Stage 2:
Gladwin to Marrion (48.9 miles)
I’ve spent
the past ten miles trying to talk myself out of quitting.
I sat
down, talked with my wife, ate two pieces of pizza, drank my Gatorade, and prepared
for the next stage. I made a lot of mistakes at that first checkpoint. Mostly
little things, but they compounded on each other, as mistakes are wont to do.
I
misjudged the amount of water I was carrying. I had most of a full bottle on
the bike, and I figured there were two more refills remaining in my hydration
bladder. As it turned out, I didn’t even have one.
The
weather had been cool and overcast, and I had been comfortable wearing my
jacket over my jersey. I had arm warmers stuffed in my pack if it became too
warm for the jacket but still cool enough for long sleeves, and I anticipated
the weather would remain static over the next stage. Either way, I had layers I
could add or remove so I figured I was fine. My mistake was not applying
sunscreen to my arms.
My
other clothing mistake was to swap out my hat for a skullcap. The hat I was
wearing covered my ears to keep them warm, and that was no longer necessary. I
opted for the cooler option, but it lacked a brim to help shield the sun from
my eyes.
Probably
my biggest mistake, though, was hurrying out of the stop without taking the
time to gather and mentally prepare myself for the upcoming stage. It’s funny
how your preconceived notions can set you up for failure if you don’t deal with
the properly. While previewing the course, I decided that Stage 3 was going to
be the difficult one; I never gave much thought to Stage 2. I hurried out of
the checkpoint, worried I was last and eager for the course to turn back west
and out of the wind.
There’s
a reason these races are called “gravel grinders,” and the first twenty miles
of Stage 2 lived up to that name. The
route didn’t turn west as quickly as I hoped, and this was the one section the
wind, though not terrible strong, was in my face. The roads were damp but firm
in Stage 1, but now they became damp and squishy, beginning to tilt upwards
ever so slightly, relentlessly up for the next one hundred miles. The sun came
out from behind the clouds, and I began to shed layers, realizing that I should
have applied sunscreen to my arms at the last checkpoint. It was too warm for
my jacket, but I had to cover up with my arm warmers before too long to keep
the sun from burning my pale skin to a crisp.
My
average heart rate, meticulously held below 145 bpm in Stage 1, began to soar
without any respite from the course. I simply couldn’t get it back down, and
despite the increased exertion my pace had plummeted. I could feel the race
slipping away from me, and I began to panic.
I was
completely unprepared for 2 Track forest road (0.25 miles after Rogers). In
retrospect, I should have been. I knew there was going to be times on the race
when my mental endurance would be pushed to the limits, I just didn’t expect it
so soon. The road was only two miles, but by the time it was done, so I was I.
“This
is not fun anymore. I know it’s not supposed to be fun all the time, but this
road has destroyed my race. I’m not sure I can make it. I’m not sure I want to
make it. I can feel a headache (probably dehydration) forming in the back of my
brain. My right knee hurts every time I turn the pedal, and I have 130 miles to
go. It’s only going to get worse.
“I
wanted to do this race to find out if I could. Maybe 210 miles in a day is
something I could do, but not today. Today, I can’t.”
I made
the decision: I would continue to the second checkpoint and then quit. One
hundred miles was respectable, and no one would fault me for falling short of
two hundred miles. It was a little embarrassing that I’d finished a longer
training ride a few weeks earlier, but I could deal with that. I made peace
with my choice. I thought about what I would tell everyone when they asked
about the race; I wasn’t going to make excuses, I was just going to admit that
I didn’t have it in me to finish that day.
I kept
talking myself through the decision. There wasn’t a whole lot else to think
about as I ground away at the road. Conditions may have improved, but my
spirits had not and that held me back as much as anything. As musical artist
Poe says in her song Terrible Thought,
“A terrible thought had moved into my mind…a terrible thought can have a terribly
long career.”
Interlude—Failure
Failure
gets a bad rap. Everyone knows the axiom, “If at first you don’t succeed, try,
try again,” but the focus is always on “succeed” and “try again.” If at first
you don’t succeed, that means you failed.
We all
love that story of the guy or gal who gets knocked down, pulls themselves up by
the bootstraps, and goes on to succeed despite everyone and everything against
them. They hardly even doubt themselves, and the outcome may as well be
pre-ordained. Hollywood loves it; I’m pretty sure every other movie they make
uses that same plot. Why do we love it? Because someone didn’t fail.
Failure
isn’t always a bad thing. If you set about to achieve something, work
diligently towards it, give it everything you reasonably can, and come up
short, there’s nothing wrong with that. Even if you don’t try again. Failing
shouldn’t be rewarded, but if failure isn’t an option, success is a hollow
endeavor.
When
the outcome is predetermined to be a success, then success doesn’t mean
anything. It is only by trying to do something which may not be accomplished
that we achieve any sense of victory. If we are not able to measure up to the
final task, then we have learned something valuable about ourselves. And when
we understand that our worth does not come from the success or failure of our
goals, we are able to accomplish grander things for we are no longer afraid to
try challenges that we may fall short on.
So, if
you have given it a true effort, really tried to accomplish something but you
come up short, yes you have failed. But kudos to you for finding out whether or
not you could do it. Maybe with some changes, whether in your own learning or
preparation or in external situations you’ll be able to succeed in the future,
and maybe not. Whether you try again, that’s up to you, but at least give it an
honest thought each way.
Stage 2: Redux
(somewhere beyond mile 80)
If I plan
to keep going, what do I have to do?
I can’t
tell you what happened to change my mind. I had no moment of clarity, no
radical conversion, no external impetus that I know to reverse my train of
thought.
I
remember thinking about what Mike from Salsa Bikes had said the prior evening,
“There will be dark moments out there when you want to give up and quit. You
need to push through them.” It was much too early in this race to be
encountering these distractions, or so I thought. I was expecting them, but not
until Stage 3 or 4 after I hit the wall beyond which I had not gone before. But
here they were, and I wasn’t prepared for them.
“You’re
telling yourself a negative story,” I thought to myself, “You need to change
the narrative. If you’re going to finish this, you’ve got to stop telling
yourself that you can’t. You can work through this, but you have to change the
narrative.”
So I
began to write a different story. I asked myself, “If I plan to keep going,
what do I have to do to make that happen?”
I took
a catalog of the mistakes that I’d made at the last checkpoint, and began to
address how I could fix them. I looked at each of the obstacles in my path, and
considered how I was going to deal with them. I looked at the clock, my pace,
did some math to figure out exactly where I stood in relation to the cut-off,
and figured out what I thought I could do and what I needed to do if I was
going to finish. My initial goal of finishing by 11pm was gone, but the finish was
still in reach with plenty of leeway.
I came
up with a battle plan. I should arrive at the checkpoint a little after 3pm and
take a half-hour to restock and rest. Stage 3 was 60 miles long, give or take,
and if I averaged around 12 mph (around my average pace at the time), I could
finish it in 5 hours, get in by 8:30. Sunset was around 9:20, so even if it
took me longer than expected I should still make it by sunset. That still left
me plenty of time to finish Stage 4, even if it meant spending a lot more time
in the dark than I’d hoped.
At
checkpoint 2, I would come in, get off my bike and sit down. I could drink an ice-cold
coke followed by a Gatorade, and try to eat some pizza. I would need to fill up
my water and snacks and ditch the things I knew I wouldn’t need any more. As
far as my kit, I would change to my long-sleeve jersey, which will last me
through the afternoon and into the cooler night, and put on a cap with a brim
to help shield the sun since I was riding west into the setting sun. For the
budding headache and knee pain, some Excedrin migraine & an Aleve (my go-to
cocktail for warding off migraines).
Everything
seemed reasonable. Maybe, just maybe, I was going to be able to do it. I just had
to make it to checkpoint 2.
Soon
after all of this went through my head, I came abreast another ride. We had
been yo-yoing back and forth for a little while, passing each other and getting
passed as we stopped for a rest or such.
“I
could do this all day, but I don’t know if I’ll make the cut-off,” he said to
me after a few minutes of silence.
“Well,
we’re ahead of the cut-off by about forty-five minutes to an hour right now.”
I’d done the math.
He
laughed. “I should slow down then.”
“Yeah.
I’ve been spending the past ten or fifteen miles trying to talk myself out of
quitting, and I think I’ve finally done it,” I told him.
“If
you’re ahead of the cut-off, you have to keep going.”
That was all he said.
I
nodded and kept pedaling. Before too long, he dropped back and by the time I
pulled into checkpoint 2 I knew I wasn’t the last person on the course. I saw
him pull into Checkpoint 2 several minutes behind me, and I’m not sure if he
made it out by the cut-off. His last split recorded on the results sheet was
Checkpoint 2.
Checkpoint 2 Split time: 4:49:00
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