Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  Although I hadn’t been able to persuade my leg to bend while walking, the act of sitting on the saddle and pressing hard on the down stroke with my good leg pushed the other one into action. The joint creaked and snapped like a rusted hinge pried open with a crowbar. I groaned in the nauseating agony of the motion, painfully chipping away every last flake of rust until a dull numbness set in.

  The air was thick and gray. I assumed that meant more rain was coming. The route quickly directed me away from town and any prospect of passing another food establishment, but I had already resigned myself to the supplies I had. Since everything in my feedbag seemed disgusting, I decided to start with the health food. I bit into the natural energy bar, which was moist and warm — surprisingly delicious. I ate another and then another as my appetite started to spark. It made sense that I was ravenously hungry. I had managed eat part of a small order of nachos since arriving in Steamboat, but I had no appetite after the Clark burrito and hadn’t been able to force down anything else. The energy deficit, unnoticed but significant, had only added to my sense of hopelessness.

  The new surge of calories filled my body with warmth and well-being just as the fog began to break up around me. At first the monotone world simply faded to a lighter shade of gray, but then genuine streaks of sunlight started to cut through the clouds. Large patches of blue sky opened up, and soon I could see distant houses, rows of crops, fences, decorated ranch entrances, and horses frolicking through green fields in the bright morning. It was a beautiful day.

  I began climbing into the heart of the Colorado Rockies. While my morning spin through the rolling Yampa River Valley had allowed my sore knee some relief, there was no hiding from the mountains. I winced with every rotation necessary to gain altitude. The trail squeezed through a narrow canyon beside the roaring Yampa River, wound around Stagecoach Reservoir on a rippled and fun stretch of singletrack, and started climbing loose gravel roads toward Lynx Pass, elevation 8,937.

  A break of any kind instantly caused my knee to stiffen up again. Still, I had to make frequent stops just to relieve the building pressure of pain brought on by climbing. The shallow shot of optimism provided by food and sunlight had already evaporated from my bloodstream. Lynx Pass wasn’t even the largest pass I planned to summit that day. There were at least three long climbs ahead before I would reach the town where I’d hoped to spend the night, Silverthorne. The map made it hard to ascertain, but I was convinced this stretch of the route would hold as much climbing as my hardest days in Montana, and I was in Colorado now, where mountains rose into high, thin altitudes. It would be a challenge if I was healthy, and a prison sentence for a knee that had no power and simply did not want to bend.

  I downshifted to my little ring and spun the pedals gently and slowly up the pass. Exit strategies churned in my head, and their prospects filled me with loathing. The next town on the map was Kremmling. I knew Kremmling was a good place to quit the Tour Divide, because that was precisely where Geoff quit the Great Divide Race the previous year. During his first day pedaling out of Steamboat Springs, he was overcome with exhaustion while approaching Lynx Pass, so he turned around and spent the rest of the day in Steamboat, trying to calm his racing heart and renew his energy. His second time out, he managed to crest Lynx Pass only to decide that his body was definitely done, burned out, worthless. He headed into Kremmling, knowing full well he was pedaling toward his failure. He booked a hotel room and spent two miserable days in town sorting out his affairs and securing transportation back to Utah. He was almost too exhausted to even board the train. Six weeks later, he was back in Juneau but still deep in the throes of recovery, running again but too sore and depressed to join me on even short bike rides. I looked toward the pass with resigned determination. I could not quit at the top of Lynx Pass. I would not drop out in Kremmling.

  The downhill coasting provided my knee some much-needed relief. I lifted my leg off the pedal and let it dangle free beneath my body, trying, even if it was just in my head, to drain out the acid from the climb and the swelling in my knee joint. I crossed the highway and turned up Rock Creek where, just around a small bluff, I approached the smiling, waving figure of another cyclist.

  The cyclist was a good friend of mine, Dave Nice. Dave was a big guy with a goofy grin, cropped blond hair, and round glasses, given to wearing cotton T-shirts, baggy shorts, and skate shoes on his long mountain bike rides. We had gotten to know each other well through the small world of the ultra-endurance mountain bike racing circuit, held together by the wide world of the Web. The month prior, I spent a few days visiting him at his home in Hurricane, Utah, where he worked at a bike shop and rode a fixed-gear mountain bike along the cactus-studded desert singletrack in the shadow of Zion National Park.

  Dave was crazier about multiday endurance racing than I was. He had attempted to race the Divide during all of the three years prior. In 2006, his bike was stolen right out from behind him as he napped next to the road. In 2007 and 2008, fatigue and injury forced him to quit in Montana. This year, he decided to try something different than the established race, and ride the route from south to north. He started at the Mexican border a week prior to the Tour Divide race and rode north into New Mexico. I had hoped I would meet him along the way.

  “Dave!” I shouted. “Dave Nice! It is so awesome to see you here!”

  “Yeah,” he said with his signature sniff. “I’ve been watching your SPOTs from my parents’ place. I’ve been meeting a lot of y’all here.”

  “From your parents’ house?” I asked. “Does that mean you’re not riding the Divide anymore?”

  “I got as far as their house,” he said. “It’s right on route a few miles from here. I got there, and I knew I was done. By then, it was too easy to stop at the house and go inside. But I’m stoked about getting that far. It’s the farthest and fastest I’ve gone on the Great Divide yet. And it was fun while it lasted.”

  “That’s awesome,” I said. “That means all you have left to see is Wyoming.”

  He shook his head. “I’m done with the Great Divide,” he said. “I’m ready to leave it behind.”

  “Really?” I asked. “After four years?”

  “It’s just too much to be going on in my head all the time,” he said. “Yeah, I’m done.”

  “Well,” I said, “to be honest, you’re not missing much with Wyoming.”

  “So do you mind if I ride with you for a while?” Dave asked.

  “Of course not!” I said. “That would be completely awesome!”

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” he said. “I have something for you.” He reached in his messenger bag and handed me a can of Coke.

  “I don’t know if I can take that,” I said. “You know, outside support and all.”

  “Did you know I was going to be here?” Dave asked. I shook my head. “Then it’s not planned support; it’s trail magic. You’re good.”

  “I know all about trail magic,” I said. “I’ve been taking trail magic in liberal doses. It’s incredibly generous out here.”

  “Yeah, people on the Great Divide are great,” Dave said. “That’s why I keep coming back.”

  We rode a few hundred yards before coming to a large stream without a bridge. I unhooked my frame bag, lifted the awkward bike on my shoulder, and started wading through the water as Dave removed his shoes. I was waist-deep in the rushing current, struggling not to teeter when I looked to my right and saw Dave skimming an ankle-deep sandbar, wheeling his bicycle to the side and laughing heartily.

  “So you can give me a Coke but you can’t tell me about that?” I called out.

  “Outside navigation,” Dave shouted back, still chuckling. “That’s against the rules!”

  We rode down the dirt road, stopping to walk our bikes through several short patches in aspen-shaded areas where the mud became to thick and deep to ride.

  “This stuff is nasty,” I said. “And it smells, too, like something rotten.”

  “You’re lucky you di
dn’t come through yesterday,” Dave said. “It rained all day. The whole road was like this. I tried to leave my parents’ house because I was going to meet Jeremy; he’s about, oh, probably about a day ahead of you. But I only made it about two miles before I decided it wasn’t worth it.”

  “Wow,” I said as I looked down and noticed a deep set of bike tracks and footprints directly beside mine. “I wonder how Jeremy fared in all that.”

  As we walked and rode, I told Dave about my bike troubles and my various knee pains. I was still feeling the pain as we rode, I told him, but the warmth of the day was helping and I was determined not to quit in Kremmling. Dave, who had an admirable viewpoint about the race and understood it was a victory just to start and make it as far as you physically could, knew exactly why I didn’t want to quit in Kremmling. I did not have to tell him. And the reason didn’t come up for several more miles.

  “Well, there you go,” Dave said as we crossed Highway 134 again, just below Gore Pass. “You have now officially traveled farther on the Divide than Geoff.”

  “Geoff quit in Kremmling,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “But he turned off the route here and took the highway shortcut into Kremmling. Now that we’re on 212, you’re officially farther.”

  “I know he took the highway,” I said. “He still went to Kremmling.”

  Dave looked up thoughtfully. “Well,” he said. “Well you started in Canada.”

  I smiled. “You’re right. I have been farther. Thanks, Dave.”

  We walked through more patches of mud and turned up the driveway to his parents’ house. Since he had already assured me of the legality of trail magic, I felt no qualms about taking him up on his offer of hot lunch, which sounded infinitely more appealing than candy bars. Instead the rather remote log home was an ultra-modern interior, shining with black and chrome amid the generous sunlight of large windows. Dave’s grandma, a petite woman in her eighties, listened to my knee story and rushed to grab a jar of blue goop.

  “This stuff cures all,” she told me. I peeled off my tights and band-aid and rubbed it across the road rash on my still-swollen knee. It stung horribly, but once the numbness set in, I realized Grandma was right. I did start to feel better.

  Dave made Spanish rice and fresh salad and Grandma plied me with brownies. “You look too thin,” she chided me. “All you bikers look too thin.”

  I rubbed more blue goop on my knee before putting on my wet socks and shoes. Dave gave me a big bear hug goodbye. “You’re going to make it to Mexico,” he said. “You’re already there.”

  “Hardly,” I said. “But I’m still hoping.”

  As I had predicted, the route rippled in a long, undulating grunt, climbing hundreds of feet in less than a half mile before dropping again. I crested the saddle of a ridge and observed an expansive redrock canyon cutting deep into the valley below. I was grateful for brand new brakes as I rocketed around tight corners through the pinion and juniper stands, plummeting more than 1,500 feet in a matter of miles.

  At the ghost town of Radium, I crossed the Colorado River. Groups of boaters were gathered at the bridge, and down the cliff-lined canyon I could see colorful rafts floating peacefully along the brick-colored water. Their movement looked so graceful, so painless, just floating on a river that, if they stuck with it, could carry them all the way to Mexico. Like the Pacific-bound droplets farther up the Continental Divide, water always finds the path of least resistance. Humans are not nearly so smart.

  As promised by my maps, the climb out of the Colorado River gorge was dusty and extreme, and it was only the beginning. The sheer canyon gradually changed from a fortress to a crevice as I rose higher. The view was spectacular, Southwestern with a hint of Rocky Mountain high.

  I crested the plateau far above the river and marveled at how normal my knee felt. It was still sore and a little numb from the blue goop, but for the first time I felt like the swelling was seeping out of the joint and being replaced by strength. I continued climbing a gradual incline when a swarm of mosquitoes found me. I had been traveling about six miles per hour when they grabbed onto the light tailwind and hovered beside me, occasionally dive-bombing in for the kill. I ramped up my speed, seven and then eight miles per hour, feeling a heavy throb move through my injured knee before fading in a burst of exhilaration. The mosquitoes surrounded me again and I accelerated to nine miles per hour, and then ten. The hill leveled out. I pedaled harder and faster, the wind streaming in my ears, the mosquitoes falling behind, until I looked back to see a spotty black cloud that had clearly given up.

  “Ha ha ha!” I called out. “Ha!” Ten miles per hour was fast enough to outrun mosquitoes. John was right.

  I coasted down the long hill with iPod music pulsing in my ears, singing out to the desert plain that was spreading out in front of me. Beneath the afternoon sunlight, I could see glimmers of white light sparkling off metal roofs in Kremmling, far below. “Wake Up” by The Arcade Fire started playing on my iPod, filling the slipstream with triumphant noise: “Children, wake up; Hold your mistakes up; Before the summer turns to dust.”

  I turned left on the pavement of Highway 9, flying toward Kremmling, a town that was actually off-route by a couple of miles. The Arcade Fire continued to sing: “Children, don’t grow up; Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up …”

  After just a couple hundred yards of pavement, I followed my maps and GPS into a hard right turn that veered away from Kremmling and rejoined the Colorado River floodplain, traveling upstream. The Arcade Fire launched into a crescendo of renewed victory and triumph: “We’re just a million little gods causing rainstorms, turning every good thing to rust. I guess we’ll just have to adjust.”

  My heart swelled to new heights, soaring above the brown river as entire southern half of the Divide opening up before me. I had officially ridden farther on the Great Divide than Geoff did, and it hit me as an enormous victory. I thought that actually arriving at the finish line of the race might feel more satisfying than that moment, but I somehow doubted it. It was perhaps the most satisfying moment of my entire endurance racing career.

  Evening fell as I continued the rolling climb, winding around the open plain of Williams Fork Reservoir before rising back into the forest among the red-tinted spruce trees of Ute Pass. As night descended, I fell steeply back to Highway 9 and motored up the gradual climb along the Blue River with the streams of white and red vehicle lights. The former mining town of Silverthorne sat at 9,000 feet. Higher than Lynx Pass and just 500 feet lower than Ute Pass, it was nearly my highest elevation of the entire long day.

  It was after 11 p.m. when I reached the center of town. I had taken a generous lunch break at Dave’s house, but I still had cranked out a seventeen-hour day during which I recovered an entire knee injury, climbed more than 10,000 feet, and traveled 130 miles, essentially fueled by Spanish rice and energy bars. And of course, every gas station and restaurant in town was closed, but as I neared Interstate 70, I could see lights on in the Wendy’s. The door was locked so I pulled up to the drive-through menu board and waited. After several minutes, a crackling teenage voice came over the intercom.

  “Um, can I help you?”

  “Are you guys still open?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said slowly.

  “Can I order something?” I asked.

  “Um, only the drive-through is open,” he said. “We only serve vehicles at the drive-through.”

  “But I don’t have a vehicle,” I said miserably. “I only have a bicycle.”

  “Uh, sorry,” he said. “It’s against our rules.”

  “Please,” I pleaded. My high-pitched voice sounded so pathetic it startled me. “I’m really hungry.”

  “Just a sec,” he said. After a minute, the voice came back on. “OK,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  Riding with my elbows on my handlebars and a huge smile on my face, I cradled my bulging paper bag and forty-four-ounce root beer a half mile back to a cheap motel
I had seen. Warm in the fleabag room, I ate cold fries and a rubbery chicken sandwich, by far the best victory meal I could imagine.

  Sunday morning arrived bright and perfect. I returned to the Wendy’s for breakfast, only to be greeted by a group of road cyclists who told me they followed the Tour Divide and knew exactly who I was. They said they were from Denver but drove out to Silverthorne to enjoy a Sunday road ride in the high country. As I pedaled beneath the interstate and connected with a series of bike paths, I realized I had returned to a world of tourists.

  Joggers and rollerblades and recreational cyclists wove around me as I made my way toward Frisco along a confusing maze of narrow bike paths. The steady stream of people became thicker as I passed through that town. I started to see large groups of women wearing pink T-shirts, pink socks and pink shorts. Some wore two balloons around their chests like an extra set of breasts. Others wore signs with hand-scrawled phrases such as, “For my mother, Sharon Hutchings” or that listed a few dozen women’s names. I had joined the tail end of a breast cancer awareness fundraising walk.

  The bike path crowd had become a full clog, but I tried not to be grumpy about it. After all, these women were raising money to fight breast cancer, a cause I enthusiastically supported. I even happened to be wearing my own breast cancer jersey — one of the two bike shirts I had brought with me was a pink Fat Cyclist jersey, an edition created to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. I slowed to a crawl and wove around the groups, saying “Nice work!” and “Good job!” as I passed. But as the miles wore on, the groups only became larger. The women wore earphones and chatted loudly and completely ignored me as I said, “On your left” or “Excuse me, do you mind if I pass?” When they didn’t move to the side of the path, I finally resorted to veering into the field, bouncing over brush and rocks as I passed. I unintentionally startled several women, who jumped and screamed so dramatically that others looked back and regarded me with glowering disdain. Did they really not hear me? Were they really that self-absorbed?