9,987 feet and climbing.
Everybody suffers in their own way. I’m convinced that given an end, I can suffer through just about anything. By knowing when something will stop, I start breaking it down into small, manageable chunks. On this particular ride, a course preview for the Odyssey, I did not know the distance, but as the route doubles back on itself multiple times, I knew how high we had to climb. At this elevation, that’s almost the only thing that matters anyway. Distance, time, it’s all just a series of things to get you back to a high point.
By this time, we are nearing the top of the hardest climb, Bunker Creek. Ticking past 10,000 feet, I recognize the knoll that signals the end of the up where we will wrap back around to Sidney Valley. I’m deep in. The steeper sections are getting walked and right now, it feels like there are way too many of those.
Clicking past 10,000, then 10,100, and then 10,213, generally I’m feeling pretty good, but there’s this vexing annoyance in my left knee. There’s only one way out of this thing and that’s up, so I ignore the sensation and keep cranking.
There’s nothing worse than overused words. Ok, maybe overused punctuation marks, like the exclamation point (you get one a year).
So let’s go down a little SoTah mountain bike history. Back in the day, like way back in the day, there was a race. It started and ended at Brian Head. There was a 50-mile and a 100-mile option, depending on the year you raced and at one point, there was even a 3-day stage race that incorporated a majority of the course and added to it. Big names showed up. It was known for being incredibly difficult but also extremely fun.
Now a lot of this may have gotten exaggerated with the passing of time, but I have never spoken with anyone who actually raced the Brian Head Epic that doesn’t speak of it fondly with a high level of nostalgia. It was certainly Type 2 fun.
At the time, Epic was the right word. The bike didn’t yet exist and the idea that a burrito could be epic was still a thing of the future. The word aptly described what was a long, hard-fought battle. No one raced the Epic and got to the end and thought that their dinner needed to be described with the same word. And of course, this is why overusing words and exclamation points is dumb. We can take a word like epic and render it useless by applying it to everyday things when, by definition, an epic is anything but ordinary.
So let’s start there.
Epic – a long poem, typically one derived from ancient oral tradition, narrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the history of a nation.
That’s its definition as a noun and as an adjective, which is how it’s been overused for the past couple decades, is relating to or characteristic of an epic.
So it’s essentially a type of literature. One of the oldest and yet, still read epics are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The Odyssey details Odysseus’ trip home from the Trojan War. Even if you have never heard of any of this, you’re probably aware of some of the things that go down in this epic as they are very much laced into our modern psyche and language.
When we began looking at hosting an endurance mountain bike race in SoTah, all of this was bubbling around in my brain. I queried folks who had raced the Epic and started linking together the pieces that I could extract from their memories. One of the biggest things that has changed was the amount of traffic that the paved roads now see in the area. The course had crossed highways and even used them as a way to connect different trails. That was off the table for us for safety concerns.
I don’t remember exactly who it was, but I’m pretty sure it was Nate Dogg on Strava who sent over an activity. At first look, it was bonkers. It linked the town of Brian Head with a bunch of the typically shuttled runs off the peak, but instead of jumping into a motorized vehicle to return to the top, he rode back up. This was intriguing but had a couple of trail crossings and spots that needed some massaging, but when it was all said and done, we had ourselves a course that was just under 50 miles, climbed over 11,000 feet twice and never got below 8,500 feet. It includes Dark Hollow, Bunker Creek, Lowder Ponds all starting and ending in Brian Head.
I went out to ride it feeling that I needed to know if it was even feasible to send people traipsing through the backcountry in a way that was guaranteed to make them hurt. It all but destroyed me, but when I fell into my chair outside my car at the end of my ride, I knew we had something special.
Was it epic? Nah, it was going to be Homeric.
We had near perfect weather. The pedaling starting around 9:30 with an overcast sky. A sweater felt great as we made our way up to the middle of the flower on the course, the top of Sidney Valley. My sweater stayed on all the way to the bottom of Dark Hollow where I knew a long, hard fought climb was coming. The clouds stayed in place and a slight breeze kept us cool as we made our way back up to 10,500 feet.
Ripping down Bunker chasing John T Digger, a jacket would have felt nice, but I was fine without it. The trail was in great shape with no downed trees (#thanksbill). We ended up varying from the course a bit to finish ripping the new singletrack and then pedaled back up the dirt road to the bridge where we jumped onto Bunker proper and started the heinous climb back up to 10,500 feet.
The chill that the downhill had brought was replaced with it being perfect as our bodies created plenty of heat. It was at this point that my knee took a decided turn for the worse. It was just a sensation, a feeling of tightness that didn’t affect my pedaling or walking, but I had a feeling it was going to be trouble.
After pushing and pedaling our way back to 10,500 feet, the overcast skies had finally started to release a little precipitation and a rain jacket felt great as we climb back up to the junction to drop Marathon to Lowder Ponds. With the up and down, the knee kind of faded and I thought I might just be good.
Then we’re dumped out onto the Sidney Valley road and start to climb back up to camp feeling the fatigue of 40 miles at elevation with some seriously steep sections of climbing. We finished it out and as soon as I stepped off my bike, it was there. The longer I went without moving, the worse it got. I had hopes that it would fade enough that I would feel confident taking on the Odyssey this Saturday, but I knew that wasn’t going to be the case.
My whole reasoning for lining up for the Odyssey was to train for the Bristlecone which is in about a month. I feel like I put in the mileage to make Odyssey a reality, but if it means messing up my knee so I can’t pedal for three days straight on a vision quest, well, then I think I’ll be sitting this one out.
At 10,500 feet, it was always a spot of contemplation and rest. You don’t get there easily and once there, the course will take you right back down where you know that you have to make it back up. It’s not easy, but it will be worth it.
And one thing is for sure, the journey will be Homeric.
Embrace Chaos. Seek Discomfort.
