To say that the world has changed since COVID-19 has become something of a cliche. The way the world has changed is different for everybody— and some of us have had to weather these drastic changes in our personal and professional lives in ways that have fundamentally altered our relationship with the bike, and what it means to be an ultra-endurance athlete, an adult, a parent, a spouse and the other myriad identities that combine to make us uniquely ourselves.
For me, the COVID-19 shutdowns happened in mid-March when the community college where I work as a part of the marketing and communications team made the decision to close all its physical locations and to move to remote instruction and operations over the course of a weekend. I went from having a private office, a commute and a sense of connection to a particular community on campus to having my work infiltrate my home via a room in my house, which was once the spot where I wrote poetry, short stories, essays and completed other freelance editing and writing projects. The usual 8-5 turned into around-the-clock expectations for work where I could “Zoom in” at any time as emergency communication after emergency communication was borne of my keyboard. I also spend my days completely and utterly alone.
Needless to say, training for anything faded from my life. After all, everything was canceled, so what was the point? For those who know me, this should sound alarm bells—my life, not so long ago, was dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in sport. Yet, as the headlines trickled in about the world catching on ethical fire, and then literal fire paired with the heated discourse around race, more COVID-19 deaths, at a certain point it just became too much. I was maxed out— I couldn’t care about anything much more than just making it through the day. Anything and everything nonessential to my own selfish survival was out the window.
Around mid-May, I stopped riding my bike. I just couldn’t anymore—the desire, the hope the all of it just became dark and quiet. I did some running and bodyweight exercises (hello push-ups and burpees), but nothing serious. Then I started roller skating, which was even less serious. But cycling— it carried a particular kind of weight from years of competition that was just too much to bear given all that had shifted in the world. Everything it had meant to me once no longer mattered. The metaphor that the bike offered me—that it somehow articulated something true about the person I was and am— seemed less and less true until I let go of that metaphor, telling myself to forget it. I also told myself that the Silver State 508, like everything else in 2020, would be canceled. When the smoke rolled in, I was almost sure of that.
As if that wasn’t enough, three days before the race, my Maine Coon cat, Jacques— my little buddy— passed away unexpectedly. He started wheezing Monday night and when the wheezing didn’t stop the next morning, I loaded him into my car to take him to the vet. On the way, he meowed one last time, and then he was gone.
And somehow that’s how I found myself climbing Carroll Summit on a smoky, cold Friday in September with teammates I hadn’t seen—and who hadn’t left the house—in months just like me. The smoke almost looked like a blue mist, casting the wild flower and burnt remains of juniper trees from a fire years ago into murky relief. You never forget how to ride a bike, they say. It turns out that that is certainly true.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I clipped into my pedals and my first thought of “damn, these tires are skinny” didn’t exactly reassure me. Settling into the rhythm of the bike and my pedal stroke, though, I started to climb Carroll Summit. And as I climbed, for the first time in six months, I felt happy. Yet, that happiness wasn’t attached to my performance, ranking or any external system—instead, I was simply happy. In fact, the disconnection from all of those metrics I treasured for years—watts, weight, place, speed, rank—made it even better: I didn’t care at all where I ended up, if I was fastest or slowest up the hill. I just knew was going to make it up and over, and then ride for several more miles. That, in that moment, was enough.
The climb up Carroll Summit is not an easy one, but it is remarkably beautiful with the burnt sculptures of junipers, blooming rabbitbrush and wild flower. At a few of the switchbacks, the pitch of the road turns steep enough that you start to wonder if you’re capable of recovering or making it to the top. The key, I learned (or remembered) that day was this: just keep going. And I did, one pedal stroke at a time.
When I rounded the final switchback of the climb, I could see my team waiting for me, including our team captain and my significant other (S.O.) Rich Staley. COVID-19 hasn’t been easy on us as a couple, either, but having him stand there and say something positive about what I was doing meant the world to me. When he gave me a high-five as I rode by him and our hands touched, raindrops began to fall, tricking down my skin. The intensity of the rain increased to a light shower as I crossed the summit. It was as though the universe was telling me this was a new beginning, and that even if you think all hope—and everything—is gone, it’s never too late to start believing in yourself again.
*
“I’m not doing the 508,” I said to Rich on one of my nights when I tried to assert myself, and he’d learned not to answer me. It wasn’t an unreasonable request. I hadn’t ridden my road bike for months, I work from home, quarantined due to the pandemic. I was sometimes afraid to go to the grocery store, to say nothing of riding on the shoulder of the highway. Over the past six months, the nature of my work changed, just as the nature of the world has changed.
For months, though, Rich ignored me and emails from the SS508 continued to arrive in my inbox with updates about the race, asking me for my t-shirt and vest size. I did my best to ignore them, as event after event— trail runs, charity rides, graduations—were canceled.
“I’m not doing it,” I said stubbornly, even up until the week of the event.
Rich, though, owns Great Basin Bicycles, the bike shop that is the major sponsor for this event and its success is really tied to his participation—and therefore, to my participation. Every year since 2014 (when the Furnace Creek 508 became the Silver State 508 due to permitting issues in Death Valley, CA) Great Basin Bicycles has been an integral part of the event, fielding one or more teams of local riders, and supplying all participants with mechanical support, gear and any last-minute emergency bicycle and sometimes moral support.
I knew it was an argument I couldn’t win. Of course I was doing the SS508, even if Rich had to duct tape my dead body to the bike and tow me behind the race van.
We were joined by Brandon T., who was my teammate back in 2015 when we raced under his totem, Sanguine Octopus as a Two-Man team. We won our division that year, wearing each other out in the long, hot miles. I was grateful for our crew, which included Brandon’s wife, Stacy who saved me from a meltdown (and sugar deficiency) by handing me a juice box at the foot of the climb up to Austin.
My good friend Rhonda Yeager also joined the team this year. She was a part of the Four-Woman team Great Basin Bumblebee I created in 2017 to capture the course record in a category that hadn’t (much to my surprise) been attempted. That year, our team of strong women finished fourth overall and first in our division. Rhonda is a long-time friend, an accomplished elite cyclist (a Cat. 2 in USAC rankings), a competitive triathlete and Cross racer, in addition to her more important role as a mother to two youngsters.
While some four-person teams opt out of the option for a crew, we were lucky enough to have two drivers who made sure that we made it out and back in one piece without too much chaos in our borrowed suburban. One was Kevin Weinske, an SS508 teammate from last year and Crewman Jim, who also crewed for us last year.
Finally, of course, there was S.O. Rich who blew up when, one day before the race, I told him I had a meeting I couldn’t cancel on Friday (the day the race began) that I’d scheduled months before and couldn’t miss.
“I’ve been planning this for months, and I don’t ask much of you, but this is important,” he said. This, coming from the overall winner of the 308, the man who’s ridden the SS508 solo in under 40 hours, the man who trained me to race in criterium and road races, who watched out for me in the California Triple Crown Stage Race for not one but several years. And, arguably, who is the one person in the world who is able to put up with all of my ridiculous crap.
And so, I sighed, I cancelled my meeting, responded to the emails regarding my shirt size and settled into the idea that I was doing a long race in questionable conditions for which I hadn’t at all trained.
*
The morning of the race was clear…ish. The sight of any shade of blue was an anomaly given the weeks we’ve been blanketed in thick smoke and orange light, like we’re all chicken nuggets under the warming light at McDonald’s. Rhonda, our first rider, toed the line with a handful of others who are A) dedicated to this sport and B) slightly crazy for wanting to do this, given all that 2020 has dished up so far.
Despite the masks and a few less competitors in former years, it felt very much like a SS508 starting line: casual and intense, with hidden tensions between teams while others, oblivious, wander around with a coffee cup in their hand and flip-flops. Robert, the race organizer, played the national anthem on the loud speaker to the (mostly) empty parking lot and we gazed into the sky since there wasn’t really a flag nearby to pledge our allegiance to. When the horn sounded, the riders clipped in and followed the lead car.
And so began the most challenging SS508s to date. None of us knew what we were getting into.
*
The riders summit Geiger Grade and descend Six-Mile Canyon. From my perspective in the van, this is an hour (or more) wait to see where we stood in the scheme of things. What emerged early on would remain true: the two four-men teams were incredibly strong, and contenders for new course records. Also, the caliber of bikes had somehow become elevated: TT bikes, disk wheels— I found myself cheering for people riding a “regular” road bike like I was.
Rhonda rode so strong, though. She looked steady in the aeros as she rode past us en route to Silver Springs. Later, she would say that a few of the men went hard on the climb up Geiger and the decision—or not— to ride with them might have burned a match. Nonetheless, we were well with in the top five teams, and that, oddly enough, is where we would stay.
*
Rich took the next 50 miles from just before Silver Springs to approximately Sand Mountain. If you’ve never seen Rich on a bike, well, it’s hard to describe in any other word other than “natural.” He’s smooth and it looks s though he’s not working hard, but he is. In my mind I often compare him to a freight train or a tug boat— some object capable of incredible, sustained power over long periods of distance and time.
This was especially true as he rode further and further east, and the air became thicker with smoke that had been pushed in that direction from the winds. He rode past old lake Lahontan and into the outskirts of Fallon, where he would later tell us that the smoke was giving him an incredible headache.
Fallon: the town it feels like an eternity to ride through with its wide fields of alfalfa, cattle and farms paired with hardware stores, used car lots, broken down casinos and vacated bars. This landscape would melt into the alkali flat that marks the true entrance into the Great Basin desert. The wide rumble strips on the shoulders of the highway. The bird of prey, circling above. The black rocks resting on the white sand that someone has gathered into their name, into a poem, and (even) into a penis with balls along the side of America’s Loneliest Highway which, because I am with friends outside of my house for the first time in six months, feels like anything but lonely.
*
I climb Carroll Summit. Rich takes us the next 15 miles to Austin. Rhonda rides over Austin and Bob Scott Summits as well as Hickson Pass. When I’m on the bike again, it’s nearly midnight and I’m somewhere between Eureka and Austin (on the way back to Reno), and it began to rain and hail. I was wearing a skin suit, a relic of my former days as a racer. I had forgotten to put water in my bottles, and as I cursed myself for that. But, not wanting to disappoint my team, I told myself over and over again that I couldn’t stop, not even for water.
Lightning began to flash across the sky over my left shoulder, but quickly surrounded me in panorama in the Big Smoky Valley. The light turned from black to purple with the violent flashes of light—and the electricity in the air entered my skin like a vibration or a bass line from a live concert. I held tight to my aerobars, focusing on my pedal stroke and my breathing as the natural world waged war around me.
Spray from water on the road made the headlight on my bike look like those plastic wands you used to get as a kid when the carnival came to town— the strands of white plastic that would pick up whatever color of light that was shown on them. As I traversed the desert beneath a hail and lightning storm, I was led by an LED light show of my own making in an impermeable skin suit that, once I stopped cycling forty miles later, I would discover was dripping wet.
I didn’t feel wet, though. Or cold. In the moment, I felt nothing at all. Cool and calm, sailing— my body as the mast of some big-rigged ship as my soul stretched up into the wind, pulling me forward into this terrifying and incredible beauty that flashed all around me in deep tones that I could feel and hear.
Yet, again it was that unexpected heroism: we are more than we can imagine. Riding through the storm, my teammates would ask me why I didn’t stop or seem afraid. What would have been the point to stop, though? The adventure lay before me in the desert, and I’d never seen something so terrifying—and so rawly beautiful before. After the year we’ve had, what else can you do but ride toward it?
Up Hickson Pass, I’d raise one arm in the air to celebrate before the long, wet descent. And, at the foot of Bob Scott summit, there I glimpsed a red and flashing light: evidence that our competition wasn’t that far ahead. I had no water, and I’d ridden over forty miles at 24.6 mph average pace. I wanted to go for it, I wanted to reel that rider in and to pass them. I wanted that more than I’ve wanted anything these past six months when life turned a boring shade of beige.
I could see the flashing red lights in the darkness of night. They were close. But, I realized this wasn’t just my battle to fight, and it certainly wasn’t my war to win. I stopped, and handed the GPS tracker to Rhonda, my teammate. A strong climber, an incredible competitor, a person with a heart of gold and the one athlete I knew would reel in those red lights with more speed and force than anyone else could. Even me.
*
She did it. She passed George Vargas of team Vireo Hangover before the top of Austin Summit, handing our team a several-minute lead into the time station. However, conditions of the race had changed. A veteran who was racing solo on a recumbent had a serious mechanical issue. The SS508 race director, Robert Panzera, texted Rich while I was out riding in the lightning storm, to see if he could help this other rider. Rich responded—as he always does— yes, of course.
So, our team stopped in Austin to help team Rusty Dogs of War, a solo recumbent rider who was also a war veteran who had a serious mechanical issue that prevented him from completing the race. I was asleep at the time, but Crewman Jim later told me that Rich fixed not only his chain but derailleur.
Our main competition, Vireo Hangover, rushed in and out of the aid station in Austin, excited (perhaps) that we were delayed. It’s a detail I find interesting since George, the man who had been riding, is also a bike mechanic. But, as I’ve said: this isn’t my war. I’m just a girl on a hot pink bike who roller skates. What can I know?
*
Nighttime comes in a series of flashes. Brandon and Rich traded legs in the dark, cold endless Nevada night, taking our team back from Austin to the alkali flats of east of Fallon, where Rhonda would once again take to the road. The light was low and blue and rough without coffee. Our crew, sleep-deprived, continued their relentless pursuit of our own success at 20 mph. I foraged for something to eat, knowing the next leg was mine. Given my options, “breakfast” was a handful of potato chips, a piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken and water.
I stumble into the dark desert to pee (as the riders exchange) and I fall into a hole that swallows my whole leg. I don’t even think to cry out or ask for help as I struggle to free my leg out of this human-sized hole to pee somewhere safer (I hope— it’s hard to see in the dark.) When it’s my turn to ride through the eternal Fallon, I do with Taylor Swift singing me through the alfalfa fields, happy to be alone on the bike, happy to be in the morning light, sailing on this golden light that shines outside and within me.
We didn’t beat Vireo Hangover—not at all. But, we didn’t want to, either. As the sun crests on the final morning of the race, we sip coffee in the van and laugh as these racers eye us nervously, us— these racers who are also husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, writers, professionals and the other host of identities that make us uniquely ourselves.
I thought of all of mine: communicator, coach, writer, editor, friend, lover— and how these roles matter in the world I inhabit, even in this strange new reality.
And this is when I think of metaphors again, and what they can mean. And how just simply riding, trying, being has taught me so much about myself. Faced with impossible odds—not training, wind, rain, hail, lightning, I chose to continue anyway. Despite the fires that rage in our political climate, in the literal world, in our inner selves, my teammates chose to ride this race anyway. Despite sadness, isolation, fear— we decided to ride and to face the unknown, together.
I was a part of that together. I realized that I am brave. My words paint the picture of these moments when no one had their phones ready to take a picture.
And, when someone asked for help, we did that, too, knowing we might not win.
And isn’t that the best you can hope for, after an event like this? And isn’t that the story you would want to tell?
We didn’t win, but hot damn, we finished.
