Coast to Coast Race Report Part 2

Before the Race

If it’s not difficult, it’s not worth doing.

Read Part 1 Here 

               The Michigan Coast to Coast Gravel Grinder is a bicycle race from the tiny town of Au Grey along Michigan’s East coast on the shores of Lake Huron all the way across the state to Ludington on the West coast shores of Lake Michigan. The challenge? Cover 212 miles of primarily dirt and gravel roads in one day—twenty-one hours to be exact.

                For some reason, I decided to participate in the 2018 inaugural edition. For some even more inexplicable reason, my wife not only agreed to let me but encouraged me and offered her help as my support crew.

                Growing up and through my twenties, I was the postcard for the American obesity epidemic—overweight, out of shape, and convinced that I was not an athlete, and would never be able to consider myself one. Soon after my thirtieth birthday, a trip to the ER confirmed my worst fears: my weight and lifestyle had begun to cause health problems.

                I paid attention. I changed my diet and become more active. I began to go to the gym to lift weights, and in early 2011 I ran my first half marathon. The weight was coming off, and I continued running and training for more half marathons. In 2012, I bought a bike and took up cycling as well. I rode my first century (100 miles) in 2013, and then several more over the next few years.

                I was finally an athlete, and I began to believe it. Maybe not the fastest, or most impressive, but I was regularly doing things the average person couldn’t (at least without training). Once, while riding up Sierra Grade, a particularly difficult hill in the San Francisco Bay Area East Bay, my friend and frequent riding partner Jesse said, “The problem with conquering a hill like this is that the next one has to be harder. If it’s not difficult, it’s not worth doing.” That last thought stuck with me, and I embraced it as a mantra of sorts. I kept riding up hills and running half marathons and looking for the next challenge.

                When I moved out to the Chicago area in 2015, I began to hear about “gravel grinders.” The wide-open spaces of the Midwest are filled with dirt roads and unpaved rails-to-trails paths, and the bike industry had taken notice. To convince cyclists they needed to buy another bike (like we need an excuse), they began to come out with all-road and gravel models. I had a mountain bike and a fancy road bike, but I wanted a bike that could serve for touring, bikepacking, and commuting to work on gravel paths so my wife gifted me one of these for my 40^th birthday.

                Void of any real hills in the area, I turned my focus to distance. In 2017, I decided my challenge would be to ride 3000 total miles over the course of the year. Despite narrowly missing a shorter 2500-mile goal in 2016, I put away the miles and passed 3000 in early December before the weather turned bad (and the winter of 2017-18 had some bad weather).

                After finishing, I realized that the grind of having to get out and get miles in took away from the enjoyment of riding, so I decided not to have an overall mileage goal in 2018. Instead, I wanted to concentrate on better individual rides. Quality over quantity, I suppose.

                I’d been hearing about this race called the Dirty Kanza 200 for a couple of years, first from my family who live in Emporia, Kansas (the start and finish of the race) and then from other cyclists and cycling websites. It is the mother of all gravel grinders, the biggest race in the scene—207 miles through the Flint Hills of Kansas, and everyone said you had to ride it. My interest was piqued, and I thought very strongly about trying to do it, but the logistics of getting to and from a race in Kansas were difficult.

                Then I heard about the Michigan Coast to Coast, probably from a Facebook ad. It was the same type of race, a few extra miles, and much closer to home. I thought about it for a while, and the added perks of racing in the first version and being able to say I raced across an entire state helped convince me. After talking in depth with my wife (and eliciting her commitment as my support crew), I decided to commit. The only thing left to do was start training.

                Without going into too much detail about my training regimen, I focused on two main things: riding my bike a lot for long times, and preparing myself mentally for the long difficult times late in the race. As I told some friends, fitness level necessary to ride 200 miles isn’t that much different from 100 miles, but the mindset was much different.

                The weather didn’t cooperate much with my training, but I still got over 1100 miles in (even if a good portion of them were done in temperatures below freezing) and put in the two highest mileage months of my life in March and April. The mental part? Well, that’s only theory until you put it into practice, but I’ve read a fair number of books by ultra-marathoners and other ultra-endurance athletes so I had a pretty good idea of where to start.

                It’s funny how the date seems to creep up so slowly at first, and then suddenly rushes up. The plans were made, accommodations arranged, bike set up and tested, and we loaded the car and set off towards Eastern Michigan. I was as ready as I was going to get; given the late winter conditions, I’d done as much training as I reasonably could accomplish.

                I trolled the weather forecast for the week leading up to the race and despite pouring down on the drive out, I was excited to see the rain finish before morning. The wind was a gentle north-east, at my back for most of the route. A little chilly, but much better than most of my training. It was a happy sacrifice to not face a headwind the entire race—one of my main prayers for the event.

                We arrived in time to check in for the race, pick up my race number, and sit-in on the pre-race meeting. The race organizers got up and talked about the race’s history, logistics, and rules before giving way to Mike “Kid” Riemer, a spokesperson for the primary sponsor, Salsa Bicycles.

                “Kid” Riemer, marketing manager and storyteller (he claims it’s officially part of his job title) at Salsa, talked about the adventure that was about to unfold. He talked about the story we would be telling, a story no one else would ever be able to tell—the first time anyone had undertaken this race. He warned us about the dark and negative thoughts we would have, “You’re going to have them out there, sometime, and you have to put them aside. Tell a different story.”

                After the meeting broke up, the only thing left to do was bring a pizza back to the hotel room, pack up the bike, and get some sleep. Not as much as I wanted—the 4:30am wake-up call was early, but if that was the hardest thing I had to deal with on race day, I would be a happy camper. It wasn’t. Not by a long shot.

Read Part 3 Here