First off, thank you to everyone involved in the ultra cycling community, the Trans Am, Amy’s race, and my race. My experience wouldn’t have happened without everything that a lot of other people did, and I owe heaps of love to those who support the Trans Am and take part in it. There are too many to name names without forgetting someone, so I’m not gonna go there. But thank you, everyone, and thanks to those of you who have read these posts!
Most importantly, thank you to my family for talking to me every day of the race while putting up with my whining and crazy talk, and, in spite of that annoyance, keeping an eye out for me and providing endless support throughout this self-interested excursion, both before, during, and after.
When I got home to New York City after the race, I was still very much in the Trans Am mindset and did nothing but write for a week straight. I wrote everything you have just read — from day one through day twenty-one — only making edits, adding an intro and this post, and having a ton of people proofread it before publishing it here (there is a private version with a lot more gossip and trash talk, but that will stay with me). Many thanks to those who have read things and given feedback! As always, I do nothing without the guidance of my sisters, and Amy did a lot to make these posts far better written and more palatable, so major, major thank you to her.
I’m really glad I wrote when I did, because it’s hard to get back into that mindset and remember all the details when the rest of life is going on and the race is well in the past. It allowed me to go really in depth about each day, both in regards to actual events and my own thoughts, and be as close to an on-bike narration as possible since it was all still very fresh. For that reason, I didn’t want to change much in my later edits, so for the most part I didn’t, only adding bits and pieces, and posts you read here are pretty raw.
Writing and explaining events and emotions also gave me a chance to take everything Trans Am out of the context of the race and think about it in daily life. What did I actually learn and take away from the experience? What does it change today and going forward, if anything? The purpose of writing was to process that, and I’ll enjoy reading the 170 plus pages (yes, even without the pictures!) in a year, five years, fifty years… And hopefully you all enjoyed it as well.
To reduce the experience to a couple paragraphs is obviously hard and I think misleading. Even this behemoth of a write up can only convey so much of what happened, what was felt, what was taken away. I didn’t finish with a bullet point list of things I learned. There are endless places for “Lessons” to be found: alone at 2 am on a dark highway, in a Kansas post office, at the counter of a Casey’s in Missouri, and just about anywhere else you’re willing to look for and find them.
The question that, not too surprisingly, came up the most for me was why I was doing this thing. I attacked the Trans Am with such vigor and ambition that it at times it seemed ridiculous. This is simply a case of riding my bike across the country, nothing more, and I’m certainly not the first or the last to do it, nor the fastest. So why commit with such voracity? Racers talk a lot about it, and it’s something worth questioning and that a number of people have said interesting things about.
At some point while I was writing these reports, Evan Deutsch published some thoughts on Facebook about the friction between being focused on racing and the “enjoy the ice cream” approach of taking your time along the way and soaking things up. It is an incredibly well written post about why people do races like TABR/any big adventure and whether it’s a good way to go about life. Click on the link below before you read anything more from me, he says it really well.
Among many insightful and interesting thoughts that he puts forward about his savage and record breaking performance, Evan talks about his experience at the Tour Aotearoa in New Zealand. While he and his partner watched much slower riders finishing after them, he says, “We couldn’t help but observe an inverse relationship between speed and smiles. It was difficult to not wonder if we should have slowed down and enjoyed more ice cream.” The Tour Aotearoa is a self described brevet and explicitly states that it isn’t a race, the only requirement that you have to finish between 10 and 30 days. So, Evan asks, what is he doing sweating for a 10 day finish? Would it not be better to bike slow and enjoy some ice cream, since no rewards await the first finisher?
I can’t say anything about the Tour Aotearoa, but I can speak on that question generally as it relates to the TransAm, since it also lacks the finishing rewards that might make it seem worth the effort to some. Clearly everyone bikes the TransAmerica route for different reasons, regardless of whether it be in the form of a race or a more standard bike tour. I think of people I’ve met on the route and some of the cyclists depicted in Inspired to Ride, and I recall a Vietnam vet, a restless retiree, an Aussie celebrating Martin Luther King, a father trying to leave a legacy, a famous racer trying to get to Yorktown first, along with the multitude of other humans on bikes following the route.
I figured the Adventure Cycling Association might have a quote on this, and they do. The ACA page about the TransAmerica Trail says two things about what the first group of cycling tourists to cross the country on the famed route in 1976 took away: “This group of people set out to have the experience of a lifetime and for the most part they did, learning about America and about themselves in a profound way.” Regardless of your pace, it’s hard to argue with that, and I appreciate that they lay it out in a very quotable and digestible sentence.
You definitely learn a lot about America. You cross ten states of the USA, each with their own distinct gas stations, sandwich shops, drivers, trucks, clouds, landscape, pavement, signs, and people. No matter if you take 90 days or 18, you interact with people — racers, touring cyclists, and locals — everywhere you go, exporting a little bit of your world and taking with you every conversation, sight, smell, and impression, most of them unexpected. I don’t know how other people feel about it, but I felt like I was unbelievably fortunate to be in a position to meet all the people (even the one that pulled out a gun..) and explore the places that we find along this route, and I definitely learned far more about the country I was born in than I could have planned for.
Of course, if we simply wanted to be tourists, seeing and learning about the US, we might rent an RV and take some friends and family. The enjoyment of the landscape, places, and people along the route is undeniable, but the route is just a specific venue for the experience. You could bike across America or Australia and it would be relatively similar. What about how we chose to move through it? We all obviously love riding bikes, but why are some riding fast, and where do you learn about yourself?
While editing these posts many months later, my family is also in the middle of reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being for our family book club. In it, Kundera asks, “Is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?” Or, as you might retort to an inquisitive, pannier-preferring, touring comrade: do you really want to take three pleasure filled months to bike across the country when you could punish yourself in 20 days? If rhetorical questions aren’t your thing, you might just quote another section of that great novel: “The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.” Take that, touring cyclist! It’s a flagrant privilege to even talk and think about life needing burdens to be more fulfilling, but I imagine it’s something all people who take on big adventures think about to some extent (and also ridiculous to quote a Czech author writing under an authoritarian regime when talking about biking, but here we are). The faster you go, the heavier the burden, but also the more intense the fulfillment. Evan says in his write up, “Seeing Lael at the finish was witnessing someone fully contented.” People take on these challenges in part to find that burden.
Why is the sense of fulfillment greater? During the race and the training, I often remembered a story from my sister Hannah when she did the Grand Traverse, an overnight backcountry ski race in Colorado from Crested Butte to Aspen. You need a partner to do the race because of the remoteness and danger of winter mountains, but it’s not always an advantage. Hannah’s partner decided halfway through that she no longer wanted to do the race and desperately tried to convince Hannah to stop. Hannah, knowing that, if her partner quit, she wouldn’t be allowed to continue on alone and finish what she set out to do, encouraged her tired friend to push on. To no avail, though, and at one point her friend just dropped in the snow, refusing to move. Hannah was dead set on finishing and convinced her partner to get up again, at which point she pulled a rope from her bag, tied it to her partner, and literally towed her up and down mountains for miles to the finish while the partner glided along. While it might sound pretty miserable and annoying to pull your partner through half the race in the middle of snowy mountains, Hannah came out of the experience feeling incredibly alive, wishing for more challenges like it (and yeah, also a little annoyed at her friend). She literally towed the burden of her friends weight across mountain passes and felt better, more fulfilled for having done it. She talked about feeling as though the experience had given her an opportunity to be fully herself, to expand into the cracks and crevices of life and be the biggest, baddest, most complete human that she could be.
In a similar vein, Sarah Hammond just published a super cool article where she talks about ultra racing, the challenges that come with it, and what motivates her to return again and again. After laying out the gory details, Sarah says, “So why do I do it? These races have given me somewhere that I feel I can get the most out of my body, mind and the sport I’m so crazy about.” ‘Nuf said. It’s about taking your full advantage of your body and mind.
So when Evan talks about the “inverse relationship between speed and smiles” and Kundera about lightness versus weight (though he may not have intended it to be read this way..), it gets to the heart of what TABR is about. Why race and not stop for ice cream, choosing weight over weightlessness — or ass cream over ice cream — and committing yourself completely to an ultimately fruitless pursuit? Because, in spite of its silliness, seeking out the challenge of a fast bike ride gives me the opportunity to take advantage of the things that make me human. It is an avenue where you can feel like you aren’t wasting your body and mind. To be mentally peaked, physically past the limit, emotionally tested, and all consumed in a way that doesn’t happen in daily life. There is some area of your brain — maybe the whole thing — that gets as big, as tickled, as tortured as it can be. It is an avenue where a person can be the person they want to be and imagine themselves to be: an adventurer, an inspiration, an admired father, a resilient human, a great athlete, whatever. Everyone’s got something. It is the antithesis, the antidote to the daily routine, to modern comfort and boredom, and to the things that we feel confine us, restricting our view and experience of the world and, most of all, of ourselves.
As I evolved in the biking world, the bigger the challenge, the more obsession and commitment it inspired. I wrote in the intro to this behemoth of a report that Amy and I took on the ride to Seattle in part because we were both bored with our day to day and in need of something challenging and adventurous. What we were looking for was an outlet where we would be able to get out of ourselves that which we didn’t in our normal lives. The interest in that ride increased the faster we planned to go, and it went to obsessive levels when we began to plan even bigger in TABR.
Throughout months of training before TABR, biking became this outlet for challenge that I didn’t get anywhere else. I lived the life of a 20 something enjoying a city with friends but not feeling particularly challenged or fulfilled by any of it. One of the reasons I would set off on my bike for weekends of crazy rides is because I felt like these rides took me to my limit, posed a challenge that other aspects of life didn’t, and allowed me to actively chase my potential, not just think about it. Yeah, for much of those rides I felt totally miserable, tired, and alone. Could I have lounged around bars in Brooklyn with friends and smiled and laughed all weekend? Sure, but biking became one way I knew how to go do something and not feel like “I could be doing something harder, more fulfilling.”
These ideas are common and applicable among so many activities and sports, from rock climbing to skiing to football, and you can substitute a bike for a climbing wall in everything I’ve said. The one aspect of the Trans Am, both the touring experience and, in particular, the race, and races like it that I think is most wonderful and rarely replicated is that it is truly available to everyone (well, everyone with a nice bike, a couple thousand dollars, and a few free weeks to commit entirely to themselves). The Indy Pac is called “The People’s Race”, and for good reason (though that is now application only, sooo maybe the Trans Am can adopt that nickname). The barriers to entry that seem to be there for most other extreme tests (again, money and time excluded) aren’t there, people can chose how hard they want to go, and there is almost a clear on-boarding process to ultra racing: watch Inspired to Ride, begin watching dots, start biking more, read some blogs, seek out an ultra race. The steps are clear for those who want to do it, and the community around them is abundant and welcoming. It can be painful to read some of the ridiculous questions that get posted in the Trans Am group, but also great that newcomers have the chance to voice their concerns and have experienced people answer them.
Being a part of something called a “race” pushes people further than a touring mindset would. That can be a bad thing for people who go too far beyond their talents and get themselves into real trouble, but so incredibly cool that it inspires people to go their absolute 110%, regardless of what that is, and gives them an opportunity to be that person that they want to be. You can get the same beauty, challenge, and growth whether you are at the back of the pack or fighting for first. Even though I know it must be a total headache to deal with the increasing numbers at the start line and the wide range of finishing times, I hope that the Trans Am race never changes from what it is: an inclusive, lawless, and badass adventure.
After the race, it took me a couple weeks to really want to be on a bike again. As has been well documented by any touring/racing cyclist, the hands and feet get wrecked, and mine were extremely numb when I finished. My hands recovered after a few weeks, but my feet were numb for a few months. I took my first bike ride two weeks after finishing and felt like I was pedaling with peg legs since I had no idea where my heels started and my toes finished.
But, the itch to ride quickly returned and I soaked up leisurely 90 mile rides with plenty of stops and ice cream enjoyment. I rode in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, in coastal Maine, in Colorado, and felt like my attitude towards biking had changed after the race.
In all the training that I’d done for the Trans Am, everything I did felt like a test. If I pedaled X amount of miles in six hours, that equated to a Y length day in the Trans Am, etc. I felt unproven on a bike, both to myself and to this foreign racing community that I admired and wanted to breach. I put a ton of pressure on riding, nothing was quite good enough, and I often spent my time on the bike beating myself up.
After the Trans Am, I felt a freedom and chill on the bike that I had never really experienced. I had passed my Trans Am test — that initial goal that had pushed my bike riding so hard — and now could more easily enjoy just being on a bike, riding with family/friends, and not worrying about speed. I’ve got #PedalFucker on my bike, my worries are over.
As a result, I started to think more about what big ride would be next (yes, of course there will be another) and felt far more relaxed about it than I did the Trans Am. I’d proven that I could go fast, and I knew that I could do so again and go even faster. I feel like I can go into the next race with way, way less pressure on myself and enjoy the training more, which should lend itself to an improved result. I’m going into my next race trying to compete for a top three (OK, depending on who is at the start line..) and will make sure I’m trained and prepared to do that.
As to what that next race will be, I really don’t know (especially because I just got my bike stolen!). I didn’t think I would do anything for a while, but I ended up doing this RidetoCES.com thing in January 2018, which was super unexpected. Now I don’t know. I want to race the Trans Am again, but it probably won’t be in 2018. The Indy Pac is of greatest interest to me, as are some off road races like the Tour Divide, the American Trail Race, or the Silk Road Mountain Race, but I have no plans for any of them. As I learned from watching people who dropped out of the Trans Am, you really don’t want to do these things unless you are 100% committed and ready, mentally and physically. In the immediate future, I’m looking to knock out an Everest, sprint from San Francisco to LA, do a 24 hour or ~500 mile race, bike with friends, do a triathlon, maybe even test out what a bike race without a big saddle bag is like, but definitely do a lot of things not on a bike.
I love riding a bike, I love going big distances fast, challenging myself, and competing, but there are a lot of other things going on in the world that I want to be a part of and multi week races monopolize a lot of time and money. I don’t want the excitement and uniqueness of these races to wear off for me. I don’t want biking to be the only thing I do, and it isn’t. I’ll be involved in another ultra race soon, though I’m not sure when.
But who knows. The spring Trans Am fever is contagious, I will again be glued to my computer for Indy Pac, and the itch to go explore will always be there. Suggestions welcome.
That’s it. Thanks everyone for reading. Any questions or want to chat about something? Shoot me an email at lippe.max@gmail.com.
Trans Am Day 1: Astoria, OR to McKenzie Bridge, OR
Trans Am Day 2: McKenzie Bridge, OR to Prairie City, OR
Trans Am Day 3: Prairie City, OR to Council, ID
Trans Am Day 4: Council, ID to Lochsa Lodge, ID
Trans Am Day 5: Lochsa Lodge, ID to Bannack State Park, MT
Trans Am Day 6: Bannack State Park, MT to Cameron, MT
Trans Am Day 7: Cameron, MT to Lander, WY
Trans Am Day 8: Lander, WY to Cowdrey, CO
Trans Am Day 9: Cowdrey, CO to Alma, CO
Trans Am Day 10: Alma, CO to Haswell, CO
Trans Am Day 11: Haswell, CO to Ness City, KS
Trans Am Day 12: Ness City, KS to Rosalia, KS
Trans Am Day 13: Rosalia, KS to Ash Grove, MO
Trans Am Day 14: Ash Grove, MO to Pilot Knob, MO
Trans Am Day 15: Pilot Knob, MO to Elizabethtown, IL
Trans Am Day 16: Elizabethtown, IL to Falls of Rough, KY
Trans Am Day 17: Falls of Rough, KY to Booneville, KY
Trans Am Day 18: Booneville, KY to Meadowview, VA
Trans Am Day 19: Meadowview, VA to Daleville, VA
Trans Am Day 20: Daleville, VA to Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, VA
Trans Am Day 21 FINISH: Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, VA to Yorktown, VA
Ice Cream or Ass Cream: The Trans Am “Epilogue”