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| Training at the County Fair |
The Smoke N' Fire 400 starts in one week. I am in preparation mode, and looking for a place to
chronicle the last week of bumbling around.
As it stands, I will be riding my incredibly durable and very heavy Surly Krampus. I find myself struggling with just how much storage to put on the bike. Long experience backpacking and traveling has taught me that I will fill any space that I have so I might as well limit my options.
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| The Steed |
The race started calling to me a few years ago. I was camped on the Payette River outside of Garden Valley. Three bikers came rolling into our campsite at dusk. Being a social creature and a lover of bikes I ambled over to the water spigot and chatted them up. They had just descended the pass from Lowman and were looking at the last arduous leg of their ride. It turns out they were racing the Smoke n Fire and were in 8th, 9th, and 10th place respectively. They were covered in dirt and ash, obviously exhausted and strangely exhilarated. I watched them roll out of camp down to Garden Valley and the Subway. I had no idea what they were doing but I marked it as something to look up later.
Idaho is covered in potato fields. Potatoes everywhere. Nothing but potatoes, except a few meager creases that have some water, and some topography. There are even a few hot springs in far flung corners of the state. It is a rather dull state what with all of the potatoes. That being said a few optimistic souls have tried to spice it up a little bit. Some of these souls are cyclists and they made a little loop that follows some water, climbs some of the meager topography and connects a few hot springs. As these things go, someone else decided to set up a race to see how fast they could ride the loop, thus the Smoke n' Fire. Those riders I saw that night were trying to squeeze some excitement out of the dull, repetitive nature of Idahos potato country. Now, 2 years later I am going to try the same.
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| Winter Wonderland |
I started "training" in January when I set the goal of riding my bike to school once a week for the spring semester. This was one of those masochistic goals that catches on when you are warm, dry, and rested, often drinking something delicious and relaxed. I believe these impulses come from the lizard brain deep inside us that is primed for terror and discomfort. My theory is that this part of our brain is bored. The rest of our more developed reasoning skills are engaged in enjoying the warmth and delicious drinks and while the lizard brain quietly goes about its work. Before you know it, you have turned to a few friends and confidants and made some comment that you can't in good faith un-say like "I think it would be a good idea to start doing a winter bike commute to work" these friends might get concerned and say something like "but the road is pretty dangerous!" "oh! No! who would ride the road? I am going to ride into the canyon, then out the other side. I'll call it the Rim to Rim commute, it will be great..." And then you're stuck. It has a name, you have to do it.
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| Route Map from the Smoke n' Fire 400 Website |
This early training was perfect. It was cold, wet, dark, difficult, and no one really cared. Great training for an even more audacious effort. The lizard brain had me. Before long I was telling friends, confidants, complete strangers about this race I was going to do. 400ish miles, no support, no entry fees, and 1000's of feet of climbing. What could go wrong?
Lucky for me, I met a few friends this summer that got me pointed in a more coherent training trajectory. I have a training plan, I have some sort of a game plan, I have a goal, and I have a loving wife who would prefer to funnel resources to an ill-conceived endurance race as long as it increases my chances of living forever.
So, here I sit in a coffee shop, avoiding actual work, typing up my thoughts pre-race, on a blog that has not been updated in 5 years.
Sometimes we are just drawn to exercises in futility, perpetual Don Quixote-esque quests, tilting at our windmills. But to document is a way of making sense of the world. I won't make any promises, but stay tuned for more.
Mike
