julia loved that the new bike helped her keep up.
Even though the girls had a very full day today, they still wanted to ride this evening, so off we went again, this time to the local MTB trails. Julia cruised the trails like a pro, and Vivi did a great job handling the bigger, faster bike through the tight twists and turns. She only watched as Julia rode her favorite drop, though:
Taking the Drop
They even fell for a little reverse psychology I used them to goad them into riding a little hill. The sign doesn’t apply when your motor is lungs and legs.
Vivi finishing the “climb”Julia finishing the “climb”
On the way home, Vivi’s saddle loosened to the point that she couldn’t ride comfortably, so I had to do some trailside jury-rigging by moving my seatpost and saddle to her bike. Shimmed with a bit of inner tube, she was able to ride home on my Brooks C17 saddle and Moots Cinch seatpost – a truly ridiculous situation, given that the saddle is worth more than her whole bike, and don’t even get me started on the ti post.
Since her seatpost wouldn’t fit in my bike’s downtube, I had to stand up the whole rest of the way, which made the last mile’s sprint through the rain even more challenging than otherwise!
All in all, this was an auspicious start to the summer.
I drove up to Afton, Minnesota, to see the annual release of a bison herd onto a restored prairie owned by the Belwin Conservancy. The thirty-five yearling bulls made sure that the event went quickly:
I loved watching them barrel out of the trailers and head to the far, far, far corner of the prairie, where they continued to run back and forth for a while before calming down. They’re the tiny brown-black specks off in the furthest distance here:
Bison in the Distance at the Belwin Conservancy, Afton, MN
Yeah, you can’t see them. Imagine how hard it would have been for Indians to see them, even in the teeming herds before the Great Slaughter.
Owned by Northstar Bison in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, these buffalo spend the summer at the conservancy to fatten up before being “harvested.” I don’t have much problem with that, since a) bison is delicious and b) their eating and roaming on the Conservancy’s prairie helps accelerate the restoration of the land. And they look great doing it.
After watching the release, I daringly posed for a picture with one bison:
My attempt to sell the Beast was successful. Within a couple days of putting it up for sale, several people wrote to ask me about the bike, and one guy checked it out on Monday.
I figured Dave was serious, since he was willing to come down from Minneapolis to ride the machine, and he was: he asked good questions, told me he was planning to do a 24-hour cycling race that weekend, and best of all eagerly roared off toward the nearest gravel roads. About a half hour later, he came back grinning and splattered in mud. He handed over cash for the bike, I helped him pack the bike into his car, and away he went, a new fatbiker.
For the first time in almost two years, I don’t own a fatbike. That’ll change on Wednesday, when I go to pick up this beauty from my friend Ben. I’m eager to ride it and name it and race it. I’ve got big plans for us.
Last summer, the girls were almost always up for a bike ride – around the block, through the neighborhood, down to campus, over to downtown. This summer, I’ve had less luck. Julia has been enthusiastic about riding near and far, but Vivi has been reluctant, for whatever reason (prime suspect: Julia’s enthusiasm).
So when Julia proposed to enjoy the gorgeous weather today with a bike ride, Vivi pitched a fit which turned into a big fight which subsided and then, to my surprise, turned into a ride on a new (to us) bike. We rode over the streets to drop off some stuff with a friend of mine who’s gonna try a 24-hour race next weekend. On the way home, the lure of a shortcut convinced both girls to venture for the first time onto gravel: a half-mile stretch that went slightly up and then down, fast. Vivi, of course, bombed the descent – except for a stop halfway down to look back at Julia and me, plodding along.
I was very, very happy with their first experience crushing gravel.
Friday, August 1, turned out to be unusually athletic. I set a deadlift PR at the gym at noon, learned how to dive at the pool in the afternoon (thanks to the girls, who enjoyed teaching me, and who laffed and laffed when I belly-flopped off the diving board), and then went on a long ride – five hours, 62 miles – with my friend Scott through the nearly-moonless summer night.
Despite getting to bed at 2:30 am, I’m pleased with August so far.
Shannon and the girls got home tonight from tae kwon do around 6:15. Within a few minutes, we were sitting down to dinner – an hour or an hour and a half after our usual (ridiculously early) dinnertime.
The meal was scarfed, the desserts were wolfed, and then Vivi got a bad attack of heartburn from something in the entree – probably the tomato sauce. She cried for ten minutes, and being Vivi, was angry as hell about it – screaming at us all. By time she was feeling better enough to take some Tums, I had heartburn too – which actually made Vivi feel better about her own case.
Meanwhile, Julia began wondering why people have heart attacks, and whether she’d ever have a heart attack, and how much it would hurt, and what she would do if she “died all alone.” I tried to explain that eating right and getting exercise would probably prevent a heart attack, but there was only so much I could say. She just had to cry it out, finally vowing as much to herself as to me that she would always get enough exercise.
Calmer now, we headed upstairs so the girls could take their showers. That went quickly, and while Julia did her thing, Vivi and I did ours: playing a game. I was almost crying with laughter when, during one round, she whomped me thoroughly while singing a crazy song that incorporated words from the game.
Before too long, it was bedtime. I packed them off into their rooms, where we somehow wound up discussing and practicing the art of the eye roll. Both girls were hilariously bad at it, thank goodness. They’re probably lying awake in their beds practicing it right now, though.
Even though our vacation came at the start of summer, we saw lots of firewood for sale in the UP. Every other rural house or small-town gas station seemed to be selling camp wood for sale, always on the honor system. $4 a bundle was the normal rate, but I did see some priced to move at $3. This appears to an unexploited marketplace inefficiency. Someone should buy all the cheap wood, then sell it to desperate tourists at campgrounds for $6.
Here and there, I also saw bigger quantities for sale – by the cord, by the pile, or even by the truckload, albeit through a raffle.
