Olya Perevalova has come a long way from her humble life in Russia. Now, the amateur marathoner is aiming for a goal she never thought she'd reach, the U.S. women's Olympic team.
David Bailey and Ricky James are side-by-side and the wind is howling. They are on their handcycles and both of these athletes certainly understand the ups and downs of life more than most.
We weren’t worried when we set off on the morning of July 2, day five of the seven-day, 330-mile BC Bike Race. We weren’t scared by the day’s 65K and immense 6,490 feet of elevation gain. Traveling at a swift, sustained pace, we weren’t concerned about missing the 1 p.m. cut-off at Aid Station 3, which penalizes violators with NOR (“Not Officially Racing”) status and essentially makes months of training meaningless. NOR denies participants what all 400 of us were there for: a medal identifying us as a finisher in one of the world’s hardest multi-day stage races. That was simply not going to happen to my team. We were too strong for that. Yes, we were back-of-the-packers in a field that included top amateurs from around the world and renowned professional superstars, like former national champion Tinker Juarez and six-time 24-hour solo champ Chris Eatough. But we’d taken the best that the BC had thrown at us: the endless miles of jarring, rooty, rocky single track that rattled teeth and beat up our whole bodies from head to toe. And we’d made all the cut-offs with plenty of room to spare.
This would be no different.
Or so I thought until about two-thirds of the way there, when my tummy began gurgling a bit too much. “Give me a minute or two,” I said to Ed Korb, an REI school instructor who was my partner in our two-man team. And I ran into the woods. I will spare you the details, but I didn’t come back for 20 minutes.
“What happened?” said Ed when I returned. I shook my head. “It just kept coming.”
Now we were truly in deep doo-doo. From a previously comfortable cushion we were now so far behind schedule that a rider we called the Man Mountain, 260-pounder Beverly Hills hotelier Ted Kahn, had caught us.
“We’re going to miss the cut-off!” cried Ed, demoralized.
“No we won’t!” I yelled back reflexively. I am no great rider by any means, but I don’t miss cut-offs. That’s because I have no intention of ever coming back.
“Come hell or high water, mark my words!” I screamed out loud, “We will cross this one off of my mountain-bike bucket list!”
Some people have an Ironman bucket list. They do the big one in Hawaii, and they do Ironmans in Japan or Germany or Brazil or Lake Placid. Some people have a marathon bucket list: Boston, New York, Chicago, L.A., London, Big Sur, and so forth. Some eventually start dressing up like Elvis. All of it is a good excuse to travel and a great way to stay motivated.
Well, I have a mountain biking bucket list. I’ve done all the big, monstrous multi-day rides: the eight-day, 400-mile TransAlp Challenge from Germany to Austria to Italy, the seven-day, 350-mile TransRockies in Canada, the four-day, 250-mile La Ruta de los Conquistadores from the Pacific to the Atlantic across Costa Rica. And as these arduous events gain popularity, more are springing up all over the globe. Now there’s the TransAndes from Chile to Argentina across the high Andes Mountains, and the TransCarpathian which traverses the mountains on the borders of Poland, the Czech republic and Slovakia. There’s TransPortugal, TransCrete, TransScotland and more. I want to do them all someday. Once a year, I cross another one off of my bucket list. And that means I don’t have time to go back and repeat any.
I have met unlikely cut-offs before. There was a time 11 years ago, on day one of La Ruta (an 83-mile, 13,000-feet-of-climbing odyssey that many believe actually tries to kill you.) I was riding with a friend who didn’t know how to mountain bike and was falling so far behind the pack that workers on the course told us to give up. But I finally left my partner after a couple of hours and rode like a man possessed, in the end making the 12-hour cutoff by three minutes.
But making this cutoff on day five of the BC Bike Race would be my biggest challenge yet. My prodigious dump had put us in a hellish hole. The truth is, if I was a betting man, I wouldn’t have bet on us. 10 miles in 70 minutes would be faster than we’d gone yet during this difficult event, in which even downhill single track was so harsh and exhausting that we often had to stop to catch our breath. But as the minutes ticked away, it became clear that we would not be enjoying any of the occasionally gracious gravity of a descent. It was all uphill. This was my biggest nightmare.
Cleared of intestinal baggage, lightened of load, I was suddenly in top form. That was fortunate, because the climbing didn’t let up. Sitting in the saddle, standing out of the saddle, we attacked the relentless ascent as 1 p.m. crept closer and closer. I flogged Ed like a racehorse as the terrain steepened to unrideable 20 minutes before the hour; we had to get off the bikes and run uphill. Soon we approached four or five other teams that had slowed to a walk. They’d clearly accepted their fate. Strangely, I held my breath as we intersected their path.
My mind ricocheted to a story Ed had told me about his childhood as we were riding several days earlier. “My mom had always told me not to associate with bad people,” he said. “So when I would pass by juvenile delinquents, I would hold my breath so I wouldn’t have to breath their air, so I wouldn’t get polluted with their thoughts.” The concept fascinated me. Now, passing the slumping bikers, I told myself, “Don’t look at them. Don’t talk to them. Don’t breath their air. Don’t get polluted by them. Don’t get their disease.”
“Don’t stop!” I cried to Ed. “We don’t want to come back. The bucket list…!”
Drained, hyperventilating, Ed wanted to stop for a food break. “No!” I screamed, “Throw it in and keep moving. Runnnnn!”
I honestly felt as if I was losing my mind, going insane, getting maniacal. But it was the only option. To slip back into rationality would be to admit defeat.
Every bend of the trail brought elation… and then disappointment. No checkpoint, no flattening of the terrain. Frankly, at only a couple of minutes before the hour now, it seemed hopeless. But I quickly wiped that thought from my mind, like a windshield wiper flicking off a squashed bug.
Momentum is everything – and too hard to get back once it’s lost.
At seconds before one o’clock, we spotted a BC Bike Race worker with a walkie-talkie on the trail up ahead. “It’s another 100 meters of climbing, then 500 flat and a half-kilometer of road,” he said. “We may let you slide.”
We were absolutely heaving by the time we hit the checkpoint. It was 1:03 p.m.
“You’re NOR,” said the worker scanning our number plates.
Ed began pleading, “But the guy down there said...” It was to no avail.
But a minute later, Fernando the Mexican and Gary the Canadian, our old roommates from a dorm we’d stayed in the night before the race, came through. The aid workers huddled around the walkie-talkie. “Okay, no one else is close. You four can keep going. Everyone else is NOR.”
Nothing about the BC Bike Race was easy. The next two days were relentless to the end. But it wasn’t a bitter end. We finished in last place with a cumulative time of 55 hours and 21 minutes in seven days – more mountain biking than I normally do in five or six months. We finished four hours behind the next-worse teams in the 80-plus and the 100-plus divisions. But we did it. We crossed the BC Race off the bucket list.
On the drive home, Ed and I made a decision: On to the Andes!
Check out Roy and Ed’s slideshow on Ed’s blog: www.bloodmudandbeer.blogspot.com
More information about the BC Bike Race can be found at www.BCBikeRace.com.
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