We're lucky that we slept

During the Tour Divide I always felt best in the morning, which is the opposite of my usual modus operandi. Regardless of the total hours of sleep I managed the night before, mornings always brought cool air and clear lungs. I indulged in deep gulps of sweet-tasting air and gazed up at the pink sky with renewed optimism. This would be the day the sun wouldn't scorch my skin, dust wouldn't fill my airways, and gunk wouldn't clog my lungs. This day, I'd be free.

A number of riders had trickled into the campground during the night, and it seemed I was the first to leave. Without realizing it, I'd ascended about half of the climb up Fleecer the previous evening, and was surprised when I reached the wall only a half hour into my day. I pushed my bike up an eroded track, skirted around a saddle, and dismounted again to hike downhill. Brave or reckless cyclists will ride their loaded bikes down Fleecer, but it looks like this:

It only gets steeper as you descend. Once you go over the horizon line, you've entered the no-brake zone and just have to hang on and hope for the best. No thank you. I prefer to have my bicycle endeavors kill me slowly, through gradual suffocation.

Even pushing downhill is more of a shoe-ski than a hike. Clumsiness caught me and I ended up on my butt, after which I inched downhill at an embarrassingly glacial pace. The reward following the downhill hike-a-bike is a screaming descent through Jerry Creek canyon, and I was grateful that morning lucidity let me enjoy every spark of exhilaration and joy.

I reached Wise River just before 9. Eleanor was sitting in front of the tiny town's general store, eating a breakfast sandwich.

"Did you stay in town last night?" I asked.

"No, I camped in the canyon," she answered.

"So you went over Fleecer in the dark?"

She nodded. "I crashed, pretty bad."

"That sucks; are you okay?"

She shrugged and looked the other way. "Yeah, I'm okay." She sounded dejected.

Whenever I meet someone clearly having a low point during these types of efforts, I'm always at a loss about what to say. I'm not a pep talker, and hate to be pep-talked — few conversations are more grating than those served with a heavy dose of artificial cheeriness. But shallow sympathies and small talk aren't exactly helpful either.

"Do you need anything?" I asked. She shook her head, and I wouldn't have been able to offer anything, anyway. Race rules stipulate that nothing can be shared among competitors, just to make everything fair. I purchased my own breakfast and sat down in the sunlight.

Brett Stepanik and Russ Kipp at the Montana High Country Lodge

The scenic byway over the Pioneer Mountains was steeper than I remembered, but I made relatively strong progress to Polaris, home of the Montana High Country Lodge. The proprietor, Russ Kipp, first entered the Tour Divide micro-community back in 2010, when cold and wet racers came stumbling up to his doorstep to inquire about rooms. The hunting and fishing lodge is more of a reservation-only establishment, but he welcomed them inside and has actively promoted his services to Tour Divide cyclists ever since.

I'd already indulged in a long breakfast stop in Wise River and considered passing by, but realized it would be a mistake not to visit a friendly place that's become so deeply embedded in Divide culture. I'm glad I did. I had a chance to chat with a few riders who I hadn't yet met. Russ's wife served a hot lunch of chicken marsala, and Russ prepared brown-bag dinners with a turkey sandwich, brownie, and an apple. The Montana High Country Lodge offered an experience similar to the daily support stations in the Freedom Challenge, where families set you up in their homes, stuff you with homemade meals, and generally dote on you to your heart's content. It was a bit of harsh reminder about how quiet and lonely of a place the Divide can be, but it is wonderful that these islands of kindness exist at all.

As I was leaving the lodge, Eleanor rolled in, looking much more upbeat. I was happy to see her, as her demeanor in Wise River left me wondering whether she was going to go on. She seemed so shattered then, but of course I should have realized that was only temporary. Out here, we get so caught up in our own struggles that it's easy to forget that everyone else is fighting a battle, everyone else is getting knocked down, and everyone else has to find the strength to keep going, every day. We all have to carry our own weight, but nobody is alone. This is what I value most about racing. Sharing difficult objectives with others lends depth and perspective to my own experiences.

I pedaled toward Ye Old Bannack Road — home to miles and miles of much-maligned death mud, — as dark clouds gathered overhead. Bile filed my stomach, because getting caught in thunderstorms on Bannack Road ranks near the top of my list of things on the Divide that scare me. Bannack Road was established in 1862 as a freight route between Corrine, Utah, and Bannack, Montana — two towns that don't really exist any more. As such, it's a dirt road from nowhere, to nowhere, through the middle of nowhere, and nobody uses it. The maps warn of fifty miles of nothing, and if you get caught in unrideable mud anywhere along that stretch, you could be in for a very long wallow.

Luckily the clouds continued rolling south, but they brought with them a gusting wind that renewed my lungs' daily battle with dust. My pace slowed considerably, and I could only nod and exhale a wheezy "hello" as others passed me like I was standing still. The road climbed gradually but persistently through the Carver Creek valley, which was populated by free-roaming cattle. As I neared the Medicine Lodge/Sheep Creek Divide, a young black bull looked up from a herd and charged toward me.

"Hey! Hey!" I screamed as the bull wheeled around, galloped up the road, and turned to charge me again. "Hey! Hey! Hey!" I screamed louder, with a high-pitched animal voice that I didn't recognize as my own. The bull came within six feet of me and reared up on his hind legs repeatedly in a taunting dance. He was just a bully bull, but I was extremely frightened, as I think anyone would be if a thousand-pound animal was messing with them. "Go away go away go away go away!" I yowled in a piercing scream that tore through my throat and ripped my lungs to frayed shreds. The bull continued to shadow my bike as I sprinted up the road, gasping and screaming "go away" until my lungs seemed to close up entirely. I gasped again and again, but it felt as though no air was getting through. I launched into a full panic of hyperventilating and crying, still awkwardly attempting to sprint away from the bull. A dark screen flickered across my field of vision, and I screeched to a stop. I couldn't breathe. I was on the verge of passing out. This was probably how I was going to die.

There's a gap in my memory at that point. I don't think I lost consciousness, but my mind flipped some kind of survival switch, and the next image I remember is walking my bike toward the final steep pitch of the divide and feeling a deep trepidation.

"The bull charged me and I panicked," I remember thinking. "That was all. I just panicked."

I pushed my bike up the pass in a daze — a thick and chilling mental fog that permeated not just my thoughts, but my emotions as well. My legs were Styrofoam that leaked out the last fumes of energy, and only hollowness and exhaustion remained. The adrenaline surge had drained me, and the mental fog obscured any perspective on what had happened. Some deep, primitive synapses in my brain understood that what I'd been doing before the whole debacle was turning pedals along this dirt road, so that's what I should continue doing.

Looking back on this experience of being sick on the Tour Divide — the worst part about it wasn't the physical weakness. No, it was the mental dullness. Each evening, as the congestion in my lungs deepened and my breathing became more rough, my oxygen-depleted brain conceded to lassitude. It robbed me of the awe and intensity of the experience, leaving me out here on this quiet nowhere road, beneath the vividly lit Big Sky of Montana, gazing at snow-capped peaks, including the mountain where I mourned for my grandfather when he died five years ago ... and all of my emotions were muted. I descended through the valley, amid this sweeping expanse of space, on a clear and gorgeous evening, lost in a fog.

For all of my mental inertia, I still had my plan. My plan said to keep going until I could eke out 135 miles from the day, which I did near the confluence of two creeks in a narrow gorge, about 18 miles from Lima. I set up my bivy near a fence and walked down to the creek to collect water. As I crossed the road, a strange wobbliness rippled through my Styrofoam legs, and I had to sit down.

"I am really weak right now," I thought, believing that the scare with the bull was what emptied me out. And then later, after I'd already crawled into my sleeping bag, the thought continued. "I came to the Divide to search for strength. I'm going to keep searching." 

I guess I'll ride this winter out

For reasons unknown, it was more difficult for me to sleep indoors than outdoors. After my coughing fits, I tended to toss and turn rather than passing back out, as I had in the bivy sack. It was the air, I suppose — drier and warmer — along with the stimulation of city lights and sounds. Around 2 a.m. I scrolled through Facebook for a half hour, and learned that the woman leading the Tour Divide, Lael Wilcox, sought medical attention for respiratory distress and was diagnosed with bronchitis. She received treatment in Helena and continued down the trail that evening, about four hours before I arrived.

Lael and I spent two nights in the same house in Banff, so it wasn't implausible to speculate that we'd caught the same bug. Her symptoms sounded similar to mine — night coughing, congestion that got worse through the day, tight breathing and wheezing. But they also sounded much more severe. I wasn't having asthma attacks, and my tight breathing didn't force me to stop. I've had bronchitis once before, while I was living in Idaho Falls in 2005. During that bout, my symptoms were so severe that I nearly called 911, because I couldn't pull myself up from the floor without blacking out, and I had to lay on the floor because it was the only way I could breathe at all. There was no way a person could ride a bike a hundred miles a day with that kind of illness, unless they were super-human like Lael. No, my Divide crud was uncomfortable, but it wasn't bronchitis.


In the morning, I added Benadryl to my daily dose of caffeine and Claritin — another antihistamine that I'd been taking as a preventative measure since day one. As I rifled through my drug baggie for the pink pills, I realized I hadn't taken a single painkiller on the Divide. So far, I was riding pain-free. Knees, toes, butt, shoulders — all of the issues that I expected hadn't cropped up once. My bike hadn't had so much as a flat tire. But the worst allergies I've yet experienced? I never expected that.

At least the indoor stay seemed to have the effect I hoped, and my lungs felt clear when I wheeled my bike into the warm morning air. For arriving in town reasonably early, I left my room late — after 6 a.m. I felt guilty about that, so I made only a quick stop at a convenience store and devoured two bananas and a green smoothie for breakfast. But I did get a coffee, and pedaled away from Helena feeling like an indestructible super hero.

The first 1,500-foot climb was a breeze, and I started up Lava Mountain with an abundance of energy. I attacked the root-clogged doubletrack with zeal, clearing steep pitches that I normally wouldn't have attempted with an unloaded bike on a day ride. Topping out at 7,500 feet, my lungs were still clear and I could breathe the fire I hadn't felt since the first day. Helena may have forced me to endure the wrath of the Gordon Lightfoot fan and a crappy night of sleep, but in exchange she had cured me! Hallelujah!

After descending into Basin, the route turned straight into a fierce headwind along the Boulder River. I felt the familiar squeeze of my airways beginning to constrict, again, and pulled a buff around my mouth to temper the barrage of dust and allergens. The old GDMBR used to skirt along frontage roads of I-15 before joining the freeway for a screaming descent into Butte, but it's since been re-routed to continue following the Boulder River to Lowland Creek. The gravel road gradually ascends (into fierce wind) seemingly forever to a Continental Divide crossing where the CDT also cuts through, then continues through steep, rolling hills until you're convinced the climbing will never end, and then you're in Butte. What happened to the screaming descent? How do you keep climbing for thirty miles and somehow end at the same elevation where you started? Mysteries. It's also twelve miles longer than the old route, and for me it was at least three hours slower. I expected to arrive at 2 p.m., and it was well after 5 by the time I rolled into town.

Afternoon thunderstorms rumbled overhead, and I raced past the brick buildings and run-down shops of downtown Butte. The route made a wide arc around the outskirts of the city — a scenic tour of open pit mines and other industrial areas. The maps indicated I'd have to ride at least a mile off route to find services, and it wasn't wrong — somehow the GDMBR managed to wrap around city of 30,000 without passing a single viable business beyond downtown. Finally there was a gas station, and I stopped for a large resupply while mulling how excited I felt about a dinner of beef jerky and cheese eaten on the bike. I'd been promising myself Subway since Basin, but the sensory overload of streets, traffic and people left me anxious to flee the city.

Eleanor walked in as I was filling a basket with all of the store's remaining string cheese, along with my new favorite power fuel that propelled me up Lava Mountain — cinnamon bears. She asked if I was aiming for Wise River that night. "Oh no," I replied. "Not with Fleecer Ridge in the way. No, it's far." I scanned her expression for hints of whether she planned to take on Fleecer that night. I wanted to warn her the approach is faint and difficult to locate in the dark, the descent drops off the face of the Earth, and the area has a reputation as a haven for mountain lions. But I felt I shouldn't try to influence the decisions of a competitor. As it was, it seemed she may have stopped into the store specifically to ask about my plans, because when I turned around again, she'd already left.

Evening was always my favorite time to ride, and this evening was the best one yet, with cool temperatures, open hillsides and incredible views of the Highland Mountains. Steeper climbs did ignite shallow breathing, leading to dizziness and muscle failures that forced me off the bike. Congestion was deepening as well, but I could formulate a reason for that — I hadn't taken allergy meds since Helena. Still, I couldn't deny that even though the morning had started out so well, each passing hour added increments of struggle, until twilight brought the dizzy, dull-headed, fatigued symptoms of oxygen starvation. As darkness settled I slipped into a daze, still pedaling forward but oblivious to everything else.

I was aiming for the Beaver Dam Campground, just 116 miles from Helena, but it was about as close as I was willing to get to the mountain lions on Fleecer. When I caught glimpse of the campground sign, consciousness came flooding back in a tsunami of fatigue. It was a strange sensation, as I don't recall feeling terrible on my bike. But as soon as I stopped, I felt utterly shattered. The audible wheezing had returned, and I looked up at the stars as I gulped air through the narrow straw of my lungs.

After taking a Benadryl, I settled into my bivy feeling inexplicably depressed. In hindsight, this was perhaps another symptom of low oxygen levels. My mental energy was just fumes, and I wondered if I should try to eat something, but I'd already slung my food bag over a branch.

"Tomorrow," I mumbled, and then found myself humming, "the sun will come out, tomorrow," and then I was asleep. 

These veins of mine are now some sort of fuse

I guzzled a liter of water during the night coughing, and still felt parched when I woke up in the morning.

"Why am I so thirsty?" I wondered as shook out my dew-covered bivy sack. My hands went numb as I collected another liter from the creek. The 6 a.m. sky was already bright, but the air was icy and damp, and I felt an odd pressure in my chest as I breathed.

The first seven miles of the day were spent obsessing about coffee. It had been more than four days since my last cup — that incredible sugar sludge I obtained in Elkford. Each morning I took a caffeine pill to stave off headaches, but it wasn't the same. It just wasn't the same.

I rode by a sign fixed to a fence that read, "Ovando is Open!"

"I sure hope that's true!" I yelled back, out loud.

Ovando, population 71, is a lonely town in the Blackfoot River valley, tucked away between the Mission and Swan Ranges. It's close to Missoula, the city in Montana where I lived for a short time in 2010-11. For this reason, I was excited to visit, and scanned the vaguely familiar highway for signs of old friends. It's ridiculous, I know, but this is one of the scenarios I fantasized about — that people I knew would be waiting for me on the side of the road, cheering. It funny, these dreams you conjure as your thoughts become more childlike.

In town, there were a half dozen bikes parked next to the museum, where a small cabin and teepee were available for campers. Jeff Wise was walking his bike toward the Stray Bullet Cafe as I rolled up beside him.

"You're just in time," he said. "Restaurant opens at 7."

I glanced at my GPS. It was 7:01.

"Ovando is open!" I yelled triumphantly, and Jeff regarded me with a squinty grin.

Jeff told me that the camping area was overflowing with cyclists the previous night, but most had left before the crack of dawn. I was glad I stopped short of town, because I had no interest in wedging myself into crowds amid all this open space. Jeff ordered the same combination of breakfast food as me, and when it came, he exclaimed, "I can't eat all this."

"Oh, I can," I said, and it was true, but I was mainly focused on guzzling cup after cup of coffee. So satisfying.

The owner of the fishing shop next door, a woman who goes by the name of Angler on the bikepacking forum (and I'm sorry that I've forgotten her real name), came inside and took pictures of all of us. Angler is the Divide's most dedicated journalist. She photographs every cyclist she comes across and posts a small anecdote about each one on the forum. She was extremely nice and upbeat for 7 a.m., and I visited her store to buy bug dope and a few energy bars. (Along with fishing supplies, Angler also offers an array of cycling-related items. The whole town of Ovando has come together to create a cycling-friendly destination, and it's wonderful.) Anyway, I hoped to find salt tabs, thinking that electrolytes might help balance this strange thirst I was experiencing. She dug into a box full of Hammer samples and found several packs of Endurolytes, and gave them to me for free.

Back at the cafe, I bought several of these dense, homemade-looking food discs called "Protein Pucks." (They were mostly almond butter and very tasty. I wish I could have purchased a dozen just to avoid terrible protein bars a little bit longer.) Someone had also recently brought in a whole pan of fresh cinnamon rolls, so I bought one for the road.

I pedaled 15 miles out of town before I was famished again, and decided to devour the cinnamon roll at the bottom of Huckleberry Pass. This was the second time that I would consume a massive pastry at the bottom of a huge climb, and it was the second time I'd regret it.

I rolled into Lincoln in the early afternoon, still thirsty, and the wheezing had returned. The weather had turned extremely hot, although my thermometer said it was only 26C (79F.) "Lies!" I thought. I went into the gas station for ice and the candy supply I'd been promising myself, and met a family of six — kids ranged from age 9 to 18 — touring the GDMBR. They'd also started their trip in Banff, about three weeks earlier. When they asked me how long I'd been on the road, I had to think about it.

"Maybe five days?" I replied. "I think this is day five." We talked for a while as I shopped, and I told them about the best parts of my race so far.

They left before I decided to sit down and devour a personal pizza (so hungry on this day. Why so hungry and thirsty?), but I caught up to them a few miles down the road. The 16-year-old daughter raced to catch me after I passed, and asked more questions. We rode together for about ten minutes, and I turned the questioning to her. She told me she'd been really into bikes since she was a kid, but just started mountain biking a year prior.

"I really like it," she said. "I feel so much faster when I'm going downhill."

"And you haven't had any problems with the more technical stuff, the rocks and mud?"

"Oh no," she shook her head. "I just hold on tight and go."


She turned around to return to her family, and I turned off Stemple Pass Road to battle this rocky doubletrack that shoots straight up a steep canyon, in the Death Valley-like heat of the day. (only 25C? Lies!) Piles of rotting tree trunks were stacked in clear-cut meadows along the road, and it looked like a battlefield. It felt like a battlefield. I was coughing up the afternoon crud and breathing swift and shallow at this higher altitude (only 6,000 feet? Lies!) The pass topped out at 7,000 feet, and the descent was similarly steep and dusty.

Below Stemple Pass, the region feels remote. You're surrounded by the tall, rounded peaks so characteristic of southwestern Montana. The valleys are home to abandoned mines, a handful of ranches, not much else. Just past the bridge over Marsh Creek, I passed a house where a man in the yard called out, "Do you need water?" Yes, I thought ... I'd guzzled most of my three liters of ice water in a matter of hours. "No!" I called back. "I'm good, thank you." In the intervening years since my first Divide ride, the ethics regarding trail magic have been more clearly defined by the bikepacking community, and the consensus is "Just say no." I respect that, and approve as well. This ethic urges us toward greater self-reliance. I stopped a few miles down the road to refill from a creek with my sluggish filter.

When it was time to climb again, my legs balked tremendously. They were all emptied out again, and my lungs felt constricted, even when I managed a good, loogie-producing cough. At this point I'd convinced myself that my breathing difficulties were allergies, and this air was particularly aggressive. The empty legs were, well ... I actually couldn't quite convince myself that the hundred-mile-plus days were the culprit. The struggle was different from my first Tour Divide, my multi-day ultramarathons and the Freedom Challenge. In those events, my legs had pain, but they still had power. Here, my legs had no pain — not even mild knee soreness — and yet no power. And really, I wasn't doing too badly. I was still able to climb, and still staying near my daily mileage target. But it felt like such a huge battle. Like I was forcing my muscles through this effort, and they might give up on me suddenly, without warning, and then I might just collapse on the dirt, utterly broken.

The 6 p.m. slump sank in as I battled a rolling ridge along the Continental Divide, and I brooded over my physical state. I reflected back on recent endurance-related struggles: falling backward and collapsing onto the slope as I tried to carry my bike up a rocky scramble during the Freedom Challenge; gasping and wheezing on Two Top Divide during the Fat Pursuit; dragging a rigid leg up a talus field during the Tor des Geants; pushing my bike with all my might and still failing to move forward in knee-deep snow drifts and gale-force headwinds on the Iditarod Trail. All of these instances had legitimate extenuating circumstances, at least in my mind. But what if there was a pattern? What if I no longer had access to strength or vitality that I used to take for granted? What if I was developing this ... weakness? A weakness I could neither improve nor control?

Rather than continue to brood on unfounded theories about why I'd soon be joining the ranks of endurance athletes who no longer had the capacity to pursue their passion, I returned to my allergy theory. A stiff breeze blew along the ridge, and there was grass everywhere. Even though Helena was a little bit short for my day — just 110 miles from where I camped — I decided to stop in town so I could clean the potentially toxic layer of grime off my body, sleep in a climate-controlled room, and hopefully clear my lungs of pollen and dust.

I rode more than a mile off route before I finally found a hotel, which had a line at the front desk at 9 p.m. I walked to the back to use the bathroom, and when I returned to the lobby, the last guy in line was just leaving. So I went to the desk and inquired about a room. Before the clerk could answer, this woman who I didn't even notice earlier rose up from a lobby chair and berated me, loudly. She was the next in line, she screamed. She'd been waiting for a half hour and had to sit down because she was so sick, and people kept butting in front of her, and she wasn't going to put up with it any longer. She had driven all the way from Missoula for the Gordon Lightfoot concert, and now she had the flu, and why was I being such a selfish bitch? Then she started coughing, loudly, pounding her fist on the desk to the horrified expression of the clerk. I just gaped at her, mouth open, hair matted to my scalp, clothes and legs coated in dust, with my own illness crushing my lungs. "You know," I seethed, "all you had to do was say something. Use words. No one knows you're in line when you're not in line!"

I couldn't let it go. After I finally secured a spot, I stormed into my room and stomped around while swearing and throwing all the pillows against the wall. I hated being in the city so much, here with the crowds and sprawling streets and crazy bitches and stupid Gordon $%&! Lightfoot. All I wanted to do was escape on my bike, ride away from my rage and flee back into the mountains. But I had to get this breathing issue under control. The city might be mean, but the air outside was killing me.