I dropped my bike off at Joe “Lojack” Rosenhauer’s house Wednesday night and secured it and Joe’s bike to his homemade bike rack inside the cap of his pickup truck. Then we “installed” Doug “Rhino” Jones’ homemade bike rack at the rear of the pickup bed so that we could secure Doug’s and Craig “Chief” Drozd’s bikes on Thursday morning.
I arrived at Joe’s before 5 AM Thursday and stowed my clothes and bike bag with Joe’s in the pickup bed. Craig “Chief” Drozd showed up a few minutes later and we secured his bike and stowed his stuff as well, then we went into Joe’s house to wait for Doug “Rhino” Jones. At 5:15 AM I called Doug and asked him where he was. He said he was putting his stuff in the pickup bed of Joe’s truck and was wondering where the heck we were!!! Sneaky guy, we hadn’t heard or seen him pull into the driveway! When we met him in the driveway he didn’t look too good. He was moving stiffly and had a neck brace on!! He told us that since modern medicine had failed to heal his pinched nerve, which was causing him great pain in his neck and right arm and hand, he had decided to go to a chiropractor on Wednesday as a last ditch effort to be able to ride on Saturday. He heard bad news “Boy are you screwed up”, good news “We can fix you”, bad news “It will take awhile”, really bad news “No you can’t ride your mountain bike, or play golf, anytime soon”. So like the Six Million Dollar Man, he can be fixed, just not in time to ride in the Chequamegon Fat Tire Festival 40 mile mountain bike race on Saturday. He is definitely not riding because he didn’t bring his bike, however he is going to take photos and drive Joe's truck to drop us off and pick us up and provide plenty of support and helpful advice (at least Joe and I think it is helpful but the way he and Craig grin sometimes we don’t know if he/they are being truthful or are pulling our legs). It took us just under 12 hours to drive to Hayward Wisconsin, and by us I mean it was Joe and Doug who did the driving while Craig and I sat in the back seat. Craig and I, being taller than Joe and Doug, figured it would be in our best interest to drive home so we have more leg room after the race! We had lunch at the Dogpatch diner somewhere in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It started raining about the time we got to Wisconsin but we hoped it would clear out by Saturday so we wouldn't be riding in the rain. We had dinner at the original Famous Dave's, a rib place in Hayward Wisconsin that is a pre-race ritual for Craig and Doug, and it was excellent.
Friday morning it quit raining so we went out for a hearty breakfast at Perkins and then we went for a “warm up” ride to loosen up our legs and so Joe and I could get a firsthand look at the race course. Joe and I were thinking about 5-6 miles would be good but we ended up going almost 12 miles. It was actually a blessing in disguise as I determined that I needed to make some adjustments to my shifters and seat and Joe and I were able to put our familiarity of the first quarter of the race course to good use and avoid several nasty crashes that occurred in that section during the actual race the following day!!! Then we went site seeing. We stopped at a bike store where the Specialized bike company was having factory demo rides. Craig listened very intently to a factory rep tell all about a hot new bike coming out in the fall, all the cool features, carbon fiber super light weight, etc, right up to the point where he revealed the suggested retail price of $8,800, then he walked away!!! Doug was kind enough to let me buy the last “goo” bottle since he wasn’t riding and it was in my price range of $3. It was a miniature five ounce water bottle that you put your “goo” packs (energy gel) into to make it easier to eat them instead of trying to open a foil pouch and squeeze it into your mouth while riding. I know that if I were to try to open a foil pouch and squeeze the contents into my mouth while I was riding it would certainly be followed by dirt, rocks, grass or trees when I crashed!!! However, since I haven’t practiced using a water bottle (I use a hydration backpack that has a bladder with a long hose to make it easy for me to drink and still keep both hands on the handlebar) I could still manage to crash while getting the “goo” bottle and putting it back, so I knew I would have to be careful. Craig had been looking at a really nice Cannondale tandem mountain bike so he could take his wife riding but I talked him into getting a nice set of replaceable lens sunglasses instead, saving him a lot of money—and his marriage!!! Then at a different store, both Joe and Doug couldn’t resist buying their own “goo” bottles with a Velcro “holster” so they could mount it in easy reach instead of putting it in a rear shirt pocket like I was going to have to do. Of course theirs were four times as expensive as mine and were therefore out of my price range!
We went to the ski lodge to pick up our registration packages and it was quite a sight, vehicles everywhere with bikes attached to them, even a motorcycle with a bike mounted slightly behind but parallel to the rider!!! We saw short people, tall people, skinny people, fat people, young people, old people, and all kinds of people but most importantly, bike people!!! Doug found a pair of those replaceable lens sunglasses like Craig’s, but in the color that Doug wanted and so he bought them as well. Then we went to Coop’s for our pre-race meal, evidently another one of those rituals like Famous Dave’s that Craig and Doug have since they have done this race multiple times before.
Saturday morning we had instant oatmeal in our rooms, another ritual, and stocked up on “goo” and energy bars and I struggled to empty my frozen Gatorades into my hydration pack bladder but boy was it worth it to have 70 ounces of cold drink on the ride!!! Doug drove Joe and me to the start line in town but Craig opted to ride his bike there as a warm up ride. Incredibly there were literally hundreds and hundreds of bikes upside down lining the street (holding their places in the line) which made for an odd sight to see all of those wheels wrong side up!!! We went to the rear of the line and hooked up with Craig who was in front of about 50 riders but by the time an hour passed and it was almost time to start the race there a lot more people behind us even because there were over 1700 riders lined up behind the start line!!! Doug warned us to be very careful at the start because everyone would surge forward and stop several times and it would be easy to get involved in a needless crash, that and to watch out for the cement landscape planter in the middle road!! Since the entire road is closed for the bikers evidently people crash trying to avoid the planter when the stream of bikers try to pass to either side of it and crowd the rest of the riders up on the curbs!! Sure enough after the gun sounded we had two surges before we really got going and sure enough two guys did crash in front of me, getting a handlebar stuck in the wheel spokes and caused me to get separated from Craig and Joe. During the 3 miles of paved road riding I caught up to Joe and we passed two more crashes, one of them was a tandem and one of the riders looked to have been injured badly (after the race we were told that there was also a big high speed crash at the front of the race and I saw one picture of a guy that had ripped half his shorts off along with all the skin!) so Joe and I were keeping our distance from everyone to stay safe. When we left the paved road and “dropped in” (through the ditch, down a hill, and then up a hill) to “Rosie’s” field, which was a really hilly really large hay field that had been cut down to about six inches, the speed dropped dramatically as the rolling resistance increased due to the prickly hay stalks, and sure enough there were a number of people fixing flat tires already. Due to our pre-ride on Friday, Craig, Joe and I knew that there was an invisible ditch at the bottom of a big hill on the other side of Rosie’s field before we entered the cross country ski trails. Remember that familiarity I talked about earlier? Wow did it come in handy. We were riding all out at over 20 miles an hour when we hit that ditch at the bottom of the hill but the guy three bikes to my left didn’t see it or didn’t know it was there and he looked like those western movies where the rider gets thrown at a full gallop as his horse is shot out from under him. His bike went to the right (I avoided it) and he pin wheeled into the ground as hundreds of riders behind him yelled “Rider Down” in order to alert everyone so as to try not to crash into him themselves. It was a spectacular crash!!! There wasn’t anything anyone could do to try to stop and help him as that would cause even more crashes, besides, there were paramedics in the field that would probably get to him pretty quickly.
I caught up to Joe after a couple of hills and then I passed him but I was pretty sure that Craig was in the lead. Then Joe caught up to me after couple of more hills and then passed me and I never saw him or Craig again during the rest of 32 or so miles left!!! Joe and I were wearing walkie talkies so we could tell Doug when we were coming up on the second food/aid station 16 miles into the race so he could take action photos of us. Craig didn’t want to carry the extra weight because he thought it would slow him down, that and he was planning on listening to inspirational music on his MP3 Player (he told us after the race that it quit working at the start of the race, bummer!)!! The walkie talkies have a range of about two miles and I started calling Doug about two miles before the food/aid station but didn’t hear him and didn’t hear Joe so I figured the range was limited in the woods, that or I wasn’t anywhere near either of them! When Doug finally answered I was less than a mile away he told me that Joe was only three minutes ahead of me but that he had “lost” his walkie talkie on a big bumpy downhill when it flew off of his hydration pack. “Lost”? I think he tossed it aside to save the weight to try to catch Craig!!! A hundred dollar walkie talkie!!! Okay, I’m stretching it there, it was about $25 years ago and you can probably get them for $10 dollars now but at this point I am the only one carrying “all” that extra weight!!! What Joe and I didn’t know at the time was that Craig was actually behind us at that point of the race because just a few minutes after I went past Doug, he saw Craig coming up the hill!!! When Doug told Craig that both Joe and I were ahead of him, well I can’t print his answer but Doug thought it was pretty funny!!
Man, we went up and down (more ups than downs—go figure) on cross country ski hills, part of the famous American Birkebiener Ski Trail, and logging roads, and two tracks, and sand pits, and one lane roads, and lots and lots of slippery grass, mud and mud puddles and it started raining about half way into the race. I got to a flat section of a rutted gravel road just as a emergency vehicle caught me from behind and I spotted a guy lying on the side of the road with no shirt on holding his right arm. As the paramedics got out they asked him how he was and he said he felt fine but that he thought he broke his arm or collar bone. Felt fine? Why? Because he knew he wasn’t going to have to ride another 20 miles to the finish!!! Later on in the race a guy went to my left to pass me on a big dry spot as I rode through the center of a mud puddle but I guess he wasn’t paying attention while he was trying to get a “goo” pack from his rear shirt pocket and didn’t see the big rock he was about to hit. You know those football highlights where the receiver jumps in the air, makes the catch but gets hits and spins around in a circle while parallel to ground and then hits hard? Picture that as his bike careened to the right (I avoided it again!) and he spun off into the trees on the left!!! I sneaked a look back and saw him climbing back out of the woods to retrieve his bike, so see, it is dangerous trying to refuel while riding!!!
Then, with about 12 miles to go I went on “Fire Tower Hill”, an old rutted, one lane Jeep trail up over 220 feet on several climbs through the woods to the top of a “hill” that used to be a forest fire lookout station. I didn’t even hesitate after I saw the guy in front of me run out of steam go sideways and fall over and then flip over in a big crash, I dismounted and walked up the steep parts. I remounted and rode each of the five (I think) flat sections but dismounted for every steep section and walked. I’m not too proud to admit that after my last big crash I learned my lesson, better to walk and not crash so you can ride again rather than crash and have to walk the rest of the way!!!! I ran out of Gatorade in my hydration pack on the way up the hill so I stopped at the top and had a volunteer add a bottle of water to my hydration pack so I didn’t have to take it off. I had been getting about three cups of water at each food/aid station but I had been dumping them through the vents in my helmet to cool me down, otherwise I might have had enough liquid in the bladder to make it to the finish.
There was a series of down hills after the “Fire Tower Hill” where a couple on a tandem almost ran me into the woods during a sharp turn when they cut inside of me, then it was back into the Birkebeiners and finally a climb to the top of the ski slope for a big downhill finish. I only had 1.5 miles left to go and was on one of the steep Birkebeiners when my left hamstring cramped up, if felt like the muscle had torn away from the bone and was curling up, I heard that thing happens to football players but I had never had a cramp like that before. It happened just as I was pushing down with my left leg at the top of the peddle stroke so the bike came to a complete stop (uphill remember) and I “crashed” sideways (a slow gentle fall really but we define a crash as anytime you end up with more than your feet on the ground). The lady pushing her bike next to me asked me if I was okay. I told her my leg decided it was done peddling and then I asked her if there was anyone coming up behind us so I knew whether I was going to get run over. She said no so I massaged my hamstring and walked the rest of the way up the hill, remounted the bike, went on a downhill, rode the next uphill mostly using my right leg to avoid cramping my left leg again all the while listening to Doug calling me on the walkie talkie but he evidently couldn’t hear me answering. As I crested that hill I was told by a volunteer that I was entering the “bowl”, which was the ski slope downhill finish, so I yelled into the walkie talkie that I was entering the “bowl”, but then I saw that I actually had one more hill to climb before I was really in the “bowl”. Doug called back that he couldn’t see me in the bowl and that I only had a little over a minute left to make my goal of coming in under four hours and that Joe and Craig had already finished. So, evidently somewhere Craig had passed me and we hadn’t seen each other!!! Then my right thigh cramped up on that last uphill and I had to dismount and hobble to the top of the hill on two bad legs!! When I got to the top Doug could see me and told me to get on my horse and get it in gear (really it was something else that I can’t print either) or I wouldn’t make it under four hours. There was a big slippery turn at the bottom of the ski hill and then one more steep short hill before the actual finish line so I had to scrub off my speed at the bottom so I didn’t crash and when I hit that last hill I was downshifting and downshifting to try to stay riding as I knew I couldn’t make it walking, but I knew I didn’t want to cramp up again either. Doug told me I only had 10 seconds left as I was about to give up and walk but then I could see the finish line as my head popped up over the top of the hill and Doug was screaming at me in the walkie talkie, so I gave it everything I had to get to the finish line, and then I heard Doug groan, four hours, and ONE second, on the clock above the finish line!!!! CRAP!!!! When I got through the chute I met up with Doug and Joe. Joe’s teeth were chattering because he finished 26 minutes earlier and was getting cold, then Craig who finished 10 minutes earlier walked up and he was also cold and wet and his back hurt and they wanted to get to the truck, go back to the hotel, get a hot shower and go eat. I was hot literally, even though I just had on shorts and a completely unzipped short sleeve shirt while Joe and Craig had on a LOT more clothes; and figuratively because I wanted to go to the lost and found and look for the dang walkie talkie Joe lost, because I was sure that it was the extra weight of MY walkie talkie that had cost me the TWO lousy seconds I needed to come in under four hours!!! It started to rain hard so I acquiesced and we left to clean up and go to Club 77 for our classy post race dinner, another of Craig and Doug’s rituals. Before we left for dinner, Joe checked the website for the official race times: Joe aka “The Rocket” aka “Lojack” Rosenhauer finished in a extremely respectable 3:34:29.2; Craig aka “Chief” Drozd finished in 3:49:05.4; and Dan aka “Krash” Kiplinger finished in 3:59:47.9—so I actually DID come in under my goal of less than 4 hours—whooohoooo!!!! We had a fabulous dinner, and on that note (under 4 hours) I even had a beer to try to dull the physical pain from the race!!!
We had oatmeal in our rooms Sunday morning and then Craig drove to Marquette where we stopped at Wendy’s for lunch even though Doug wanted “real” food, which he described as not greasy and no salads! I drove the rest of the way home from there and it rained really hard starting at Mackinaw. We saw hundreds of turkeys and a lot of deer on the drive there and hundreds of crows, a large bald eagle on the side of the road that tried to fly into the side of the truck, and two baby bobcats on the drive back.
So, it was quite an experience, good times, good company, and well worth it.
Race information: http://www.cheqfattire.com/pages/news.shtml.
Map for the race: http://www.cheqfattire.com/MAPFLYERINSIDE.pdf.
Footnote: I sent an Email to the race organizers asking if anyone turned in a yellow and black walkie talkie to the lost and found and low and behold, they did!! They sent it to me, at no charge, and when I got it there wasn’t a scratch on it, it wasn’t water damaged, and it still worked!! I am going to reimburse them for the postage, but what a really really well run race!!!
Additional footnote: If you want to know about Craig’s, Doug’s or Joe’s experience you’ll have to ask them for their own ride report, I’m sure it will be much shorter!!! Ask them about the imported liquids, snacks and wireless internet.
