Land Run 100 and Beckett's 'How It Is'

The Land Run 100 is a gravel race that starts and ends in front of District Bicycles in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

How It Is is a novel by the French writer Samuel Beckett, in which a man crawls through endless mud and can hear only his own panting.

Stillwater, Oklahoma is home to Oklahoma State University, where the works of Samuel Beckett are studied (I assume).

The red soil of Oklahoma is so rich in character that it inspired a musical genre and is never ever going to wash out of my tights.

District Bicycles is owned by Crystal and Bobby, two of the most delightful people you're likely to meet.

Here's an example of the distinct and unusual voice of Samuel Beckett's How It Is:

"other certainties the mud the dark I recapitulate the sack the tins the mud the dark the silence the solitude nothing else for the moment"

I mention these things because I recently participated in the Land Run 100. It was a day unlike any other in my life but not unlike reading How It Is. It was muck and ooze to an order that's difficult to describe. It was so muddy that my memories seem hyperbolic. Photographs show they are not. There were at least four different kinds of mud. None of these were "fast mud."

It was intense, it was preposterous, and it may have changed the way I think.

My relationship with endurance events is love/hate, as is my relationship with travel. The drive to Oklahoma is long and boring, and the forecast for Saturday was a 100% chance of rain. However, I was past the point of cancelling my hotel reservation, so I loaded up with snacks and podcasts and ventured east.

After I arrived I discovered that the hotel had gone out of business and had taken my reservation with it. Well, whatever. I didn't have enough podcasts to get me back home. Once I found another hotel and a place to eat, I wrote a single sentence in my notebook. "This was a bad idea." Whether that refers to traveling to Oklahoma, signing up for another endurance event, or ordering waffle fry nachos from the late-night bar menu is anyone's guess.

The day before the race there was a no-drop, twenty-mile group ride. Living near the mountains and several trail networks, it has often been tough for me to understand what draws people to dirt roads, but they are empty and wild and sunny and take you past fields of perplexed cows and silos painted red, white, and blue, and you feel that you yourself are made simpler by this simple place. I'm no plainiac, but it was quite pleasant.

I awoke to the sound of rain on Saturday morning. It's tough to pin down why, exactly, I did not want to ride, but I found a supply of excuses. I thought I was getting sick (there were symptoms, but they disappeared), and I hadn't ridden a singlespeed in a long time, and I wasn't sure I had the right clothing, and ad nauseam. I thought about getting in the car and driving home.

As I pulled on my jersey I formulated escape plans: if it rains for an hour I'll turn around. I'll quit at the halfway point. If I'm cold after the first ten miles I'll call SAG.

Clearly I can't decipher my own mind. I signed up for an event and made tedious preparations and drove to Oklahoma and then labored to talk myself out of it.

The rain let up for the start. Nobody was fooled.

You can see my Straggler in this photo, left. Someday I will write Surly a love letter about it. 

Before firing the cannon, Bobby had some words for us. Because I am a cynic, I heard him out and thought about how nice it would be if what he said were actually true. Because I am a cynic, I make a lazy connection between inspiration--a word that means 'to blow into'--and hot air. Bobby is really good at inspiration. What he said was stirring. But I'm really good at being a cynic, and talk is cheap and saying you can do a thing is no guarantee.

Whatever. He said his thing and we put our hands in the air:

We rode a little pavement to get out of town, but soon hit dirt. It was not bad. It hadn't rained all that much. The temperature was forty degrees--as it would remain--but the riding was pleasant. 

It began to rain. 

The roads were wet but in no way an indication of what was to come. I stopped to adjust some clothing and learned an important lesson about wet gloves with integrated liners. The integrated liner pulls halfway out when a wet hand is withdrawn, and wadding a wet hand into a wet liner and getting that mess sorted out inside a wet shell is nearly impossible. You might as well try to pull on socks that are tied together. Separate liners would've been much better.

"centuries I can see me quite tiny the same as now more or less only tinier quite tiny no more objects no more food and I live the air sustains me the mud I live on"

I'm guessing it was around mile twenty where we got our first real, literal taste of the terrain to come. At the crest of a hill the road turned the color of Mars, and we descended through wet cement. It was squirrelly. Climbing the subsequent roller was mixing cake batter with a bicycle. This was where I first saw a rider carrying a bike with the derailleur dangling from the chain like a pendant. I saw perhaps fifty iterations of this throughout the day. 

"I turn on my side which side the left it's preferable throw the right hand forward bend the right knee these joints are working the fingers sink the toes sink in the slime these are my holds too strong slime is too strong holds is too strong I say it as I hear it"

I was unable to take a lot of photographs. Initially it was too wet for me to fish my phone out of its baggie and then worm my hand back into a wet glove. Eventually I couldn't really operate my hands at all. However, this picture I took accidentally shows the benefits offered by narrow and fairly slick tires. This is about as muddy as they got.

Compare that to other tires:

"the tongue gets clogged with mud that can happen too only one remedy then pull it in and suck it swallow the mud or spit it out it's one or the other and question is it nourishing and vistas last a moment with that"

The road became packed gravel once more. It felt like we should be nearing the halfway point when I asked another rider how far we'd gone. He wiped the mud from his glasses and from his Garmin and verified that we'd come twenty-seven miles. About halfway to halfway.

Despair.

I couldn't navigate back to Stillwater without cell service. I couldn't face turning around. My hands were too cold to loosen the clasp on my snack bag, so I stopped on a bridge to eat. This is where everything changed.

I had been wearing the glasses with clear lenses that I always wear when riding, and though I tried to clean them the mud was greasy and I hadn't a scrap of clothing to wipe them on that wasn't also muddy. I stuffed the glasses in a bag. I cannot explain the abruptness with which clarity settled.

There was a tent on the riverbank (barely visible to the right of the bridge, above). A torn and soiled tent, a dog, a shovel, and a cooler. Likely these were the sum of someone's assets. The dog--seated to calmly survey the passage of hundreds of humans aboard strange devices--did not mind the rain.

"we are if I may believe the colours that deck the emerald grass if I may believe them we are old dream of flowers and seasons we are in April or in May and certain accessories if I may believe them white rails a grandstand colour of old rose we are on a racecourse in April or in May"

The above photograph, taken through a wet baggie, doesn't do the landscape justice. The water was translucent, and I could see ripples in the sand of the river bottom, which were purple and aqua in the strange light. With my glasses on, everything had been reddish-brown or brownish-red.

My Honey Stinger chews had become a single, firm clump, and as I sat there trying to dislodge a chew so that I might eat it I began to regard my general preference for being warm and dry as a meaningless preference. Skin is waterproof. Hypothermia wasn't going to be an issue, so what was, exactly, the issue?

There were a hundred very good reasons to stop riding, from broken derailleurs to illness to insufficient clothing to ninety-seven other things. Nobody who DNF'd should feel bad--that's not what I suggest. I, however, recognized I had no good reason to stop. At the end of the day, my story would come down to the narrative that I was telling myself. Indeed, this is cliché--mind over matter, etc. That doesn't make it less true. It took these clichés--a bridge, a clarity of vision--to prove that what Bobby had said to us was correct. My doubt was my greatest obstacle.

The mind is weak; the flesh is pretty strong, actually.

So I continued, attentive to my surroundings. Purple bushes were in flower. Green fields were resplendently sodden. Thrice I saw smoke rising in the distance and smelled burning wet willow, which is a smell that took me back to a place and time I'm not sure I'd visited in the first place. Gloomy is a word employed for days like these, but it's just a word. The world is sometimes dry and sometimes wet. Exchange the world gloomy for serene or lustrous and the entire narrative changes.

These were new.

The sand had eaten away my brakes by mile thirty, which made for some really exciting descents.

A party was going down at the halfway point, but I stopped only long enough to do two things: adjust my brakes and eat a burrito, only one of which had an effect.

There were several miles of pavement leading into and out of Guthrie, and by the time I hit dirt again, the character of the mud had changed. It had grown mean. Ruts were deep. Clots of mud were flung by my rear wheel up over my head to rain down in front of me to be run over and flung up again.

In the days before the event, my friend Tobie from blackriver and my friend Joe from J.Paks had recommended a singlespeed with slick tires should there be mud, and their advice played a huge part in my being able to finish. There was a fifteen mile stretch where every half-mile I passed some poor rider--all of them brown, all of them bent over their derailleurs in the exact same way. It was like playing Excitebike and looping through the same graphic every few seconds. I don't have the willpower to ride a geared bike and not shift it, so here again it was a few words that changed my day (thanks, Tobie and Joe).

And yet here language is going to fail me. These last miles I cannot describe. The varieties of mud. The relentless rolling road. A motion outside of time.

"you are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it's one you are there no more alive no more then again you are there again alive again it wasn't over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another"

Inconsequentially, it stopped raining. Every few minutes I wiggled my fingers, and if I could feel them I continued. When I wiggled my fingers and couldn't feel them, I bit them, and if I could feel the bite I continued. When I bit my fingers and couldn't feel them, I stopped and put my hands in my armpits until I could feel them, and then I continued. I otherwise felt fine.

"for number 814336 as we have seen by the time he reaches number 814337 has long since forgotten all he ever knew of number 814335 as completely as though he had never been and by the time number 814335 reaches him as we have also seen has long since forgotten all he ever knew of number 814337 vast stretch of time"

Some argue that How It Is is about a form struggling to emerge from formlessness--a character speaking himself into existence. To one degree or another, that was my race.

These stories I tell myself about who I am, which of them are fictions?

I am not a person who does things like this. But I am. How does one reconcile the narratives in their head with what's real? By testing those narratives, I suppose. It's shattering when a discrepancy is revealed--you do not know upon whom you look when you look in a mirror. It's shattering for a cynic to admit that an enthusiast was right. You were right, Bobby. Thank you.

James Gaan

"and if it may seem strange that without food to sustain us we can drag ourselves thus by the mere grace of our united net sufferings from west to east towards an inexistent peace we are invited kindly to consider that for the likes of us and no matter how we are recounted there is more nourishment in a cry nay a sigh torn from one whose only good is silence or in speech extorted from one at last delivered from its use than sardines can ever offer"

*See some better photos of this event by 214 Photography and James Gann. Search #landrun100 on Instagram.

A Trip to the Fatbike World Championships in Crested Butte

Jason from Clif Bar took this photo of your friendly neighborhood Yawp! Owl.

Ordinarily when someone tries to charge me for riding my bike, instead of opening my wallet I open my mouth to complain. Bikes are already expensive, and racing isn't terribly exciting for those of us at the back. I typically prefer to ride alone or with a few friends at a leisurely (and free) pace. However, because fatbikes are a little ridiculous in a way I fully support, and Crested Butte is one of my favorite places, I decided to check it out. I'm glad I did.

I was accompanied by my trail partner and life buddy Rebecca, and we arrived in Crested Butte on Friday night at exactly pizza-thirty. Reports of heavy snow in the area were not fake news. 

The forecast was calling for temperatures around 20 degrees during Saturday's race. It was -16 when we woke up and I never saw the thermometer climb into double digits. It didn't seem like the best weather for bike riding, but it was great weather for drinking coffee next to a window.

Perhaps this 14" pancake explains side-stitch I had later.

This may be the first time I've ever seen something "safe for work" trampled out in the snow.

The course was out in the open and unbelievably gorgeous. I tried to take some pictures, but my phone was in my pocket and I somehow got sweat all up inside my phone's case (though I'm sure I wasn't sweating), and thus I couldn't swipe over to the camera. After you finish looking at Chad's suit, look beyond him to get an idea of the kind of Rocky Mountain meadow we rode through:

Photo: Rebecca

Despite the temperature there were some bare legs:

Photo: Rebecca

The course had been groomed by snowcat. It was a little soft on the periphery, but in the center it was quite fast. The abacus zip-tied to my handlebars on which I calculate my average speed was frozen, but still I maintain that the trail was quite fast.

I've ridden bikes in the snow a fair amount and haven't had issues with frozen water before, but on Saturday my water was frozen before we left the starting line. It turns out that riding 18 miles in the cold without hydration isn't really a problem (the whiskey handups were key).

I don't think I've been involved in a race that felt more like a group ride. Participants were great to one another. It's a real joy to get out on the bike in the middle of winter, and that joy is what the event captures and promotes.

Steve somehow gets some sprinting done on a fatty.

Photo: Rebecca

On Sunday, we got to take our bikes up the mountain the easy way. It was a little bit warmer, and it's unclear whether it was the weather or the free beer that motivated Rebecca to suit up and hoist her Surly Wednesday onto the lift, but there she is.

Greg often has just one wheel on the ground.

At first, there was only one singletrack run open for us, and it was deep and sloppy and rutted, and one couldn't help but do this about every seven feet:

See?

It was silly in the best way, like playing in the snow as a kid. It was an exercise in being upside-down with snow in your pants and getting to laugh with other people who also have snow in their pants. After a couple of hours we were too destroyed to continue.

Now, if only somebody would hold Hot Tub Worlds on the same weekend.

Adventure Lab 2017

Most of the time it's better to ride bikes than to talk about riding bikes. Occasionally, though, and especially when it's cold outside, it's kind of nice to sit down with a bunch of friends and a few beers and talk about riding bikes. 

Earlier in January, a few folks headed up to Yawp! and we did just that. Our friends Tiffany, Kristen, and Joe were kind enough to share some photographs and regale us with accounts of bikepacking trips past.

Rather than try to recount their adventures second hand, I'm just going to post their routes and some of my favorite pictures from their presentations. If you want to chat with them about their bikes or their routes, I'm betting they'll be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Tiffany followed the Great Divide route through Colorado on her Surly ECR. She had never bikepacked before, and decided to set out on her own for a week. Here's some of what she saw:

These were the only other two people she saw on bikes that week, and they were on ECR's, too.

If you see Tiffany around town (and you will--she rides through it every day) give her a high five.

Kristen and Joe have done a lot of bikepacking in this country and others. You make know Joe as the man behind J.Paks. (If you don't think you've heard of J.Paks before, you actually have! Scroll back up and look more closely at Tiffany's framebag.) Last summer they took two weeks and rode the Colorado Trail in its entirety. 

It was a real treat to have these folks share their stories with us. It's our hope that if you came to the Adventure Lab and heard their stories, or even if you simply enjoyed their photographs, you'll spend less time talking about the adventures you want to have and spend more time having them.

Fat Biking and the Problem with Type 1 Fun

Humans like knowing what to expect. I was recently talking to my friend Chris at Call to Arms, and he said a brewery has to offer a few beers consistently, year-round. People like trying new beers, but most of them need to know that they can count on the availability of a certain beer before they'll become a taproom regular.

An adventure is by definition an unusual experience, which means we sometimes won't like what we get. Snapping your handlebars in the middle of the Colorado Trail is for sure an adventure, but it sucks. Like beer drinkers, cyclists like to take certain things for granted--that their bike won't break--while being open to a certain amount of unusual experience.

Two friends and I recently rode fatbikes near Ward, Colorado because, you know, adventure.

I almost never make it up to the trails around Ward. I once spent a week near Ward on an adventure of another sort. My rural high school sent five of us from a Leadership class to a weeklong camp that we thought was a Leadership Camp. It was instead a retreat for urban teenage gang affiliates and other troubled or homeless kids. For an introverted, dorky kid who liked to read, solve crosswords, and listen to Sting, staying in a dormitory where there was knife-throwing, bicep-measuring, and a lot of Insane Clown Posse was perhaps the most unusual experience. 

That is probably a story for another time.

Fatbiking lends itself to adventure because conditions are constantly changing. No two days are quite the same temperature, and snow forms an endless number of surfaces, textures, and consistencies.

It was busy for a Monday, and to our surprise we were the only people on bikes. Perhaps this should've been a clue.

We emerged from our heated vehicle with warm fingers and toes, but by the time we situated our gear and set our tire pressure--which required removing gloves and applying pliers to frozen valve stems--we were cold. Because the stoke was high and the day was young, this didn't much matter to us. We assumed that once we got moving we'd warm up. That was mostly true.

Yukon Cornelius: the greatest prospector in the north!

Conditions were strange and the going was slow. New snow had obscured the packed trail underneath, so it was difficult to get moving, difficult to stay moving, and once moving was easy to bust through the crust and sink up to the axles and fly off the bike and make a fatbiker's snow angel, which is a special version of the snow angel that resembles the silhouette of an angel that someone dropped a piano onto. Despite the slow going, there were extended, pleasant interludes of real actual bike riding.

We followed the road for awhile, which involved some walking and falling down. Then we tried singletrack, which involved constant walking and falling down. Here is where we encountered the problem with Type 1 fun, which is the type of fun we'd set out to have without discussing it or even thinking about it. On a day ride like this, Type 1 fun is simply what a person expects.

If you aren't familiar with the different Types of Fun, here's a brief explanation. 

Type 1 fun is simply "fun."

Type 2 fun happens often in cycling--it's not fun until you get to reflect upon the experience (or brag about it if that's your MO) after the fact.

Type 3 fun is an expedition you barely survive. It's not even fun, later, to reflect upon how you lost all those toes. Then there's Type 0, which is fun at the time but not fun to think about later (tequila).

Type 4 is where you deconstruct the paradigm of fun and conclude that the notion of fun is meaningless.

Some people argue that Types 1.5 and 2.5 exist. Having such an abundance of fun that it must be classified and qualified and hairs must be split about it seems a little bougie to me, not to mention a Type of analytical anti-fun in itself. However, I'm going to try to make a point about Type 1 fun here in a minute, so let's take a breather and look at a picture for a minute.

The problem with (some) fatbiking and Type 1 fun is that fatbiking is often strenuous in a way the other kinds of cycling are not. Yes, pedaling through deep snow is strenuous in the good old-fashioned, calorie-nuking way. However, you sometimes have to deal with "unusual experiences."

Simply mounting your bike and making it move forward can be difficult. Really difficult. It often takes 5-10 attempts to get rolling. The foot you have on the ground may sink into the snow or slip, causing you to topple. Because your gearing is so small, one-quarter of a pedal stoke is enough to move the bike forward about an inch, so you have to hop on and immediately get your feet going like Scooby-Doo's. Once you mount the bike and get your feet going, your rear wheel may dig straight down instead of rolling forward. Either wheel may slip off the packed trail into the powdery abyss. You often have to ride with your front wheel turned sideways like a plow while you fight for balance and traction, and that can at any moment throw you into the woods.

If that sounds frustrating and exhausting, it is, and frustration and exhaustion are the two supports upon which the bridge between Types 1 and 2 fun is built.

The Fatbike Paradox: they stay upright until you ride them.

It took us something like two and a half hours to ride five miles. We pushed our bikes a lot. We sank into snow up to our waists. I probably threw my leg over the toptube 200-300 times. Was it Type 2 fun?

Only open seasonally for Type 2's.

Motor boat, snowtor boat.

But here's the thing: this ride was Type 1 fun--it just didn't take the shape of the fun we expected. It's like buying a bag of cookies you think are chocolate chip but are actually macaroons. You might be upset because you wanted chocolate chip cookies and don't have them, but odds are the macaroons are good, too, if you can get around your expectation to taste the cookie in your hand. What could be bad about riding through country like this, even if we rode 20 feet at a time?

Cue the piano:

Chad rides a Twreck! Har-d har.

Cornelius finds more silver than gold.

"An adventure" is not something I knew I was having when I was curled up on my bunk at the "hoods in the woods" camp I had expected to be something else. I learned invaluable lessons during that week that I never would've learned playing icebreaker games at a leadership camp. Perhaps this is proof that the best of adventures can be simultaneously disappointing and epiphanic.

That was what is known as Type 2 philosophizing, or Type 4 BS.

In the end, we survived, we had fun, we had coffee. Whatever kind of fun it was, it was the right kind.

*By the way, if you didn't already know the Surly Ice Cream Truck is a Type of Fun all its own (Type 5"), you can read more about it here.

**And if you're curious about what fatbiking is like when it's regular ol' fun type fun, read this.

***Chad also wrote about our ride. Check it out on the blackriver website.

Yawp! Company Vs. the Whale*

Call us the Yawp! Company. Some weeks ago--never mind how long precisely--having nothing on our schedles and little or nothing to interest us in Colorado, we thought we might shuttle about a little in a van and see the sandstoney part of the world. It is a way we have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever we find ourselves growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in our souls; whenever we find ourselves involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and passing more hours in front of teevees than miles on a bicycles, we account it high time to get to Moab as soon as we can.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all our curiosity. 

We always go to sea as sailors because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. 

Thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the quarter-deck.

The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage them, the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a vacant sea. 

It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. 

The whale now lay at a little distance, vertically thrusting his head up and down in the billows as he leaned to the push--the now rising swells with all their confluent waves.

If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a different object.

"No bones broken, sir, I do hope," came Stubb's honest remark.

"Breech!"

Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.

But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all the while, drew nigh to him where he lay and took him by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine. 

The helmsman who steered that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw.

He was one of that crew, his shouts had gone up with the rest, his oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger he shouted and more did he hammer and clench his oath.

*All of this text is either stollen directly from Melville or stollen and then mutilated. Why? Because one of the trails we rode is called Captain Ahab, and I don't believe a gag can go on too long.