Do Unnecessary Shit
Sometimes, you just need to feel like you did something, like rip your legs off and self-flagellate with them, something.
For the past three years, the Alliance has been feeling like it did something to start out the New Year. It’s a little challenge we call Ten on Zen. The idea is to ride as many laps of Zen as you can within 10 hours. Mind you, most people can’t make it to 10 hours, so view that more as a limit not as a requirement. Some may take this as a race, but it is a personal challenge. Once you hit a certain point, the idea that you are beating anyone else up but yourself is insanity. When the downhills are the painful part, you are about there. When the rocks start moving, you have arrived.
This is also known as Doing Unnecessary Shit.
Absolutely Bonkers – New Course Records
As these things go, there is always someone faster, stronger, dumber, whatever, that is going to come in and go to the next level of what has been done.
This year’s Ten on Zen saw that in spades. Not only did we have the biggest turnout yet, but both the Singlespeed and Geary course records were bested.
Joe Dirt aka Josh Onarheim decided to beat everyone to the punch and went out a day early knocking out 11 laps in just over 10 hours. This bested Jonathon Davis’ previous course record by a lap. This is a seriously killer effort. I think Josh has set the bar very high and we are getting close to what is physically possible. There might be someone out there that could throw down 12 or maybe 13, but they are few and I have a feeling this one might stand for a while.
On the singlespeed side of things, Mills Pablo aka Millard Allen came out and casually busted out 9 laps and finished looking like he could have kept going all night. Based on how he looked coming in lap after lap, I think he could throw down a couple more putting the Singlespeed and Geary records very close to each other. It would be rad to see a Singlespeed best the Geary record, but we’ll have to see if that is even humanly possible.
Rule #3 – Keep smiling
Lap 3. I’m headed back up the climb feeling pretty good, but not quite good enough to keep pace with B-Rad. My legs don’t feel all that bad, or at least not as bad as I know they are going to feel, but there is certainly some burning and I’m breathing hard. Having been down this road once or twice, I knew I was approaching the Pain Cave. I wasn’t quite there, but I was getting ready to knock on the door.
Just as B-Rad leaves me in the dust, I look south. My mountain, aka Pine Valley, is covered in snow. It’s bordered by the red cliffs I’ve known my entire life and the sun is shining warming my back. My body is starting to revolt. It knows where this is headed and knows it’s going to be painful, but I just smile taking in the scenery and watching as the rider in front of me pulls away.
A few laps later and I am by myself. Or at least that’s how I remember it.
I had just successfully not died on the Zen Drop and was on my way into Hell Hole. I rounded the corner of the big rock and almost fell off my bike. Not because I was too tired, or because I had one of those stupid moments that you stop and plop, no I thought I was going to die. My heart was racing and my brain was in full flight mode. For a split second, the rock moved, it didn’t, but it did. And my brain was sure there was something there that was going to eat me and my best bet was to get the hell out of there. Luckily, I wasn’t in any condition to be moving anywhere at any kind of top speed and upon a second look, the rock had not moved, there was no mountain lion, tiger or bear and I was just a little bit loopy.
It wasn’t the first rock to move nor was it the last, but once I gathered my senses trying to recalibrate into reality, I smiled. I even giggled a little bit. This is kinda what I came for and it was being delivered. Tunnel vision, a lapse of memory, time-traveling, and stuff that moves when it doesn’t, and things you see that aren’t really there.
Yup, I arrived.
It’s important to know your why
At least that’s what they say, figure out your why and then you will know your passion, your life will just make sense, yada yada yada.
Well, I don’t know why. There is no rational reason for doing this. Maybe that’s why my life has never made sense, but I contemplated this question for the greater part of a lap and had to give up, shrug my shoulders and accept that it is absurd to ride your bike around in circles on an extremely difficult, chunky trail until you can’t. There is no why, it’s just what we do.
And at the end of it, when we are all broken, can’t walk, sit or stand, we high-five each other and commit to doing it all again next year.
Embrace chaos. Seek discomfort.
All photos courtesy of the Ten on Zen official documentarian, Heather Gilbert.