It Takes a Village to Try the Arrowhead

One of the best things about my attempt to race the Arrowhead 135 this week is the way so many people have helped me out. It’s really amazing and heart-warming. And, I hope, hand- and foot-warming.

First of course is Shannon, who’s letting me try my body and mind in this crazy race (and spend some hard-earned money in the effort) . Thanks foremost to her!

After her is a long list of people who have offered gear and advice. Thanks, all!

  • Scott K., who offered to let me use his car to get to and from the race.
  • Michael L., who loaned me his neat Spot GPS tracker so that Shannon (and others!) can “watch” me ride via this cool live-updating map. (The updating will start when the race kicks off at 7 a.m. on Monday, January 27.)
  • Derek C., half of the team behind the fantastic Inspiration 100 every September, who’s offered encouragement and sent me a “good luck” present to help haul all the gear you have to carry in the race and a ton of music to make the drive up north speed by.
  • Jerry B., the head ape at Monkey See Monkey Read, who has provided all kinds of advice based on his attempt at the AH last winter. I’ll see him on the trails this year as he goes after the race again.
  • Tom B. at Fit to Be Tri’d, who tuned up my bike, offered some good advice for keeping it working in the cold, and gave me a tin of Dermatone to protect my lips and skin.
  • Marty L. and the staff at Tandem Bagels, who cut me a deal on their excellent “energy bombs” to eat during the race.
  • Nicole S. at the Gear ReSource here in Northfield, who helped me find some cheap, light gear and loaned me some other stuff.

In addition to all those people, I need to thank the gravel-grinder group here in town, who have been great riding companions for several years now. And I also need to thank all the friends and acquaintances who have wished me good luck in this nutty endeavor. I’ll need it all, I think! The race starts at 7 a.m. on Monday morning. I have until 7 p.m. on Wednesday to finish.

Sleigh Bells Ring

When I’m out in "bad" weather, I think a lot about how much time my grandfathers – a farmer on my dad’s side, a trucker and logger on my mom’s – must have spent outside in horrible conditions, doing their jobs. I’m lucky that I can choose to go outside and enjoy (not just endure) the experience of being outside, no matter temperature, precipitation, wind, etc.

Of course, both grandpas knew how to enjoy winter, too. Here – at a Christmas in the late 1990s – is Grandpa Jauquet at the reins of his sleigh, pulled by his two Belgian workhorses and laden with grandkids, including me, Shannon, my sister, and a bunch of my cousins.

Sleigh Bells Ring

Business Trip Lessons

My trip to a conference at Wesleyan University in Connecticut went well overall. First and foremost, the conference was great. Second, my air travel went smoothly, with no major delays or other trouble. Third, I had a good time hanging out with new and old friends at the conference.

But I also made a pretty bad choice as to the hotel where I would stay. I picked the cheaper option, when I should have done more research to figure out which of the two had the better location.

So – three tips to find a better hotel next time:

First, heck the distance from the hotel to the conference site, and choose the hotel with the shorter distance! The cheaper hotel this time was miles from the conference site, and though the hotel furnished a shuttle, walking the half-mile to campus each morning and evening would have been great.

Second, use Google Maps to figure out where nearby stores and such are located, but also use StreetView to see if I can walk to any of them.

Before this trip, I could see that my chosen hotel was less than half a mile from a mall with a grocery store and several restaurants, but I didn’t see that that half mile could not be covered on foot, thanks to a ridiculously narrow overpass.

Third, ask at the front desk about the view from my room. This time, I got this, which isn’t much of a view at all:

View from Room 260

Inspiration 100 Race Report: It Didn’t Kill Me, So I Must Be Stronger , Right?

Last Saturday, I headed up to Alexandria, Minnesota, to ride in the Inspiration 100 gravel road cycling race. The I100 is the real deal: perfectly organized, run over a great course, and – most importantly – as hard as hell. Of the seven gravel century races I’ve done, this year’s I100 was definitely the toughest – and also definitely the most satisfying (except for maybe my first-ever gravel race, the infamous 2011 Almanzo). I’ve never ridden at my maximum for as long or as productively as I did Saturday. I doff my disgustingly sweaty cycling cap to the hardworking folks behind the race, especially Derek and Scott, who thought this event up a couple years ago and have now pulled it off twice. They’re great guys, and the Inspiration 100 is a great race, one I’d highly recommend to anyone who wants to do a gravel race. It’s tough enough for an experienced racer, but not so tough that a rookie couldn’t gut it out.

Having done the race last year, I knew more or less what I was getting into, and didn’t either overpack or freak out about nutrition. Nor did I forget my helmet, my shoes, or my bike.
Giddyup and Go

I carpooled up to Alexandria with my friend Bruce, which was great for conversation and lots of Neil Young music. Along with our traveling buddies Joe and Scott, we swung through the pre-registration at Jake’s Bikes in Alex, saying hello to Derek and Scott and some fellow racers, collecting our number plates, and downing a quick beer. Beforehand, I had helped secure some nice overnight accommodations at a cabin owned by the parents of a friend, where we enjoyed this evening view:
Lobster Lake Sunset

After dinner with Bruce, Joe, and Scott, we got a solid night of sleep. Breakfast was matter of fact, even if the sunrise was magnificent. We made it to the race start line well ahead of the gun. Much of the chatter on the line had to do with the conditions – 70 degrees and humid by eight o’clock – but it was also great to connect with friends and acquaintances and ogle each others’ bikes.

Start Line

The race organizers Scott and Derek gave us the usual pre-race speech and then sent the hundred of us off onto a hundred miles of gravel. The first turn is onto this road, which gets less pleasant fast.
Pleasant Grove

Though a group of fast men and women went off up the road right away, a sizable bunch of us formed up and stayed together for the first ten miles or so.
Paceline, mile 8

That paceline blew up when we hit the first minimum-maintenance road, which is really just a rough track between two farm fields. By sheer luck, I was at the head of the train when we reached that section, grinning like a doofus:
MMR Train: Now Departing

I hammered it, putting my summer of fatbike riding to very good use. I popped out at the other end of the MMR with a nice gap, but slowed to let my friends Scott and Bruce catch back up. Shortly thereafter, I discovered that my hammering had a cost: a deflated rear tire, no doubt pinch-flatted on some hidden rock.

Disgusted, I hopped off my bike, sent Scott and Bruce off up the road, and started to fix the damn flat. My hands were shaking from the exertion, so the change took longer than it should have, but not as long as it might have, given that I discovered that I had left my tire levers at home and that my mini-pump had fallen apart at some point over the summer. The watchword of these gravel road races is that "you are responsible for you," but honestly, it’s not true: you are responsible for yourself, but almost everyone else is eager to help out. Two guys who were taking a water break lent me a tire lever, and just as I seated the fresh tube, another Rice County racer pulled up and let me use one of his precious inflation cartridges to inflate the tire. Riding his gorgeous fatbike, he would need four or five cartridges for each tire if he flatted, so he was making a decent-sized sacrifice. That’s gravel grinding, though – racers helping racers.

With my bike back in order, I caught my fatbiking friend, chatted for a few minutes while I got my legs going again, and then headed up the road. I caught a racer or two every few minutes over the next thirty miles – mostly folks who had passed me while I was fixing the flat, but some fast starters who were already fading. Making these catches partly mitigated the inevitable onset of body troubles: my lower back was starting to ache and my stomach was protesting any attempts to eat solid food. I decided to try to handle both problems by stopping at the convenience store at mile 40 – the first of two places where we could get food and drink – to stretch my back and buy more drinkable energy. Sorry, trail mix and beef jerky: I’ll have to eat you another time. Just before the first stopping point at mile 40, I caught up with Julia and Chris, two racers who come up from Texas to do the race. They’re used to heat and humidity, but even they said the weather was horrible, so it must have been! We rolled into the convenience store at mile 40 together, but after grabbing some a bottle each of Gatorade and Coke, I headed up the road by myself.
All Day

My back had loosened up in those five minutes off the bike, and never flared up again – a testament to lots of time in the gym this year improving my core strength and to having a bike that fits well. My bike, a Salsa Vaya that I call Giddyup, is actually second hand, purchased from race organizer Derek. It’s a fantastic machine, and didn’t let me down at all. Caking a bike’s drivetrain in gravel dust is a recipe for disaster, but Giddyup operated perfectly all day. In the next ten miles, I caught a few more racers – including the guy I accidentally ran over last year – and then fell in with someone who was going at exactly my pace. We rode together for a few miles, but then took a wrong turn that – naturally – led us down a long hill which we then had to climb to get back on course. He turned around before I did, but I was so annoyed that he’d called the turn wrong (even though, yes, it’s each racer’s responsibility to follow the cues!) that I hammered till I caught him, then dropped him right away.

In retrospect, that effort might have contributed to the pure awfulness of the next ten miles of riding, the most physically and mentally painful riding I have ever done. The heat and humidity were mounting, I had fallen behind my drinking, and the flattish course that I remembered from 2012 had been replaced by one composed entirely of unrelenting rollers.** I wasn’t bonking, though I almost wish I had been, since then I wouldn’t have been so horribly aware of just how much life sucked and how stupid it is to ride a bike on gravel roads.

But experience paid off: a tiny but loud part of my brain reminded me to keep pedaling, to drink small amounts frequently (the Gatorade and the Coke were so good), to keep recalculating the distance until the second stop at mile 70 (being sure to add in the extra 2.5 miles from my wrong turn), and to keep repeating two bike-racing mantras: Jens Voigt’s immortal "shut up, legs!" and the truism that "the weather is bad for everyone."

Grinding on, I slowly caught a few more racers, including my pal Joe, and my brain and body came out of the bad place. By about mile 65 I was feeling back to what’s normal for being two-thirds of the way into a gravel race. With the second rest stop coming, I finished what was left of my water (spraying some of it on my jersey to get a few seconds of evaporative-cooling magic) and got into the drops to hammer to the stop. The cold darkness of the bar there was heavenly, and the free ice water was delicious. I refilled my water bottles, bought another Coke, and then – remembering how the day had gone so far – bought a can of energy drink to back up my back-up Red Bull. As I got back on my bike, Joe cruised by, and we headed out together. Thirty miles to go. Just thirty.

Joe and I have ridden many miles together, so it was great to share some of the Inspiration gravel with him. Not long after the rest stop, we came up on our friend Bruce, who was having a very, very hard day. We rode with him for a bit, then he let us go to suffer at his own pace. A couple more riders came back to us over the next ten miles or so, but we were mostly alone, taking turns pushing down long straightaways. Somewhere in here, I downed my Red Bull, which tasted fantastic despite being quite a bit warmer than room temperature. Somewhere else, I noted that my cyclocomputer was displaying a 100-degree temperature reading. And somewhere else, I lost Joe. I turned around to see if he was okay, and he was way off my wheel.

I was feeling strangely decent – not strong, but not suffering as badly as I had at the halfway point. I could pretty easily hit 17mph on the flats, keep my speed up around 10mph on the uphill side of the rollers, and push a bit on the downhills. Honestly, though, it felt good to not pedal all the descents, and even better to collect a few more riders. With my body doing what it could, my brain turned to two endless math problems: how many miles till 102.5 – the finish line plus my 2.5-mile wrong-turn tax? And how long would it take to cover that distance if I kept the mph above 15? Slowly, the mileage ticked up over 80 and then over 90, rewarding myself every time I hit another mile by sipping my remaining water and Coke. Making the penultimate turn back onto Pleasant Grove, I could see the cemetery that is just up the road from the start/finish line and laughed at the aptness of that sight. Up a slight incline on Pleasant Grove, a left turn onto the pavement, and then a half-mile to the finish line, where I was hauling ass so fast, the race photog couldn’t even snap me! (This is not true.)
102.5

Thirty seconds later, I was lying in the grass, elated and exhausted from head
Post-Race Face

to toes.
Gravel Legs

Giddyup was just as dusty as I was, but less tired.
Giddyup at Rest

I wound up finishing in 22nd place of the 78 finishers. My friend Scott finished about 20 minutes ahead of me – a bit more time than I had taken to fix my flat. (Next year!) Joe came in a few minutes after me, and Bruce a few minutes after him, worn the hell out. Those wonderful post-race endorphins soon took hold, though, and we sat on the grass trading stories, swilling lots of water and a few beers, and eating everything we could find – including the freshly-grilled brats that Derek and Scott had waiting for us.

That these two guys were present and shaking the hand of every finisher tells you how dedicated they are to gravel racing in general and to their gravel race in particular. It’s personal in the best way, from the individualized entry-confirmation emails in August (in mine, Derek talked a little trash) and the low-key but homey pre-registration on Friday night to the way they sincerely and profusely thanked us for coming to their race and to the fact that Mrs. Derek was manning the bratwurst grill while the guys’ kids ran around.

That vibe definitely extended the endorphin rush, but when they finally wore off, the pain set it. I needed at least two days to rehydrate (despite having consumed two gallons of fluid during the race and at least that much in the eight hours afterwards), and now – three full days later – my legs are still remarkably sore. I won’t even mention that that much riding does some strange things to my, uh, digestive cycles. But really, the pain is a good thing, and anyhow it’ll be long gone before my next gravel race, the Heck of the North, on September 28. I’ll probably have forgotten almost about it by the time I roll up to the start line for the 2014 Inspiration 100 – just 361 days from now. Registration opens on July 1, 2014. My postcard is addressed, stamped, and hanging from my bulletin board.

P.S. It turns out the Inspiration includes about 3,500 feet of climbing, which compares pretty favorably to the 5,800 feet of climbing in the Almanzo, which is known as a hilly course.

Studebaked

Shannon’s parents spent a couple days with us this week to celebrate Vivi’s birthday. In the evenings, my father-in-law regaled me with stories of his recent trip in his restored 1952 Studebaker pickup truck to a Studebaker “meet” in Colorado Springs. It took him and his brother three days to get there from his home in Moorhead, Minnesota, since the pickup can only go about 55 mph. I say “about” because the vehicle lacks an odometer and a speedometer. The trip sounds like it was great, full of relatively tame adventures and lots of time talking with other Studebaker aficionados at the meet. Here’s Dad beaming in front of his beautiful truck:

Father-in-law and '52 Studebaker pickup
Father-in-law and ’52 Studebaker pickup

Lake Superior

It’s the time of the year when vacation photos are as common on your favorite social media network as photos of babies. For me, none strike a chord more than pictures of Lake Superior. We didn’t take a vacation on the big lake this year, but I hope we can next summer. It’s been too long since I’ve been up there (though I have been up there since this 1981 scene).

Summer 1981 on Lake Superior
Summer 1981 on Lake Superior

LRTrip

To give Shannon a little space to work on her book, I took Thursday off and headed up to Minneapolis with the girls, planning to ride the light rail train from the Mall of America to downtown and back, then hit the American Girl store at the mall and have lunch with a too-infrequently-seen friend. We played pretty loose with this plan, but we had a blast. The girls thought the train ride was great, shifting in a matter of minutes from sitting nervously near me

LRT Riders

to straphanging with expressions ubiquitous to any mass-transit user:

Three stations later, the girls have already assumed the postures and facial expressions of jaded lifelong riders.

Once downtown, they wanted me to point out the building in which I’d worked during my unhappy days as a corporate drone. They marveled at its height, but were disappointed that I hadn’t worked on the top floor. We got off the train and turned down a teeming sidewalk. The girls clutched my hands tighter than they had in a long time, which was gratifying. After a few minutes, we reached the Dunn Bros. coffeeshop inside the (sorta) new Hennepin County Central Library, a gorgeous space. I had some coffee while they downed their snacks and talked about all the people around us. Julia, wide eyed, whispered to me, “There are a lot of African Americans here!” True enough – at least relative to Northfield, kiddo.

Already running behind, I tried to hustle us back to the train for the return trip to the mall, but the girls were enthralled by the escalator and the glass-wall elevators, so we had to take a few trips up and down each conveyance. The escalators were especially amusing, since they really do defy normal rules about moving. Nobody fell or anything, and by the second round trip, both girls were assuredly stepping on and off. Twice in about five minutes, a passer-by asked if the girls were twins!

The second trip on the LRT went quickly and almost silently, the girls studying the scenery as we rode along. The highlight for me was the guy who didn’t even bother to rack his bicycle when he boarded the train, then hopped on the bike and rode it right off the train a few stations later, weaving uncertainly through the other passengers and down the ramp onto the sidewalk. I kept thinking he was bumped handlebar from riding right onto the third rail. Bzzzzzprt!

We found my friend and her adorable daughter right away at the mall, and browsed the American Girl store for a while before finding a food court for an enjoyably predictable meal of McDonald’s. By this time, we were well past the point at which I expected to be heading back home, but Vivi, my little Lego lover, begged to go down to the Lego Store. We played for a few minutes (and I discovered that the store is finally selling something I thought they should have been selling forever: make-your-own minifigs – 3 for $10!), then finally headed back out and home, tired from our suburban-urban excursion.

Walla Walla Pictures Pictures

Belatedly, here a few photos from last week’s grand visit to Walla Walla, where I enjoyed a fantastic conference at Whitman College, great networking socializing, excellent food and drink, and some wonderful scenery.

A view from our turboprop flight from Seattle to Walla Walla: circular fields irrigated by water drawn from some of the Columbia River’s tributaries. This shot doesn’t do justice to the oddity of perfect circles stretching as far as I could see.
On the way way to Walla Walla - desert fields irrigated with river water...

The Marcus Whitman Hotel, the tallest building in Walla Walla and a very, very nice place to stay.
Our hotel is the tallest building in Walla Walla!

One of the numerous very cool pieces of public art on the Whitman campus:
Just another cool piece of public art at Whitman...

Another, different sort of public art at Whitman:
Whitman College Totem Pole

The gorgeous little pond at the Forgotten Hills vineyard of Waters Winery, where we enjoyed a great outdoor dinner (among other activities):
More views that don't suck.

One of the banquet tables. Yes, it was this gorgeous: 75 degrees F, dry, sunny, still…
Plus also, until ten minutes ago I'd never been to a vineyard. I gotta say, I can see the appeal.

Copper Country Compare & Contrast

location – Houghton: mainland; Hancock: peninsula
personal history – Houghton: would live there (t.b.d.) ; Hancock: lived there (1987-1991)
high school mascot – Houghton: Gremlins; Hancock: Bulldogs
higher education – Houghton: Michigan Technological University; Hancock: Finlandia University
class – Houghton: white collar; Hancock: blue collar
topography – Houghton: north-facing hills; Hancock: south-facing hills
main street – Houghton: red bricks; Hancock: potholes
ambiance – Houghton: fresh paint; Hancock: new rust
representative restaurant – Houghton: Ambassador pizza; Hancock: Jim’s Pizza
representative food – Houghton: Keweenaw Brewing Co.; Hancock: Vollwerth’s sausages
bike riders – Houghton: weekend warriors on Felt road bikes; Hancock: neck-tattooed dads on BMX bikes
representative business – Houghton: bike shops; Hancock: “motorsports” dealers
ubiquitous car – Houghton: shiny Priuses; Hancock: battered F150s

Copper Country To-Dos

In our three days in the Copper Country, I want more than anything else to soak up the atmosphere – warm days, cool nights, forests, the lake, lots of stars, surprisingly cool towns – and to hang out with my mom, my sister, and her two kids.

But I also want to make sure that Julia and Genevieve get to have a few particular experiences of the Copper Country:

  • See two of the houses that I lived in – one in Ironwood, on the way north, the other in Hancock.
  • Drive over and admire the Portage Lake Lift Bridge, which is pretty amazing.
  • Walk in some real woods – not one of these little ten-acre thickets down here.
  • Enjoy the Big Lake: look at it, dip their feet in it, collect rocks (maybe even agates) created by it…
  • Eat square-cut pizza at the Ambassador in Houghton.
  • Stop at the lookout on Quincy Hill.
  • Eat pasties where they were perfected. (Sorry, Cornwall.)

No Plan B: Almanzo 100 Race Report (part I)

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!

Almanzo 100 (2011)
Almanzo 100 (2011)*

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!