Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  I smiled at the clerk. What could I possibly tell him? That I actually wasn’t the clueless novice he took me for? That I had been using top-of-the line clipless pedals and shoes for more than a month of heavy riding already? That riding clipless meant I wasn’t in control and wasn’t comfortable, and that’s why I was there, purchasing a cheap pair of plastic pedals that I could use with my cheap running shoes as I prepared to compete in the longest mountain bike race in the world? How do you explain that?

  “No, these are all I need for today,” I said as I handed the clerk the eighteen dollars in cash. I couldn’t shake my discomfort with the fact that I was spending a mere eighteen dollars for an extremely important part that I hoped would hold up to 2,700 miles of hard riding. I wondered if I was actually making a huge mistake. But it was too late. I had already cut my hair.

  The transition from uncertainty to commitment certainly wasn’t clean. A week before the race, I still had no real plan about how I was going to travel to Banff. I looked into plane tickets to Calgary and studied the viability of riding to Banff from there, but I felt dubious. How likely was I to actually get on that plane? Or find my way out of the city? How much could I trust myself to clear all those obstacles without clamping onto the nearest excuse to pack it all in and go home? I had a feeling that just getting to the starting line might turn out to be my biggest challenge in the race, and I was not too proud to ask for help.

  I contacted a fellow racer and Internet acquaintance in Denver and asked him if I could hitch a ride to Canada. The ulterior motive was not just simple transportation, but a silent request for the moral support I was craving so badly. The company of someone else who intended to embark on this journey would keep my mind focused, and the companionship would help distract me from the tugging doubts I still wrestled when I lay awake at night.

  Chris Plesko enthusiastically welcomed me on the two-day drive north. I packed my bike and all of my gear in a single box. That box held what was, to me, the barest essentials of modern living in the Rocky Mountains in the summer: a steel-framed bicycle with a good front shock; a cushy seat and ergonomic handlebar grips for long-distance comfort; a down sleeping bag rated to thirty-two degrees; a thin air mattress to cushion against the cold ground; a water-resistant bivy sack to ward off wind and rain; a comfortable pair of large shoes that would fit the several layers of socks I hoped would cushion against frostbite cold and pain; two bicycle jerseys; two pairs of running shorts; four pairs of socks; two pairs of underwear; two sports bras; arm and leg warmers; light polar fleece pullover; waterproof nylon jacket and pants; fleece hat; thin balaclava; padded bike gloves; warm fleece gloves; helmet; headlamp; strong headlight; camera; small bike repair tools; extra batteries; satellite locator beacon; GPS unit; mp3 player; two water bladders; one water bottle; water filter; iodine tablets; sunglasses; various pain and allergy medications; and bear mace for defense against predators of both the animal and human kind.

  I questioned the necessity of all of it as I hoisted my bike box across the Denver airport. The arm-burning weight forced me to take short, swift steps for fifty feet or so before dropping the heavy box to catch my breath. I came to a single flight of stairs and struggled mightily, lifting the box with great bursts of effort a few steps, resting, and then powering up again. At the top of the stairs, my hair was drenched in sweat and my heart was racing near its maximum capacity. It was just one flight of stairs, located at the end of one small airport terminal. How was I possibly going to power this stuff across the long spine of the continent?

  Chris and his wife, Marni, welcomed me like an old friend. Chris’s bike, a sleek white singlespeed, was dialed in to the smallest details. It glistened with brand new parts as it hung from the bike stand where he had just spent several hours freshly tuning it after just a few short rides. He handed me a spreadsheet of his own gear list — everything extensively tested, accounted for and accurately weighed. I glanced over it despite a revulsion that made me feel like a kid who had just gotten a D on a spelling test only to have a friend wave his A paper in her face. Chris’ gear list resembled mine, at a base level. But there was a scientific certainty to his items, listed in precise terms and weighed down to fractions of an ounce.

  “You weigh your chapstick?” I cried out. “Your chapstick?”

  “Don’t worry, Chris is just crazy,” Marni said.

  Chris laughed. “I like to know what I’m dealing with,” he said. “Why? How much does your stuff weigh?”

  “I don’t have the slightest clue,” I said. “I don’t think I even want to know. I can tell you it weighs a lot more than yours.”

  “That’s okay,” said Chris, who had put so much time and thought into his gear that he was convinced he had reached the perfect balance between being light enough to move fast and having enough supplies to keep him going. “As long as you’re comfortable. That’s what’s important if you want to finish.”

  “I probably have too much stuff,” I said. “But, I don’t know. Even if you’re really fast, sixteen or seventeen days is still a long time to only have access to one pair of bike shorts.”

  “I’m shipping a fresh pair to myself in Salida,” Chris said, referring to a town in Colorado that was a little more than halfway through the race. “It’s going to be oh-so-sweet when I get there and put them on.”

  I laughed. “I guess the little things are worth fighting for. You’ll remember those when you’re stuck up on a mountain pass in a thunderstorm. They’ll be great motivation. “If I only make it those last two hundred miles to Salida tonight, I can change my shorts!’”

  Everybody laughed, and I was glad to be in the company of people who understood the depth of the journey ahead and were still willing to laugh about the absurdity of it. Even though every second I spent observing Chris and his meticulous preparations gave me more reasons for uncertainty, they also gave me a sense that I wasn’t completely crazy, that something of this magnitude could actually be done by real people.

  The drive north passed in a blur of gas station stops and open prairie. Chris and I scanned the snow line on the Front Range to the west. It reached all the way down to the foothills, with white-frosted trees that indicated recent snowfall.

  “It’s pretty low,” I said. “Don’t you think some of the passes are still snowed in?”

  “I think the snow’s all above 8,000 feet,” Chris said. “Most of the route in Canada and Montana is lower than that, and by the time we get this far south, maybe it will be gone.”

  “That’s a lot to melt in a week,” I said. The high peaks were covered in a solid layer of white. I tried to comfort my unease by telling myself that I had pushed my bike through a lot of snow in Alaska. But even the soft snow I had dealt with in Alaska bottomed out after a few inches on a packed trail. In the untraveled sections of the Rockies, during the melt of summer, I envisioned sinking up to my neck in slush. The urge to call it quits nibbled at the edges of my thoughts, and I tried to ignore it.

  We drove through Calgary without stopping and turned west toward a jagged wall of mountains. The Canadian Rockies loomed as though carved out of solid rock, chiseled to rugged beauty by the slow erosion of an unknowable amount of time. White and blue glaciers tumbled off the peaks into vertical waterfalls that cascaded into the green valley below. A herd of elk grazed in a field of purple flowers along the highway. After crossing nearly a thousand miles of prairie, the backdrop seemed too dramatic to be fully real — like a stage set in an old Technicolor movie.

  “This place is unreal,” I said after we drove through the gate of Banff National Park. “Seriously, it’s like someone took all a bunch of postcards and designed a mountain theme park.”

  “It is incredible,” Chris said. “And wait until you see Banff. It’s such a cool town.”

  Shortly after I had made travel arrangements with the Pleskos, a woman in Banff contacted me to tell me she knew about my race plans through my blog, and wondered if I needed a place to stay in town. Leslie and
her husband, Keith, were both outdoor fanatics who had sculpted their lives in such a way that they could live in the small national park center, work the minimal amount of time needed to support themselves, and spend the rest of their time traveling and playing in the mountains.

  Within minutes of my arrival, Keith whisked me away in his car. We wended up steep switchbacks to a hillside where I could see all of Banff. Small buildings clustered around the roaring whitewater of the Bow River, itself wedged in a narrow canyon between towering peaks. Keith talked vividly about ski touring in the winter, mountain running in the summer, riding bikes on deliciously technical trail, and, when the day started to wane, returning to the quaint town to enjoy a five-star dinner or exotic sushi afforded by the many tourism-centered luxury restaurants in town.

  “And it’s all regulated and maintained by the national park, so nothing about this is ever going to change,” Keith said. “Seriously, it’s paradise in a bubble.”

  “I don’t want to leave this place,” I said. “Maybe we can make a trade. You can ride the Divide, and I’ll take your lifestyle.”

  Keith laughed. “I’m jealous of you!” he said. “Leslie told me all about the Great Divide. It sounds like a grand adventure. I’ve traveled throughout this region and I can tell you that you’re going to see a lot of beautiful country.”

  With the exception of packing up and making last-minute adjustments, I avoided my bike for the next two days. I hiked to the top of a peak on a trail that started in Keith and Leslie’s back yard. I joined Chris and Marni for a soak in a natural hot spring. The night before the Tour Divide was set to start, Leslie and I traveled to Lake Louise, a deep turquoise body of water surrounded by glaciated slopes. We climbed a corduroy tower of a mountain and sat far above Lake Louise’s sparkling water at sunset. I felt a deep sort of warmth, something more like happiness than anything I had felt since Geoff and I left Juneau in a cloud of cold finality. I didn’t know if it was the beauty of Banff, the friendliness of people who had so recently been strangers, or the fact that I had finally made a solid decision to ride the Divide. But the reasons didn’t seem to really matter. I felt happy.

  “Feeling nervous about tomorrow?” Leslie asked as we hiked back around Lake Louise. The sun had already slipped behind the Continental Divide. I looked at my watch; there were less than twelve hours remaining until the race start.

  “Of course,” I said. “But at the same time, I feel this relief, because I’m here, and I know I’m going to try it, and now I just have to do it.”

  “That’s right,” Leslie said. “Git ’er’ done.”

  The Tour Divide organizers held a barbecue that night to allow all the racers a chance to get to know each other before we started spreading out over 2,700 miles of open road. I showed up on Leslie’s beach cruiser, wearing a cotton hoodie and jeans, and trying to look as nonchalant as possible. Of course, few people at the barbecue picked me out as one of the racers, except for those who had stumbled across my blog. A couple other racers showed up in full kit with their loaded bikes. They leaned against the outskirts of the park pavilion, appearing both intensely focused and somewhat miserable. If I was honest with myself, I felt the way they looked — knotted up with anticipation that was on the verge of exploding into a full-blown panic attack. But I wanted to be the kind of person who finished 2,700-mile races like the Tour Divide all the time like it was no big deal, so I put on my act. I nibbled on half of a hamburger as though I was watching my calories instead of carbo-loading for the biggest race of my life. I laughed about the craziness of endurance athletes with the other racers’ wives and girlfriends before admitting that I was actually one of those crazies. I met one of the two other women in the race. Cricket was a middle-aged mother from North Carolina. She looked even less like an endurance athlete than I did, small and slightly pudgy, but she projected an air of confidence that told me she had done her homework.

  The morning of the race dawned several shades of perfect. The air was completely calm. The temperature was in the high fifties, promising to rise into the seventies later that day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, not one. I hugged Keith and Leslie, mounted the loaded bike that would become my entire life for the next few weeks, and coasted down the hill to the pre-race meeting.

  Racers gathered in front of a hostel in downtown Banff. The crowd buzzed with an energy that was much more palpable than the subdued nervousness that consumed the previous night’s barbecue. Non-racers dashed in and out of a nearby building, handing off bottles of water and Power Bars. Dozens of loaded bicycles were propped against fences, laid on the sidewalk and held by racers in matching jerseys and shorts. I wore one of two outfits I had chosen for the next few weeks — a green polka-dotted jersey that had a black grease stain under one of the arms, and a pair of bike shorts I had worn during my first cross-country bicycle tour back in 2003. My only conceit was a pair of socks that I had received with my race packet before my first endurance event, the 2006 Susitna 100. They had already nearly disintegrated, but I decided I would lay them to rest somewhere on the Great Divide.

  “Hey, are you Jill?” a man near the outskirts of the crowd said as he approached me. I smiled and nodded. “Hi, I’m John,” he said.

  John Nobile was the winner of the 2008 Great Divide Race and the current record-holder on the border-to-border course. He frequently rode with Geoff in the early part of the 2008 race while Geoff was doing well, and then surged ahead when Geoff faltered. The following spring, after I broadcast my Divide aspirations online, John contacted me to discuss logistics. He took me under his expert wing and gave me advice, which mostly included meticulous calculations and specific training regimes that were only moderately useful to a flighty person such as me. But I embraced his mentorship because he was the champion. The pre-race meeting was the first time I had an opportunity to shake his hand.

  Before we could even get a few sentences in, a reporter sidled up to us and stuck a microphone in our face. He queried John about his unusual bike, which was custom designed with a fiberglass faring in the front and an aerodynamic trunk welded to the frame. John talked about his efforts to be as aerodynamic as possible, from his custom-made bike to his clothes, his aerodynamic wheels, his semi-slick tires, his clipless shoes and his shaved legs. “Everything I do is to go fast,” John said.

  Then the reporter turned to me. “What do you think of reports about snow on the first pass on Montana?” he asked.

  “I heard that, too,” I said. “Maybe it’s there and maybe it’s not. You know, snow. The secret is to hit it up early in the morning and then you can ride on top of it. But yeah, maybe you have to walk for five miles, postholing in the snow, going really slow for a while, but it’s really not the end of the world.”

  And that was the truth of it. I could worry and fret all I wanted about the future, but when it came down to it, I had no choice but to put my head down and push onward. After the reporter left, I realized I didn’t have my bear spray in my pack.

  “Shoot!” I said. “I forgot my weapon!”

  I left John and sprinted back up the hill. I breathlessly burst into my friends’ house, where Leslie already had the bear spray in her hands when I reached the living room.

  “Thanks,” I panted, gave her one more hug, and sprinted back down the hill just as the racers were rolling out from the starting line. No grand send-off, no shotgun start, just cheers from the small crowd and a stream of cyclists moving wordlessly into the wilderness.

  “By grace go I into the Great Divide,” I whispered to myself as I followed them down the trail.

  Chapter Nine

  Into the Great Divide

  It didn’t look like the first mile of a grueling 2,700-mile mountain bike race. The freeze-dried leaves of the previous autumn still littered the trail, soft and disarming. Sunlight filtered through hemlock branches and mottled the ground with abstract shadows. Bicycles sporting all manner of bags and panniers and tarp-wrapped bundles streamed past a small group of t
ourists who had probably just been out for a morning stroll. They cheered in German and snapped a photo of me as I rode by.

  Stress pumped through my blood like jet fuel and I pedaled a hard pace that I wouldn’t be able to sustain for twenty-seven miles, let alone a hundred times that. I caught up to several small clusters of cyclists, gasped a quick hello, and surged forward. After one mile, the group of forty-two racers had already significantly spread out, and eventually I found myself somewhere in the mid-pack.

  My throbbing lungs forced me to settle into an easier rhythm just as I caught up to two older men: an Italian who did not speak English, and a professor named Steve. The professor was a bald, powerfully built man in his mid to late-forties. The Italian drafted silently behind our new group of three as Steve and I talked through basic introductions: Name, place of origin, and bike set-up. Steve taught creative writing at a small college and lived with his wife in Iowa. He talked quickly, but I gathered that he had children and had ridden the Tour Divide before, but didn’t finish. He said he planned to “take it easier” this time around, and “enjoy the view.”

  As I tried to describe my gear choices, I noticed Steve had a camera mounted to his handlebars. He said he intended to film his entire ride, which he would use later as the basis for performance pieces at his college.

  “I use the footage mostly for inspiration,” he told me. “I generally do monologues, no costumes or sets. I prefer to set up the scene myself.”

  I wondered what inspiration Steve could possibly extract from hundreds of hours of gravel, mud, grass and trees, and then smiled at my delayed self-recognition as a person seeking enlightenment in the same mundane scenario. “So what kinds of images are you hoping to capture?” I asked.

  “Oh, everything,” he said. “I have the camera angled up so I can talk into it. I’m going to tell it how I’m feeling, what I’m thinking about, things like that.”