This one time at Fat Camp

A few weeks ago, while I was nursing weak lungs and a festering disappointment about my failed Tour Divide, I received a text from my friend Danni in Montana, who I've missed and haven't seen in at least two years. She asked if I wanted to join a group of friends for a backpacking trip in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, playfully dubbed "Fat Camp." I was unsure about my health and the logistics of wedging another trip into this already-packed year, but at the last minute decided I couldn't bear to miss it. 

"I SO want to join you," I replied. "Otherwise this will be the worst summer ever, seriously." 

"I'm really pathetically fat and out of shape, so don't worry even if you still have pneumonia," Danni wrote. 

I couldn't ask for better backpacking companions — self-contained and capable women from a variety of backgrounds. There's Amber, a fish biologist and fast mountain biker/skier from Kalispell, Montana; Lora, another biologist/skier/climber in Corvalis, Oregon; Danni, a lawyer/mother who is not fat and out of shape, but is understandably too busy to spend much time on recreation; me, with slightly asthmatic and decidedly clumsy tendencies who arguably doesn't bring a lot to the table on a trip like this; and Meghan, a fiercely fit trail runner who floats effortlessly up steep boulder fields, lives in Moab, Utah, and co-manages the popular ultrarunning news site, iRunFar.

 It's a natural and yet unique dynamic — five thirty-something women in the woods. With no husbands or boyfriends in sight, we were an anomaly, and nearly everyone we spoke with made some sort of comment along the lines of "wow, all girls." Calling the tradition "Fat Camp" is something of a play on this, I think. Fat Camp refers to the perpetual hunger one often experiences in the backcountry, but also alludes to the stereotype that the only reason women engage in physical activity is to lose weight.


I hate going hungry, more than I hate struggling under big backpacks, so I packed an enormous amount of food. I thought my supply was reasonable for five days, but I was still thinking more in terms of the Tour Divide, when I was mowing through 5,000-plus calories a day. Out here, even with difficult terrain that pushed our 11-mile days into the 5- to 9-hour range, 3,000 calories were about all I could stomach. I ended up with nearly three days' worth of extra food, but it's nice to know I can carry what I need for a week or more in the backcountry.

At the airport, my pack weighed 28 pounds before I added water, bear spray, electronics, and fuel. It was an unwieldy thing, and I have been spoiled by bikepacking, which lets the bike do the carrying and only requires extra leg work from me. Having all that weight on my upper body threw me off kilter. I stumbled and fell a number of times during the first two miles, which descended 2,000 feet into the Long Lake valley. Near the bottom I fell hard on my left arm, spraining my wrist. This minor injury would bother me a lot for the next two days, but healed just in time to negotiate the most difficult scrambles of the route.

Volatile thunderstorms greeted us on the climb up Pine Creek Canyon, and then it proceeded to rain for the next ten hours. We constructed a small tarp shelter and cooked soggy dinners before setting up our tents. My Big Agnes Seedhouse 2 is now six years old and leaks in a few places, but the two-person tent allowed enough room to keep my sleeping bag centered in the dry spot as it rained and rained through the night. It would have been more of a hazard if I'd shared the tent with someone else. Unfortunately I left my backpack in the collapsed vestibule, and most of my other gear got wet.

 Day two took us from our camp on Trapper Lake to the Highline Trail, and deeper into high country. The Wind Rivers are a spectacular mountain range, rising abruptly from the high desert of central Wyoming. During the Tour Divide, I rode along the foothills of these mountains en route to the flat expanse of the Great Divide Basin. That section of the GDMBR isn't particularly exciting, and from a distance, the snow-capped peaks of the Winds are merely pretty. I didn't really know what to expect going into this trip, but I now understand why this range is a backpacking paradise. Just one day of travel from any trailhead will put you deep into craggy alpine terrain, almost entirely undeveloped and mostly above tree line, with the soaring skylines of 13,000'ers all around you.

 We thought our plan to average 11 miles per day would give us lots of time for lounging, and it did. But travel wasn't easy — there was lots of climbing and the terrain was rocky, even when we had a trail to follow. We did manage enough extra time in the evening for a scramble above the Green River, where Danni and I laughed about being ill-prepared with Hokas. They're great shoes for running and all-day walking, but less ideal for shorter bouts of ankle-rolling, crack-wedging, boulder-hopping hiking.

 Day three took us to the end of the Green River Valley, over Shannon Pass, and then up the steep face of Knapsack Col. I once rafted a long section of the Green River across Utah, and it was fun to visit its topmost headwaters, where the wide, muddy river I know and love is just a clearwater trickle beside bursts of wildflowers.

 Scaling a steep boulder field toward Shannon Pass.

 Looking back down the Green River Valley. Those cliffs even remind me of the Book Cliffs north of Green River, Utah.

 Skirting the edge of Peak Lake.

 Starting the 2,000-foot climb up Knapsack Col. Here we met our first northbound CDT thru-hikers. They warned us of a tricky descent off the backside, and we could see weather forming on the pass. This especially made Meghan nervous, as she harbors a particularly sharp phobia of lightning. I'm also scared of electrical storms, but my greatest sources of terror in mountains are tricky descents in slippery, wet conditions.

 We worked to pick up the pace as best as we could, acknowledging that our not-quite-alpine start of 9:30 a.m. didn't serve us well. Above 11,000 feet I started to feel my airways tighten. I took a hit from my inhaler, which helped, but it was obvious that slow and steady is the only pace I have right now. We climbed increasingly steeper scree slopes as the sky darkened.

 The forbidding crest of Knapsack Col, elevation 12,280.

 Happily, rain and lightning held off, but the descent was indeed tricky — a 42-percent grade boulder field where the footing was anything but secure. Lora and Amber opted to walk/boot ski down the loose talus to the side of the boulder field, but I didn't feel confident enough in my balance to attempt this (a fall there had the potential to rip my pants, as one of the better outcomes.) Instead, I ended up in a minefield of extremely loose boulders, so I veered over to a snowfield to butt-slide. This proved to be a poor decision. From above, the snowfield appeared to end in scree, but in actuality the lower slope was glare ice covered in a thin layer of dirt. It was too steep and slippery to walk, and more sliding amid the ice-covered rocks would certainly rip up my pants — and likely the flesh on my butt and legs. With trekking poles still stashed in my pack, I had to balance my clown shoes on tiny protrusions of rocks, tip-toeing sideways toward the open scree slope, knowing any fall would result in torn-up legs — and I had already taken a lot of falls during this trip, on much easier terrain. It was nerve-wracking! Backpacking is stressful! But I made it without incident.

 Descending the talus amid the once-proud remnants of the Twins Glacier. The map I'd looked at before the trip made it look like the glacier filled the entire basin, enough so that I routed my GPS track around it, over a small pass and down a much steeper gully. (Meghan and Amber designed the loop, and I took their descriptions and created a GPS track that proved to be fairly accurate. This was a source of pride for me, as I'd drawn the track by looking at topo lines on an electronic map devoid of trails and names, and guessing the most logical route. Of course, I was the only one who cared, as I was the only one carrying a GPS.)

 Descending into the Titcomb Basin. The cold wind and rain finally picked up, and we shared a frigid lunch behind a boulder, shivering but starving. This was proving to be a tough 11 miles! Our day stretched out for nearly nine hours, and there wasn't even as much stopping as other days.

 Still, I'd be lying if I didn't admit there was lots of leisure. Even when things were a little cold and scary, we never failed to have lighthearted fun, giggling over the biceps of sleeveless climber boys and discussing all the ways Danni can condition her 17-month-old daughter to want to join her for a thru-hike of the CDT someday.

 Looking back at an imposing skyline — Mount Woodrow Wilson, The Sphinx, and Bonney Pass. This is just a few miles south of Gannett Peak, the highest mountain in Wyoming.


 We found a beautiful, secluded spot just below the lower Titcomb lake to set up camp for the next two nights.

 We kept it cozy.

It was a great breakfast spot. Every morning I ate oatmeal, a dollop of peanut butter, and coffee for breakfast. Lunch was salami and cheese on a tortilla, and dinner was Mountain House — a variety of the less-desired meals from the remnants of Beat's Iditarod stash. I also had lots of hot chocolate and tea — because what purpose is there to camping without hot drinks? What I brought far too much of was snacks. I couldn't even convince my friends to eat my granola bars, cookies and candy, even though Danni was only packing about 1,200 calories per day (she takes this Fat Camp thing seriously.)

On day four, we hoisted light packs for a day hike up Indian Basin.

 More boulder hopping. My quads and glutes were quite sore by day four, and I wished I had easier access to mountains like this. The Sierras are still reasonably far away from my home, but I'm pretty sure I'd at least lessen my clumsiness if I had more opportunities to develop mountain-specific fitness.

As you can see, it's hard not to spend the whole time looking up, which translates to tripping over things.

We climbed along the sad remnants of Harrower Glacier as we boulder-hopped our way to Indian Pass, at 12,200 feet on the Continental Divide.

On the pass, Danni found a cozy nook out of the cold.

 Lora and Amber found a high perch amid the blasting wind.

 Another group shot from Indian Pass.

The eastern Wind Rivers are almost entirely undeveloped wilderness, stranded between the Continental Divide and the Wind River Indian Reservation. In the Fitzpatrick Wilderness, most peaks and lakes are unnamed, there are very few trails, and tricky terrain and route-finding would keep one necessarily focused on the immediate present at all times — no cruiser daydreamy hiking here. Someday I would love to return to the Winds with ten days of food, a good map and compass, several self-made GPS tracks, real hiking boots, and the exuberance one can only feel while moving slowly and steadily through a truly wild place.

 Looking west again, a small tarn provides a splash of color beneath Knife Point Mountain. Still a wild place here, even on the popular side of the Divide.
 

Fremont Peak and flowers. So many flowers!

 In the evening, I went out for a stroll to take photos of the mountain paradise surrounding our camp.

 This place is just unreal.

On day five, all we had left to do was connect the loop.

 The previous day had been the only consistently sunny one, and rain returned for the last day. Overall, though, we lucked out with the weather — the only drenching rain came as we slept, and cold and lightning were minimal. As we hiked out, we heard reports of a massive storm approaching the area, set to bring heavy rain and snow to the higher elevations. Sure enough, as we drove away from Pinedale on Saturday, apocalyptic-looking clouds were approaching at breathtaking speeds.

"It looks like a Japanese painting," Danni said of the scenery as we raced raindrops out of the high country. We moved quickly to ensure enough time for hot-tubbing and copious amounts of fried food in Pinedale. It was a wonderful trip and a rare opportunity to get to know a fantastic region and a great group of women a little better. I'm a lucky girl to have had the chance to attend 2015 Fat Camp, even if I didn't lose any weight.

Thanks again, ladies! 

Getting my lungs back

After I left the Tour Divide, I spent the next week convalescing at my parents' house and feeling half dead. Temperatures in Salt Lake City were well into the 100s, and I could understand why weather services issue heat warnings for the elderly and infirmed. My body was so weak that I could barely cope with anything. I slept up to twelve hours a day, wheezed when I spoke, and became desperately winded while walking with my mother across a Target parking lot. An albuterol inhaler helped, but two different antibiotics didn't seem to do anything. After I returned to California, my doctor speculated I'd developed a viral pneumonia. My resting heart rate was still in the 90s, and he was alarmed that I'd damaged my heart. Several tests confirmed normal heart function, and enough time passed that concerns about pulmonary embolism also declined.

With its harsh symptoms and recovery, the "Tour Divide lung crud" is as sick as I've ever been. Admittedly I harbored jealousy about other Tour Dividers who bounced back from their respiratory illnesses as I struggled through a slow walk around the neighborhood, clutching an inhaler and frequently stopping to catch my breath on the day I'd hoped to finish the race. It's humbling to realize how quickly fitness can be reduced to zero, and this illness has been a reminder to never take health and vitality for granted. Physically moving through the world is my greatest source of joy, and it's also a gift that could be snatched away at any time, without warning.

I don't need to go into detail about how I spent the month of July, but it was a slow recovery that got a boost once I started running again. I wore a heart rate monitor and went for lethargic jogs. At first I couldn't breathe when my heart rate spiked to the high 130s. But before too long I didn't become winded until the 140s, and then the 150s. My usual tempo pace falls into the 160s, and I first achieved that about three weeks ago. Every run felt like an improvement to my lung health, while a couple of bike rides set me back. It was more difficult to control my exertion levels on the bike, and I had an asthma attack while mountain biking in Santa Cruz with my friend Jan. This prompted me to cancel a backpacking trip the following weekend, and I thought I would probably lose the rest of summer to the lung crud.

Still, I continued to make improvements with running, and boosted my mileage as I clung to hope for late summer adventures. I received an invitation to join friends on a five-day backpacking trip in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. Concerns about the altitude and other commitments prompted me to say no, but at the last minute I decided to go. It was a wonderful trip that I'll post about soon, but felt especially encouraged by a couple of outings in Salt Lake City that I tacked on at the end. It was just five weeks ago that I couldn't walk along a flat sidewalk without gasping. By Aug. 8, I felt strong enough to attempt Lone Peak.

Lone Peak is my childhood mountain. I used to gaze up at its higher slopes while walking to school. Looming over the southeastern corner of the Salt Lake Valley, Lone Peak is a broad massif with a prominent point 7,000 feet above the valley floor. If you start from the valley, you have to climb all of those 7,000 feet, and the loose-dirt trail that gains 1,200 feet per mile is the easy part. At 9,000 feet elevation the trail effectively ends, and the next 2,500 vertical feet entail difficult route-finding up a boulder-choked cirque, scrambling up rocky gullies and traversing a tricky knife ridge. I've summited Lone six or seven times in my life, and I forget how hard it is, every time.

Although it was 90 degrees in the valley, the air at 11,000 feet had a sharp bite. Still, the sky was clear, and there was almost no wind. I hesitated for long minutes over the tricky maneuvers of the knife ridge, trying to work up the nerve to wedge my Hokas into a crack or swing my whole body over a yawning couloir while clinging to an overhanging slab. My heart continued to beat steadily, as though it understood that adrenaline spikes might trigger a breathing attack that would not help the situation. I was surprised how easy it was to breathe up here. For weeks my lungs felt as though they were clogged with silt. For lack of a real medical explanation, the silt analogy is the best I have. Tight airways forced shallow breathing, but slight increases in effort seemed to help break up the "blockage." Progress was so gradual I hardly noticed, but this day was the first my lungs felt almost clear. I scrambled onto the table-sized boulder that forms Lone Peak, steadied my legs to stand amid the dizzying drops on all four sides, took a deep breath, and smiled. Then I quickly dropped back to squatting position, because damn, this peak is exposed.

After nine hours of steep hiking and scrambling on Sunday — not to mention the five days in the Wind Rivers before that — my legs were sore and creaky on Monday morning. But my lungs felt great, which is basically the same as being well-rested. I still had eight hours to kill before I needed to be at the airport, so I joined my dad for a nice jaunt up Mount Raymond and Gobbler's Knob, two 10,200-foot peaks in the heart of the Wasatch.

Dad said Mount Raymond was a bit of a scramble. It was fun scrambling, of course, and not too exposed. But my hamstrings felt shredded from lots of over-stretching on Lone Peak, and my legs were covered in cuts and bruises from less-than-graceful maneuvers. Breathing, however, remained steady. I was thrilled. What a gift this is — the ability to move through the world.

I won't take this for granted again. 

The last good day

I wrote about day eleven of the Tour Divide a month ago in the post, "On not letting go."  I promised myself that vignette was going to be the only thing I publicly wrote about the experience, but I've never been able to stick with resolutions to cut back on blogging. Rehashing each day over the past month has been cathartic, as it usually is (catharsis is 85 percent of the reason I continue to update this blog after ten long years.)

Day twelve dawned hopeful, as I rose from a patch of sage about 28 miles north of Wamsutter, Wyoming, where I'd effectively passed out after sleepily crashing my bike the previous evening. I'd pedaled 162 miles the previous day without an asthma attack, and I put most of the Great Divide Basin behind me. Watching the Northern Lights shimmering above this vast desert was one of the more incredible experiences of my life — even though I wasn't yet convinced the display wasn't just a vivid hallucination. (It was real. A severe magnetic storm on June 22 brought the strongest Aurora Borealis displays in more than a decade. Just one day after the summer solstice, far-northern latitudes were too bright to witness them. But they were quite spectacular in southern Wyoming.) Also, I'd come up with a plan to cope with my wheezy, winded status quo. The plan revolved around even lower exertion — I'd soft-pedal into dusty headwinds and walk steeper climbs. I probably wouldn't be that much slower because, well, I hadn't been that much slower.

The ride into Wamsutter was uneventful, and I reached the I-80 exit town just before 9 a.m. There was a Love's truck stop that turned out to not be a great resupply place. (They didn't have sunscreen. Who doesn't have sunscreen? Also, faster Tour Dividers had cleaned them out of all their string cheese. Boo.) But they did have fresh melon and a Subway, and anywhere I could get cheap coffee in the morning was perfect by my standards. Mike and Marketa rolled in at about 9:30 and left first, while I was outside next to a gas pump cleaning my bike with the free paper towels. I purposely waited about five more minutes for a gap to form, because I was feeling especially self-conscious about my slow pace. Mike and Marketa might encourage me to ride with them, and trying to keep up would be a sure ticket to breathing attacks.

South of town, this Tour Divide alternative to the GDMBR cut through the heart of hydraulic fracking country, with huge trucks and semi-trailers streaming through a veritable tunnel of dust. I managed to get behind a truck that was traveling at eight miles an hour — slower even than me! — and dampening down one side of the road with a water spray. This would have been a good thing for me, but trucks on the other side of the wide gravel road were kicking up even more dust as they moved into the shoulder, and the spray itself had a weird chemical smell that burned in my sinuses and throat. There was no way around the water truck without spiking my heart rate, and I could already feel my lungs closing.

About six miles past town, I stopped, looked back and thought, "Well this is it. I'm going back to Wamsutter."

But then I thought, "No, I can't quit here. Not here. Not so close to Colorado." I was convinced Colorado would save me.

This is a new section of the Tour Divide route, so it was all unknown to me. Once you pass through Wamsutter, you think you've got the hard part of the Great Divide Basin over with, but that isn't the case at all. Although you're no longer in the geographical boundary of the Basin, the shadeless sage desert continues for sixty more miles, all of the creeks are little more than patches of stagnant muddle puddles with a thick oil sheen, and fracking traffic remains heavy on dusty dirt roads. We were given cues for this section but not warned that there were no viable water sources for sixty miles. I'd planned to get water out of one of those nonexistent creeks, but luckily I am a water hoarder and left Wamsutter with nearly four liters plus two bottles of juice. Marketa wasn't so lucky and ran out of fluid fairly early in the day. I managed to catch Mike and Marketa about fifteen miles south of Wamsutter, and she was struggling.

Mike and Marketa were an interesting duo. Mike was in his 50s, from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, with this laid back attitude that would convince you nothing was ever hard for him. He was an Ironman triathlete who only recently took up long-distance cycling, and bikepacking was especially new to him. He was one of those guys who watched "Ride the Divide" and thought, "Hey, I could do that," and a year later he was riding the Tour Divide at a strong pace. Marketa was just 20 years old, from the Czech Republic, and quite chipper all the time even when she was hurting. Through the communication barrier I only learned a little about her, but Mike told me she was a semi-pro mountain biker who won races in the Czech Republic.

"How did you two hook up?" I asked Mike.

Mike told me they'd leap-frogged for several days before she finally latched onto him two days earlier. Their paces were well-matched, and she seemed very happy to have someone to talk with. I gathered that Mike also didn't understand everything Marketa said to him, but seemed to be a good sport about being on the receiving end when Marketa was feeling chatty.

"Sometimes, you know, you just need to let a woman talk," he said to me knowingly. I laughed.

I enjoyed Mike and Marketa's company, and I'd stop whenever they stopped, which became more frequent as Marketa struggled without fluid on this hot, dry afternoon. Both Mike and I offered her water, but she wouldn't take it. These days, Tour Divide rules explicitly forbid accepting support from anyone — even another racer — along the trail. I admired Marketa's integrity, but the experience led me to ponder why the bikepacking community has chosen to go down this road in competitive events. The sport was pioneered from a self-supported, Fastest Known Time / Individual Time Trail standpoint. These routes can be challenged any time, and those who don't decide to line up for the "race" don't have the advantage of other riders present on the course. From a fairness standpoint, it makes sense that competitors can't share something as simple as a swig of water or a candy bar. Still — these contrivances to pretend you're all alone out there are often confusing. I chatted with others who were frequently unsure what constituted "support" — one questioned whether taking advantage of a bike shop that stayed open after closing hours was unfair, and another believed that visiting a medical clinic was not allowed under the rules. I got the sense that many people felt like they were riding on egg shells, with the SPOTs tracking their every move, and everything they did was open to misinterpretation. There aren't easy solutions to keeping this kind of self-supported, self-policed race format fair without tightening rules to encourage solitude. But I still think it's unfortunate that in an aggressively competitive ultramarathon like UTMB I can offer aid to a fellow racer, but on a weeks-long adventure like the Tour Divide, I have to stand back while another person suffers, and do nothing.

After battling a series of steep rolling hills that the road just shot straight up and down, the three of us stopped together in Savery, Wyoming, where someone from the local museum left a cooler of water out on a picnic table. Mike and I debated whether this constituted illegal support, but I argued that this was here for everyone, and even if it wasn't, we could just walk into the museum bathroom and get water there. Once we got the ethics debate out of the way, we all enjoyed the water thoroughly. I remembered that I had camped at this museum before, during my bike tour from Salt Lake City to Syracuse, New York, in 2003. Back then we set up our tents on the lawn and played with a stray cat, who I ended up giving the tuna I planned to eat for lunch the following day, because she looked hungrier than I'd ever be. "2003, huh? You really are an old-timer," Mike said to me, and I smiled. I've been a bike tourist for nearly 14 years now, and it's a major part of my personal history. There's really nothing better than traveling by bike.

I sure was excited to see this sign. Wyoming was done! My suffering was over! Of course it's ridiculous to believe that an end can be drawn by something as arbitrary as a state line, but this is the kind of mentality we foster in efforts like the Tour Divide. It's too huge to conceptualize the big picture, so we compartmentalize it into what are ultimately arbitrary pieces. "I you can make it to Butte, you can finish." "Once you leave Montana, the hardest days of climbing are behind you." "Once I escape Wyoming, all the dust is going to magically settle, my lungs are going to clear up, and I will fly!"

For tonight, I had the Brush Mountain Lodge to anticipate. Brush Mountain was my only real carrot on the route. In 2009, the proprietor of the lodge, Kirsten, walked outside and flagged me down at 10:30 at night when I was in a particularly dark emotional space. She invited me inside, fed me fresh fruit, offered a warm bed, and more than anything else, was a kind and understanding voice when I needed a friend. Of all the "support" I enjoyed in 2009, the Brush Mountain Lodge was one that truly made all the difference. I couldn't wait to go back. "I just need to make it to Brush Mountain," I had decided before the start, "and I'm as good as there."

The 23-mile climb from Savery was a grinder, and although the scenery was beautiful and I was stoked to be in Colorado, the struggles mounted early. Soon my lungs were constricting and I stopped in a cloud of mosquitoes to try to take in more water. Gasping led to panic, and this ignited another good session of bawling. I actually cried for the better part of twenty minutes, mashing pedals and gasping between sobs because this really wasn't helping with my breathing difficulties, but the mosquitoes were too thick for me to stop. I couldn't even tell you why I was so upset. Maybe I was crying because it was hard. It was just too hard. I was finally coming around to the truth that my weakened body and lungs wouldn't be able to sustain this effort, not for a thousand miles or a hundred. No amount of patience or persistence could save my race. I understood, but not out loud. Only in sobs.

I arrived at Brush Mountain just after sunset, to the customary warm reception. Mike and Marketa were there, and Kirsten was cooking up cheeseburgers for everyone. She asked about my ride and I raved about the beautiful sunset, the northern lights I'd witnessed the previous night, and all of my memories of this scenic valley and our first meeting six years ago. When coughing erupted, I tried to tamp it down with the big jug of ice water on the table. I was so incredibly happy. Even though I'd been so sad just minutes earlier, I'd gotten that emotional gunk out of my system and swung around to renewed optimism. It was going to be all right. It was all going to be all right.

That night, I posted my daily report to Facebook: "Sunburn. Dozens of mosquito bites. Lungs filled with dust. The physical challenges of the divide have been quite different this time around, and I'm not even quite sure how to battle what seems to be a worsening allergic reaction. But I made it to Brush Mountain Lodge, and it feels like coming home."

But ... be brave

Up at 9,000 feet, with frost coating my bivy sack, it was finally cool enough that I made it through the night without dousing myself in sweat ... or at least that's what I assumed. There were a few coughing bouts, but I'd become used to those. Night coughing was just part of the waste removal routine, like peeing. But the night sweats were disconcerting. They caused feverish, weird dreams and sucked all the moisture from my body, leaving me dehydrated, exhausted, and achy in the morning. If I could stay away from the night sweats, I actually woke up feeling okay. 

It helped that I woke up here, on the shoreline of Wind River Lake. It was a day-use picnic area, but I stashed my bike in the outhouse for bear safety and did a little stealth camping down the shoreline. I sat on a picnic table eating my morning bars and breathing frosty air that seemed to flow freely into my lungs. Today was going to be a good day. I could feel it.


Coasting along the Brooks Lake Road, it didn't take long before self-generated dust clouds were already aggravating my breathing. The last time I rode the Divide, this entire segment was covered in snow and mud, forcing a gooey slog that required more than three hours to travel six miles. I thought it was so terrible then, but right now, I missed it. I missed the snow. I missed the mud. The Divide had become this hot, dry, dusty, mosquitoey place that was tearing me apart.

"The only reason I got through this the first time was because 2009 was a wet and cold year," I thought. I'm fair-skinned, heat-sensitive, allergy-prone, and possibly (apparently) a little bit asthmatic. My body is just not well-designed for the summertime outdoors.

After a refreshingly frigid coast down Highway 26, I found the Lava Mountain Lodge opening up their small store at 7 a.m. I was just in time for morning coffee and a microwaved breakfast burrito. Heaven! Sarah Jansen was there and offered to let me take a shower in her room. It was tempting, as I hadn't had a shower since Helena. But I was already considering shooting for an early day in Pinedale and spending another full night indoors with lots of available fluids, in hopes of giving my ragged lungs some rest and relief. 

Once I was nicely saturated with caffeine, I started up Warm Springs Road with my new old secret weapon — cinnamon bears. Even though I'd already had protein bars and a burrito in the morning, I intended to keep a steady supply of sugar coming in throughout the day, to see if that helped with my energy levels. I'd spent the early days of the Divide really trying to make the nuts, cheese, and dried fruit diet work. Constantly needing to process complex calorie sources — and thus avoiding them when I was struggling — only seemed to deepen my physical malaise. No, candy it would have to be.

The route veered up a new segment above Union Pass, a steep and rocky climb on ATV doubletrack that emptied into a high-altitude basin with breathtaking views of the Wind River Mountains. It was one of my favorite segments of the route, and I relished the sensation of floating high above the world as I laid into the pedals with all of the cinnamon-bear-fueled energy I could muster. I just wanted to be a cyclist again, to breathe that fire again, to move freely through the world in the way I knew my body was capable. I just wanted a day that wasn't a struggle from the start ... that wasn't the same amount of struggle whether I was pushing up a hill or passed out on a picnic table ... that wasn't a struggle just to do the most basic task in a terrestrial animal's existence. I was tired of struggling to breathe.

Sarah passed shortly after the descent and complimented me on keeping up with my daily mileage goals, which I hadn't really calculated, but I was somewhere in the range of 1,300 miles on day ten. "I'm only going to get slower," I said with a resigned sigh. Sarah mentioned she was planning to stop in Boulder, which is about twelve miles past Pinedale, in hopes of getting the Great Divide Basin out of the way in one big effort the following day. I thought this might be possible for me as well, if I could clear out my congestion. I'd ride to Atlantic City during the day and tackle the Basin overnight, when the wind, dust, and heat likely wouldn't be as bad. Then I'd be in Colorado, home to high-elevation coolness and afternoon thunderstorms, and maybe, just maybe, I'd could conquer this crud, once and for all. 

Although these optimistic hopes flitted through my thoughts, my mind's wanderings increasingly slipped into the stagnant tailings pond of my frustration and malaise. I wanted to keep fighting, but why? My old mantra, "Be Brave, Be Strong," whispered from a far distance, but these words no longer had the tone of triumph and hope that they once did. "Be Strong" sounds mocking when when you're in the grips of progressively deepening physical weakness. "Be Brave" sounds sarcastic when the battle is clearly futile, and soon I only heard this phrase the way Modest Mouse sang it in what had become my favorite song to listen to on the Divide — "Be Brave" 

Well the Earth doesn't care, and we hardly even matter

We're just a bit more piss to push out its full bladder

And as our bodies break down into all their rocky little bits

Piled up under mountains of dirt, and silt,

And still the world, it don't give a shit,

But ... Be brave! Be brave! Be brave! Be brave! Be brave! (Be brave!)

It may sound like I had already given up hope, but I really hadn't. I clung to the theory that dust and allergies were the root cause of my malady, that I just needed to get out of Wyoming to find relief, and that I'd be healthy again by the time I reached the hard sections in New Mexico. When the nihilistic thoughts crept in and questioned why I needed to keep pedaling, I'd argue back. "I want to be brave. I want to be strong. I want to feel alive. Isn't that enough?"

Often, people who participate in these endurance events compare the experience to living a whole life in a day. In the case of the Tour Divide, it's a few weeks, but the sentiment in the same. When I look back on my first Divide ride, I remember it as distinct periods of wide-eyed childhood, angsty adolescence, strong young adulthood, and wizened but weary older adulthood. This time around I jumped very quickly into the elderly years, and in retrospect, believe the experience served as a window into old age. My mind swirled with a barrage of hopes and dreams, and often utter awe: Look where you are! Look! But when the dullness set in, I'd stare off into the distance with a gray pall over my thoughts and emotions, and I'd begin to understand how someone could wile away the last years of their lives staring at a television. Even more than my weakened body, my mind craved a deep and dreamless sleep that wouldn't come.

I understood the desire, too, to rage, rage against the dying of the light. I devoured cinnamon bears and demanded more from my legs on the rolling descent from Union Pass. But in the Green River Valley, I ran up against a wall of wind fortified by relentless dust. A steady stream of vehicles kept the dust in motion on that bumpy road, and my breathing became alarmingly raspy. I started coughing, and then I was gasping, and then I was sprawled in the sage next to the road, clutching my chest and panicking.

I couldn't do this anymore, I couldn't do this anymore, I couldn't do this anymore ... but, breathe, breathe, breath, breath. Be brave, be brave, be brave. (Be brave!)

I managed to calm my breathing, but after that I was terrified of hard efforts, and even more scared of the clouds of dust, which I couldn't do anything about. The asthma attack had frightened me, but even more than that, it left me utterly exhausted, in a way that even cinnamon bears couldn't cure. I didn't feel sleepy, even, just empty. After the attack, there were 35 more miles into Pinedale that I remember almost nothing about.

Yet optimism stayed with me. I do remember walking into a hotel lobby, pulling down my face mask, and taking a deep breath. My lungs were so congested that it stopped short and caused me to cough violently, but I let myself believe this was my first healing breath of dust-free indoor air, which I planned to spend the next ten hours breathing. I didn't even care about a shower, or access to real food, or even sleep. Oxygen is and always will be the top priority.

At home with the ghosts in the national park

Night sweats woke me up before my dawn alarm, so I stripped off my soaked clothing and draped it over my bike before crawling back into the bivy on top of my sleeping bag. Sometime later I awoke in a fit of coughing, burst out of the bivy and stumbled barefoot through prickly bushes to vomit. It was just the coughing that made me throw up, but the result left me feeling weak and feverish. I laid down on the dirt in my underwear, feeling the cool Earth on my clammy skin, and took quick and shallow breaths as I stared up at the tree canopy, framed by stars. A minute or two passed before I stood up, shivering heavily, and crawled back into my sleeping bag, which was wet.

Before these little emergencies, I'd been so deeply asleep that I floated through them with a kind of disoriented detachment. When dawn came, I wasn't sure if any of it had happened. But my clothes were still draped over my bike, and my head was pounding. Early mornings had turned from being the best part of the day to the worst. But nights weren't so great either.

My Tour Divide has been a difficult experience to recap, because it reads as though I was miserable and sick nearly all of the time. There were lots of pleasant and enjoyable stretches that don't necessarily make the trip highlights reel when illness factored so heavily into the experience as a whole. I suffered through some difficult bouts, but the simple act of waking up to sunlight, eating terrible protein bars, and getting back on my bike would improve my outlook — and my physical state — immensely.

I enjoyed quite a few good miles in the morning, with smoother pedaling down the remainder of the rail trail (surface conditions improve considerably as it descends along the Warm River) and a nice spin through Idaho farm country with the Grand Tetons looming over the horizon. I collected water from a sprinkler that tasted like ginger ale, and found a smashed brownie from Whitefish in my frame bag, which made me immensely happy.

Still, the miles of easy breathing were now entirely in the past. Even on short climbs, I often had to stop before the top of the hill to catch my breath. I was doing just that on a pullout above the Fall River when a cyclist approached. It was Josh Daugherty. He had this intense look on his face that I can only describe as crazy eyes, but he did stop to say hello.

"Where's Brett?" I asked.

"Oh, back there," Josh said, gesturing down the road.

"Did you guys stay at the campground?"

Josh shook his head. He told me they stayed back on the rail trail, probably very near the spot where I camped, after both of them crashed several times in the dark. After being turned away from Subway, both of them were frustrated and had some sort of tense exchange. Brett was the veteran, Josh explained, and he respected Brett's wisdom, but he was unhappy with how the race was going so far. Their sleep had been poor, and their stops weren't efficient. So he was riding ahead this morning. He didn't have a plan, he said. He just needed some space to think.

"People keep telling me not to worry about guys passing you, that it's just about finishing. But that's not what I want." Josh paused for several seconds as he turned his crazy-eyed expression toward the mountains. "I want to chase dots."

The emotion resonated with me. I don't consider myself an overtly competitive person, but I admire that drive in others. It's a fire that can fuel great things, or spectacular meltdowns, but either way, it makes for a compelling narrative.

"You seem strong," I said. "You should go for it."

Josh thanked me and headed down the road. I didn't expect to see him again. A week and a half later, he posted this update:

"On day 9, I woke up frustrated and rode away from my company, sort of by accident, just wanting to work out the angst. Then a switch inside me flipped and I realized I was going solo and there was no turning back. I was done racing with fear. I would rather fail riding my heart out than ride safely to the finish. I wanted to find the very bottom of me, and to answer questions about myself that I didn't believe I would get another chance to again. Those guys that had been passing me were riding their hearts out. They looked shelled and exhausted in their battle for some place in the mid 20's or 30's or wherever. There's a mocking title for those guys, the "mid-pack heroes", and it's not a flattering title, but it's probably fair. And I wanted to be one of them. So I joined the battle and the true meaning of the event revealed itself to me. If I raced without fear and gave the very best of myself then I would be happy. If I fought bravely and opened myself to whatever experience the journey had in store for me then I could be satisfied with myself."

Josh was the twelfth person to finish the Tour Divide in 18 days, 12 hours and 19 minutes. The fact that he didn't really start racing until nearly halfway through the ride, and turned what I considered a "clinging to 21 days if everything else goes well" pace to an 18.5-day finish, is impressive. In my opinion, Josh's late-race push was one of the more incredible, if quieter, performances of this year. No doubt it was a meaningful journey for him.

When I read Josh's post, it made my heart shudder a little. "I wanted to find the very bottom of me." This is what I had wanted, too. Not to race without fear, as fear is one of the emotions I seek and embrace in these endeavors. But I did want to race with an open heart, without expectation, free from self-doubt, fixed perceptions, and the limitations of my body. "Those limitations are in my mind," I'd tell myself. "I can choose something more."

But I was growing weary of the battle, a deepening struggle just to do what I thought should come easily to me. How can I explore my own inner depths when I can barely stay afloat in the shallow end? I wasn't fighting to be great. I was fighting to be a vaguely adequate version of myself, and that in itself was very discouraging. Weakness was winning. In these endeavors, who do we have to blame but ourselves?

The Ashton-Flagg Ranch Road cut me to shreds. Wrapping around the northern edge of the Tetons, this wide gravel road was extremely dusty and constantly under siege by Saturday traffic. I descended into Flagg Ranch in a state of distress, took a long break at the resort while sucking down slushy drinks in the lobby, and still felt no better as I climbed toward Grand Teton National Park. There was a tiny, 500-foot climb on pavement past the resort. Refusal to allow myself a break on such an easy ascent resulted in my second breathing attack of the trip. Similar to when the bull charged me, my airways tightened and I began gasping. But here I wasn't frightened, and I wasn't doing anything difficult. I was just weak.

I coasted down to Jackson Lake almost in tears, although this wouldn't yet qualify as my cry for the day. I still didn't feel confident that my lungs wouldn't seize up again, so I pulled over at a picnic area and laid down on a table. Weekend traffic streamed past, but the picnic area was empty. One of the most gorgeous and popular views of the Tour Divide — the snow-capped Tetons towering behind a sparkling Jackson Lake — was in view as I tapped an update into my satellite messenger: "Really sucking wind. So much dust I can barely breathe." It seemed like a good idea to alert others of my condition in case I lost consciousness and couldn't be roused.

I napped for maybe fifteen minutes and woke up feeling a little better. My breathing had improved and I no longer felt as though I might suffocate. As I pedaled toward the park exit, a man on a road bike caught up to me and slowed to chat for a while. Mark was a retired law enforcement officer from Florida who worked summers at a Wyoming ranch. We talked about cycling, horseback riding, self-defense techniques and grizzly bears as I grew more winded. Mark had slowed down quite a bit to keep my pace, which was hovering between 12 and 13 miles per hour, but it was killing me. Slowing to something less than 12 mph seemed pretty embarrassing, given I was a bike racer and all that, so I worked to keep it up as he spun easy. I told him about my breathing struggles. "Must be the elevation," he said. "Gets me too."

"Yeah," I said. "It probably is just the elevation."

Mark turned off my route after a few miles, but it was nice to have his company while it lasted. It helped me ride better, I decided, because I wasn't so fixated on feeling bad. Just before sunset I had my big cry for the day, though, over mosquito bites. I'd accumulated dozens of bites over the past week, and the Buffalo Valley bugs were the worst yet. I was not hesitating to drench myself in DEET, and they still found unprotected patches of skin to ravage. I'm allergic to mosquitoes. Usually the bites just swell to quarter-sized, dark red welts. But as they accumulate, the reactions sometimes extend to more extreme swelling, watery eyes and sneezing. Once, after picking up about thirty bites during a hike, I came down with a fever. I wondered if mosquitoes were to blame for my respiratory distress. This wondering turned to bawling, and once I had the daily meltdown out of my system, I felt better.

I still had to race the mosquitoes though, and lack of breaks caused my lungs to start constricting again. It was another dizzy battle to schlep myself up Togwotee Pass, where I planned to camp on Brooks Lake. At one point I decided, "This day hasn't been all that bad. It probably won't get much worse." But of course I didn't know.

This heart of mine is just some broke machine

Beat finally asked me about the strange titles of my Tour Divide posts. They're lyrics from the most recent Modest Mouse album, "Strangers to Ourselves." I listened to this album rather incessantly during the ride, and it became the background score to many high and low moments along those dusty roads. The lyrics fit well with the stubborn optimism and strife of a slow decline, with just enough humor and nihilism to beat back despondency. Now I can't think back to the Tour Divide without hearing these songs in the background. After I wrote about "Of Course We Know" on day three, it just made sense to go with the theme. I suppose that's strange, but hey ... this is my blog. 

Now, where was I? Oh yes, Big Sheep Creek canyon in southern Montana. In the morning I woke up with a piercing headache and disorientation. I blinked through pounding confusion as the world came into focus — high cliffs loomed over the narrow canyon, but just enough sunlight swept over the rim to illuminate patches of sage near my camp. The outside of my bivy sack had the usual layer of dew, but the inside of my sleeping bag was soaked, as though I'd been sweating heavily through the night. I'd slept the sleep of the dead for six hours without waking up once to cough, and now my lungs felt like they were filled with sand. I tried to force a cough as I stood up, but this only made me dizzy. 

Pedaling down the road, my head continued to pound, and nausea discouraged me from eating anything. "Coffee," I thought. "I just need coffee and breakfast." But this dizzying headache surpassed typical morning malaise. I'd become accustomed to feeling my best first thing in the morning. And I'd slept for six solid hours! Maybe I needed those midnight coughing fits to clear my lungs. It had seemed like a crazy theory up until that point — this notion of slow suffocation because my lungs were too clogged to properly filter the air. I still doubted this theory had medical merit, but maybe I really wasn't getting enough oxygen?

I pedaled into Lima just in time for the morning rush, with at least eight bikes parked outside Jan's Cafe along the usual truckers and interstate travelers. It became clear as soon as I stepped inside that breakfast was going to happen at glacial pace, but I didn't really care. My health was declining and I'd already lost a fair amount of motivation for racing the Tour Divide. I just wanted to survive.

I sat down at a table with Eleanor, Brett Stepanik and Josh Daugherty. I'd met Brett and Josh the previous afternoon at Russ's lodge. We had lunch together and among the usual Tour Divide chatter, I learned that Brett was a dedicated photographer who was carrying a large film camera and dozens of rolls of film in his messenger bag, and Josh was a soon-to-be new father. They'd slept up in the canyon the previous night as well, and were taking advantage of cell reception to make calls and check news from the outside world. The conversation I'd interrupted was about the race standings. Josh informed us that the next person to leave would be in 28th position — then 29th, 30th, and so on.

I couldn't help but curl my lips in a little smirk, because I found it amusing that he'd taken the time to extrapolate this information. My last few days had been such a struggle that my mind had wandered far away race mentality. It was jarring to realize that this was still very much what we were all out here doing, out here on these lonely roads, battling with everything we had for weeks of our lives — we were just jostling for position in a race. But then my next thought was, "30th out of 150? That is not so terrible." I was somewhat surprised to learn that the entire field hadn't passed me, at least not yet.

Beyond Lima, the route travels east through the Centennial Valley. This is one of my favorite segments of the GDMBR, largely because it's the first time the route travels across a wider expanse of open space. Many cyclists dislike it for this same reason, but I love the sense of freedom and wonder that these empty spaces spark. I can look toward a strip of road or hillside that's three or six or ten miles away, realized I'm heading that way, and by the time I get there, enough time will have passed that it will be slightly different. Animals will skitter by, the wind will stir up dust, clouds will cast moving shadows, grass will flow like waves in the breeze, and all of these beautiful details will continue dancing on a stage that at first glance looks desolate and stagnant.

Of course, this is still the Continental Divide, where imposing mountains and their volatile weather are never far from view. There was a fierce south wind that slowed my speed to five miles an hour when I had to ride directly into it. Worse than that, the wind kicked up so much dust that my already congested lungs developed the alarming sensation that they were on the verge of closing up again. Whenever I felt my airways constricting, I stopped and turned around to cough and pull up the buff I'd started using as a face mask. But if I was honest with myself, all the fabric really did was block air flow, because my lungs were already filled with gunk. Still, it seemed I should prevent more dust from entering my airways, if I could.

Concentrated slow pedaling did at least keep me ahead of thunderstorms. Near the pass, Brett and Josh caught up. We rode together for a short distance, but they quickly outpaced me. Sarah Jansen and one of the Australian Daves passed earlier as well, riding seemingly twice the speed I could muster. "How are these people so fast?" I wondered. It occurred to me that at this point we were still on a 20- to 21-day pace, and actually, if I looked at it objectively, I was still having a good race. I was pain-free, managing my sleep well, still mostly sticking to my nutrition plan, being relatively efficient (the two-plus-hour stop in Lima notwithstanding), and damn it, I was still keeping up with fast people. But I was fading. I could feel myself fading. If I didn't kick this lung crud soon, my strength was going to run out.

Red Rock Pass — the iconic state line sign that everybody on the Tour Divide photographs. In the preceding miles, Josh and Brett used some colorful language to describe how excited they were to be leaving Montana. I was actually ahead of them again at this point, because they stopped to chat with some locals in a bike shop van. The locals said they knew Eleanor and were driving out to surprise her. They also offered beer, which I refused but found it amusing that their trail magic was actually terrible for exhausted bikers with nearly a thousand miles on their legs who were climbing up the Continental Divide. I'd probably pass out or vomit before I made my way through a beer. It was more sabotage than support.

I reached the Subway at Mack's Inn with just twenty minutes to spare — it closed at 7 p.m., which I didn't realize until they turned Josh and Brett away a half hour later. I was not feeling well but forced down a chicken footlong just the same. The sun was still up and I hoped to get some rail trail miles out of the way before I collapsed for the night. My lungs were bad; breathing was difficult, but at least the rail trail was flat.

The rail trail is another infamous segment of the Divide — 30 miles along an old rail bed that cuts a thin, straight line through the forest atop a thick bed of volcanic sand. In 2009, I rode the rail trail in a rainstorm. While the trail was badly washboarded then, the rain did tamp down the sand, and I had *no* idea just how slow and sandy this thing was. Even after letting as much air out of my tires as I dared, I still swerved and sank and barely gained enough traction to grind out five miles per hour. Adding insult to indignity, it was a Friday evening and several dune buggies were crawling the trail. About two miles in, I got stuck behind an older couple in a one of these vehicles, inching forward at an unfathomably slow pace. I mean, I caught up to them while pedaling a jerky 5 mph, and they might as well have been standing still. The trail was only as wide as their vehicle, so all I could do was inch behind them. Their speed was too slow for me to keep traction, so eventually I had to walk, and still I was shadowing them without losing ground. How could this be fun? How could this possibly be an enjoyable Friday night activity, to drive a dune buggy at two miles per hour on a flat bumpy trail through a forest with no views?

Finally I found a place to get around them, which I did by jogging through brush. For good measure I walked a fair bit farther so they could see how slow they were actually going, then remounted my bike and commenced grinding the pedals. The route passed through several residential areas, and each intersection had a sign for the "National Recreation Trail."

"Recreation? How could this be fun for anyone?" I wondered. "It's crap to bike, it's bumpy and slow to drive, it would be awful to run or hike. They should designate this a national torture trail."

Clearly, I was becoming very grumpy, and it only went downhill from there. The sun set and the trail emerged in these pretty wetlands, where the ruts and washboards were much worse. Even at the blistering pace of five miles per hour, I swerved enough to get bucked off my bike. I negotiated the crash landing badly and ended up with my face in the sand.

This ignited what would become a nightly incident for me — a solid ten minutes, at least, of shameless sloppy bawling. Being charged by a bull the previous evening is what set off my first emotional outburst. But every night thereafter I'd find something to cry about, and then I'd really indulge in the cry. Looking back to those nights, when thoughts and emotions were muted behind a thick, dull haze, I think on some level I was clinging to anything I could still feel. Even if that feeling was despair, over something quite minor, I embraced it with as much vigor as I could muster. Until there was nothing left.

I hated the rail trail so much. I wanted to get it all out of the way before morning, but then I crashed a second time, and then a third, before finally conceding that I was riding quite badly. I followed a faint deer trail to a hidden cove above the Warm River, then dislodged the contents of my bike bags. On this night I still had some lucidity, so I went through the ritual of wet-wiping the dust away from my skin, slathering Neosporin on my butt, and opening my sleeping bag all the way, so hopefully I wouldn't wake up soaked.

Within seconds of laying down I was out — which is not like me at all. I'm a terrible sleeper, more so in unfamiliar camping situations, and especially so in endurance racing situations. But it had been a long time since I'd truly exhausted myself.