Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  The Tour Divide was to start in Banff, Alberta, about 270 miles north of the Great Divide Race start, on June 12. It had a well-publicized start list that was already numbering in the high-thirties, including two other women. The race had a friendly, welcoming Web site that offered novice encouragement and advice. It allowed cell phone use and had no time cut-offs. Unlike the secrecy-cloaked Great Divide Race, the Tour Divide offered live online tracking and commentary.

  Several of my endurance cycling acquaintances were already signed up for the Tour Divide. The advantages of that race were an opportunity for camaraderie, the earlier start date, the presence of friends and the lack of time limits. And of course there was the cell phone rule. I hated to admit it to myself, but solitude scared me more than any other aspect of the Great Divide, and the idea of even a single, unreliable, mostly useless connection with the outside world was greatly comforting.

  There was also the fact that Great Divide Race had been Geoff’s race. He wrote off the Tour Divide as a softer — if longer — version of the original and had less respect for it. This made me want to enter the Tour Divide even more. It made me feel petty to admit it to myself, but I really needed something I could make my own. As the events trickled closer, I concluded the Tour Divide was the better race for me.

  But whether to ride the Divide at all was the only decision that really mattered. I continued to invest heavily in the race. I studied maps. I purchased gear. I put in long days of training. But the more defined my leg muscles became, the more my conviction seemed to blur. Two weeks before the race start, I decided to conduct one last overnight test. I would go somewhere cold, high and fairly remote. I would bring everything I planned to use in the race, and nothing more. I would ride long and late, camp, wake up early, and ride long and late again. And, most importantly, I would embrace my solitude, cycling into the deeper depressions of my thoughts that promised to haunt me on the long tour.

  As I pored over my dog-eared and sun-faded book of Utah maps, my eyes kept stopping on the Uinta Mountains. The Uintas are Utah’s highest mountain range, largely cloaked in wilderness areas, but there were a fair number of jeep roads and four-wheeler trails snaking around the Mirror Lake Highway. If there wasn’t too much snow, I could climb as high as 11,000 feet. I decided on an overnight tour of about 200 to 250 miles on pavement and dirt, camping at high elevation.

  I started my ride in the town of Heber much later than I planned. By the time I combed through the grocery store for candy, peanut butter, dried cherries, and a cheap pair of sunglasses, it was after noon. I veered onto the busy highway and pedaled into a light headwind. Traffic ebbed as the highway passed through increasingly smaller mountain towns.

  The temperature dropped as the elevation increased. The cool air was a relief at first, but then slowly, almost imperceptibly, it crossed my discomfort threshold. As I climbed beside tall stands of pine trees, the weather started to deteriorate. Misting rain turned to harder rain, and then to sleet. I stopped to put on more layers and returned to grinding the pedals. I watched the elevation reading climb on my GPS — 8,004 feet ... 8,007 feet … 8,012 feet. Pretty soon the sleet turned to large flakes of wind-driven snow. Although I prefer snow to cold rain, I eyed the accumulating dust with nervousness. My Divide gear amounted to a water-resistant but certainly not waterproof bivy sack, a thin air mattress and single down sleeping bag with a comfort rating of thirty-two degrees. It was likely already approaching that temperature, at four in the afternoon. If I climbed up to 11,000 feet and rode trails at the cusp of timberline, what kind of weather was I going to camp in? Snowing and twenty degrees? I wasn’t properly equipped, and I had already passed the point where the road was still closed to vehicles, so I wasn’t likely to see anybody else.

  But, with the goal of education pulling me forward, I tried to push those doubts out of my mind. The snow tapered off as I climbed into the low clouds. Through the gray mist, I could see piles of last season’s snow rising like a wall next to the road. Fresh gouges had been carved in the ice on the shoulder, indicating a snowplow had been through recently, even though the road was still closed. I wondered how far the snowplow had cleared the road, and how high I’d be able to climb.

  Soon the clouds began to clear and I could see the snow-blanketed peaks of the high Uintas looming around me. My GPS indicated I was nearing 10,000 feet elevation. The roadside snow wall was nearly as high as my helmet, but the pavement remained mostly clear. The cold didn’t seem any more intense than it had an hour before, but it also didn’t feel any warmer. I passed idle machinery, and then the icy road ended in a five-foot high wall of snow.

  I had suspected that I would run into impassable snow before I reached my destination, and yet, once I was there, I remained steadfastly determined to keep moving forward without stopping. I lifted my bike onto the top of the snow wall and scrambled up to it. The surface of the crust was surprisingly solid for the last day of May, and it seemed strong enough support my wheels. I mounted the bike and pedaled as the tires dug into the snow. The cranks turned like they were clogged with rubber cement, but the bike lurched forward. I was in my lowest gear, pedaling as hard as my legs could push, and my forward motion registered about three or four miles per hour. The tire track I left behind was five inches deep, but I was pedaling. That fact alone made me feel satisfied with my progress. Although I understood the summit was ultimately out of my reach, I made the decision to continue that direction as far as my maxed-out legs would allow.

  That distance turned out to be about five-hundred yards. I let my bike tip over into the snow as I coughed up the cold air and pressed my fingers to my neck, gauging a heart rate that was approaching 190. The elevation was 10,500 feet, as good as the sub-stratosphere for a person who’d lived too long at sea level. I wheezed and gasped and smiled, because not once in that six-hour climb did I think about feeling lonely or frustrated. I felt tired, cold, and sometimes even scared — but those feelings were preferable to the disconnection and uncertainty I often wrestled with as I tossed in my warm bed at night. The climb had reduced me to simple needs, childlike wonder and instinctual decisions. It was a difficult but undeniably pleasant way to live.

  I struggled to push my bike back toward the pavement as I sank to my thighs in the snow. “This must look crazy,” I thought, “Pushing a bike through unplowed snow in a random spot on the Mirror Lake Highway.” Then again, all one has to do is shift their perspective to realize most actions can be viewed as crazy. It’s crazy, I thought, that people spend their lives in pursuit of complications such as love and wealth when they could enjoy a simple life of moving and existing — possibly the true path to happiness.

  Once I reached pavement again, I put on every last layer of clothing I had stored in my gear bags, then rocketed down the long, frigid descent. My self-adjusted brakes squealed horribly every time I squeezed the brake levers, so I let the bike fly free, much too fast to look down at my odometer, too fast to block my tears or wipe away what was becoming a steady stream of snot, too fast to even look around at the ever-blurring scenery as it changed from stark white and black, to misty gray, to the pale greens of early spring. I descended back to about 8,000 feet, and because it was still early in the day, veered off a side road I had picked out on my map and began the climb anew. What the map called a four-wheel-drive road was little more than parallel tracks through the mud, strewn with huge boulders and dotted down the center with spruce saplings that were already a couple of years old.

  I worked on the technical climb for two more hours, until the sun slipped below the horizon and I returned to snowline. My toes, which had been throbbing under the pressure of my shoes for most of the day, suddenly released an electric shock of pain. I yelled out, hopped off my bike, took of my shoe and looked for damage. The toes looked normal. But as soon as the shoe went back on, the pain came back.

  I repeated the steps with no improvement. My formerly frostbitten toes had remained extra sensitive to both cold and pressure, but
this sensation mimicked the prickly pains of thawing all over again. I wondered briefly if I had possibly refrozen my toes, but they felt warm to the touch. The skin was soft and pink. I pressed hard on my big toe. Blood quickly flushed back into the capillaries after I released my thumb, a sure sign of circulation.

  The only reason for the pain that I could surmise was my shoes. Shortly after I returned from Moab, I had acquired a proper pair of clipless bike pedals and matching shoes, because every known cycling expert and friend told me pedal connection and proper-fitting shoes were crucial for long days of riding. Otherwise, they said, I risked knee injury, technical mistakes, or worst of all, lost power. I had been riding with my new shoes and pedals for three weeks with few problems, but my rides had never been longer than five or six hours. Even during those rides, I would start to feel uncomfortable pressure on my toes toward the end. This ride was approaching eight hours. A long day in the saddle had caused my feet to swell, resulting in unworkable discomfort in my sensitive, frostbite-damaged toes. It was a disheartening development.

  I was still in the wilderness, however, and had no choice but to continue wearing the shoes and cope as well as I could. It was harder than I thought it would be. As I worked my way down the slow descent, I often had to stop and pull off the oppressive piece of plastic and leather just for a few seconds of relief. Walking around particularly large obstacles caused even more pain, and by the time I reached road level, I felt close to crippled, limping noticeably and swearing loudly every time I had to clip back into the pedal.

  I had hoped to ride into the darkness for at least an hour or two, but the pain in my toes made every pedal stroke close to unbearable. Even a direct ride back to Heber was too daunting to think about, so I limped back up the jeep road a short distance and rolled out my bivy sack in a small clearing next to the abandoned road. I took off my shoes and collected firewood around camp wearing only my socks, not really caring if they got muddy and wet. I built a roaring kindling fire and huddled over it as a layer of frost started to form on my bivy sack and bike. Fifty-foot-tall spruce trees nearly blocked out the sky, but a narrow opening revealed a spectacular wash of stars.

  The earlier storm had cleared. I remembered that I was camped in bear country, and I reluctantly put my shoes back to walk a few hundred feet up the road, where I ate a quiet, cold dinner of tuna fish, spoonfuls of peanut butter and Corn Nuts. Loneliness crept forward, but I couldn’t be bothered with it. I had below-freezing temperatures to contend with, not to mention fatigue and bears, and a three-month-old case of frostbite that was proving to be a surprisingly difficult problem.

  The next morning dawned with new warmth from the sun, rousing me from deep sleep. I blinked blankly at the treetops for several seconds before I remembered where I was. The frost on my gear had already melted to round droplets of water. I shook off my bivy sack and packed up quickly before eating my dried cherry and peanut butter breakfast over the snow-white remains of my campfire.

  When there were no other chores to complete, I slipped my shoes back on. The pain in my toes wasn’t quite as pronounced, but was definitely still there. It wasn’t enough to demand a survival ride into Heber, so I proceeded with the day’s plan. I traced several rocky jeep roads to their snow lines before turning around and traveling a few more miles down the main road. It was another long day on the pedals, and by the time I approached Heber, my toes were throbbing under the weight of more than two hundred miles of distance and 12,000 feet of climbing in a tour spanning less than thirty hours.

  Most everything about the trip went well. My lungs handled the high elevation without too much protest, and my sleeping gear warded off the low temperatures without any discomfort. I had put in two back-to-back Divide-esque days without feeling too much fatigue. The food I ate gave me good energy and didn’t cause gastrointestinal distress. My knees felt strong and my back and butt felt normal. I had even avoided the creeping loneliness that concerned me the most. But I had a new, surprisingly pressing concern — my frostbitten toes. Were they really unable to handle long days of pedaling? Toes seemed a silly thing to fret about, but I knew the level of pain I had experienced the night before was guaranteed to push me out of the Divide race in a matter of days. I couldn’t believe that my ultimately useless toes might fail me out of yet another big adventure.

  I spent that night in Heber at the house of an college friend, Anna, who was also a mutual friend of Geoff’s. I hadn’t said anything to her about our breakup, because I just wasn’t ready to deal with disbelief and pity from our longtime friends. I wasn’t sure if Geoff had said anything to her, but if he had, she mercifully did not bring it up. We sat down for a late-night snack of graham crackers and peanut butter — I didn’t tell her I was becoming tired of peanut butter — and talked about my ride. I told her about the snow, the rocky jeep trails and my great kindling fire. I didn’t talk about my toes.

  “So you feel pretty good right now?” Anna asked.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “The ride went really well.”

  “And you think you’re ready for your race?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, as much as I can be. Something like the Great Divide is so big and so long, I don’t think anyone is every truly ready for it.”

  Anna’s mouth curled into a slow, somewhat sad smile that caught me off guard. Anna was an experienced mountaineer, skier and cyclist, with more tenacity and talent than I would ever possess. But she also was the kind of person who was unfailingly positive about everything. You could tell her you planned to jump off of the Empire State Building with a hang glider you made out of coat hangers and toilet paper, and she would ask you where you planned to land. I didn’t really expect any of my friends who had any understanding of the magnitude of the race to actually believe I could do it, but if anyone was going to enthusiastically pretend they did believe it, Anna would. But instead, she just nodded. “So you’re really going to try it?”

  I leaned forward and gave Anna a solemn look. “I know that this race is going to be prohibitively hard,” I said. “And you know me. I mean, all the camping and hiking and riding we’ve done together in the past, you know me. I never really aspired to do anything extreme. For someone like me, this race is likely impossibly hard.”

  Anna’s eyes widened into an understanding gaze. “But that’s okay,” I continued. “The fact that something’s impossible has never been a good reason not to try.”

  And I realized, perhaps for the first time all summer, it was true.

  Chapter Eight

  Banff

  There are few better ways to manifest the finality of a decision than changing one’s appearance. The day after I returned from Heber, I woke up in the morning and instead of setting out on my bike in yet another directionless tangent, I drove to a salon.

  “Cut it about to here,” I said to the stylist as I slid two fingers between strands of hair just below my ears. Nearly a foot of hair fell below my imaginary chop line, as long as it had ever been. I had been pleased with my hair in my old life, but as I slowly made the mental transition to life on a bike, my mind shifted from vanity and desire to need and simplicity, and my hair became just another excess. I only needed it long enough to pull it back in an elastic band, but short enough to stave off dreadlocks if I went a few days or a week without taking a shower. As the stylist snipped away large chunks of blond and light-brown strands, I felt no emotion. I didn’t need my hair; therefore, it wasn’t part of me, and I felt no loss.

  I walked from the salon across the hot pavement of a strip mall to a shoe store. Amid stacks of running shoes, I located an inexpensive pair, size nine and a half — one size too large for me. I tried them on, found them to be sufficiently roomy for my sore toes, and purchased them.

  I walked over to a pharmacy to pick up a pill case for some of my more crucial riding aids: allergy medication, antacids, ibuprofen (or as endurance athletes like to call it, “Vitamin I”), and a powerful prescription sleeping medication, Ambien. In the
past, intense physical efforts often left me unable to sleep at night. My heart, which never seemed to get the memo that the long day had finally ended, continued to pound in my chest as my muscles processed a hefty dose of lactic acid and adrenaline. I never understood athletes who said they could easily collapse into a deep sleep after hard exercise. My experience had always been the opposite — the more physically exhausted I was, the harder it was for me to sleep. I realized that sleep was crucial to enduring the long days in the saddle on the Divide, so I turned to the powerful if dubious help of medication. After I secured my drug supply, I drove to a bike shop.

  “Do you have platform pedals?” I asked the clerk.

  “Excuse me?” the clerk looked almost suspicious.

  “Platform pedals,” I said. “You know, flats.”

  “Um, we do,” he said. He took me to the very back corner of the store, away from the area where a wide selection of clipless pedals were displayed, and pointed to a single pair of cheap-looking pedals hanging from a wall.

  “These are all we have,” he said.

  I looked at the price — cheaper than I had even expected — and frowned. “Really? These are it?”

  “That’s it,” he said. “If you’re thinking about becoming more serious about riding, you should really think about going clipless. You’ll have a lot more control; a lot more power. You’ll be more comfortable. If you want, you can try on some shoes and I’ll give you a demonstration.”