Trans Am 2017 Day 17: Falls Rough, KY to Booneville, KY — 245 Miles, +12,027 ft

9 min readNov 9, 2017

Day 17 was another reminder that the Trans Am is a delicate balance. Push too hard one day and you suffer the next. Ride 140 miles one day, and do 240 plus the next. You don’t get ahead or do well with one big push, but with the effort you can sustain over multiple days, but I couldn’t quite get that right. I overslept by more than an hour and didn’t get going until after 4. I was glad to see that Ken and Sofiane had only just gotten out the door, so they must have overslept as well. In the final week of the race, I would oversleep multiple times. I guess my body and brain were cooked and telling me that I needed more sleep? Idk why. The same alarms that had worked for me the previous two weeks weren’t enough anymore.

Sidenote: Kentucky and Virginia were a blur, and still are. I don’t really remember nearly as much as I do in other stretches of the race, and it sounds like that is common among other riders. I think at that point I’d cracked and picked myself up enough times and was so sleep deprived that I was just in a pretty lucid state. There are strong points that I remember well, but a lot of things are not totally there. This is also due to the fact that the geologic features are not very distinguishable. There are basically two types of riding in Kentucky: rolling farmland and spiky hills, and you could be anywhere in the state. Virginia is more distiguishable, but much of it is this awful stretch along Highway 81 up to Lexington, and a lot of things just look alike. So I have a harder time remembering locations and feelings in these two states. End sidenote.

I rolled out pissed into the wet early morning, hardly beating the sun onto the road. I was certainly well slept, though (Five and a half hours, helloooo!). I felt like the previous day, now just a blur of emotions and bad weather, was behind me, which was a massive relief. The sun came up and I found a ton of gas stations along the route, which I hadn’t expected, but wasn’t stopping until I got to Sonora. About 30 miles into this stretch I realized that I actually really liked Kentucky riding. We were on some really small back roads, but the pavement was great and the roads quiet. Often the roads were so small they didn’t have a center line, and I felt like we were on a big bike path. I was focused and felt strong for the first time in a while, and I reminded myself that this was because I had slept well.

I was in Sonora after not too long and passed by a gas station with Ken and Sofiane’s bikes, so crossed the interstate to the next large gas station. I ate some breakfast and got two Subway sandwiches to go, sticking one in my feedbag, per usual.

I looked at my phone on the way out and saw that it was 10 in the morning. What the fuck! I had flown through the morning and thought that it should be more like 9. Oh well, I thought, I guess I wasn’t pedaling as fast as I though. Then I realized that we hadn’t switched into Eastern time when we crossed into Kentucky, but could have that morning. Ah, that made sense. I called a sister on the east coast to see what time it was and this suspicion was confirmed. Phew! I was pedaling strong.

I set off from Sonora with Bardstown zeroed in as the next stop, 50 miles ahead. Part of the reason this day would be a success was that I focused on stops a good distance apart. I had gotten hung up at times on being able to stop every 20 miles since we left Colorado (another reason The West is best with the large gaps between stops), but today I set my focus on a stop at least 50 miles ahead each time. It gave me plenty of time to get and stay zoned in and it helped the miles fly by.

The riding was nice, rolling with some stiff hills, and I felt like I’d never ridden in a place like that before. I’ve only ever really ridden in Colorado and around New York City, so terrain like this was new but I liked it. There was a stretch before Harrodsburg that felt like what I imagined the eastern part of Kentucky would look like and I wondered if this is how it was going to be the rest of the way. Steep, small mountains covered in super bright green. We rolled along the valley at the base of some hills, and I felt like I was deep in Appalachia. It was close, but only a miniature version of what was to come.

Sofiane and Ken went off route, and I caught them right when they corrected and came back on. I was focused and didn’t want anything to do with them, though, so I hung back while they rolled into Bardstown. Sofiane rode in the middle of a lane, clogging traffic, and I still didn’t like him. It’s OK though, because we are good friends now and he’ll laugh reading this because I’ve told him so already. But at the time, I thought he was a jackass and should get out of the middle of the road.

The first thing you see coming into Bardstown is a series of buildings that look like an old prison, like they might have been on Alcatraz Island. I was baffled and wondered if they were military barracks, but there weren’t really normal windows on them. Then, as we came to the top of the hill, I started to smell whiskey, and I realized that these housed whiskey barrels. Crazy. Glad it wasn’t a prison.

They pulled off at the first stop in Bardstown and, in the interest of not being near them, I went to one on the other side of town. I pulled in for water quickly, still loaded with a footlong and some snacks, and hit the road. It was all the same riding from Bardstown to Berea. You roll along the top of a hill and occasionally drop quickly into a tight valley, then climb back up out of the trees soon after.

I was still cooking and I really enjoyed the riding. I felt strong and focused all day. I had taken off my jersey because it was hot and crazy humid. The jersey was perfect for the first half of the ride, but when the heat and humidity came, I needed more air. Since Eric had died, I’d been wearing my reflective vest at all times and, somewhere outside of Bardstown, I just started wearing it with no shirt. I passed Sofiane and Ken after they stopped to chat with someone and use their pump, and hollered “Suns out guns out!” and Ken loved it.

A farmer driving a hay bail across the road outside of Mackville stopped and chatted, welcoming me to Kentucky and wishing the best for the rest of the ride. I appreciated this a lot since I hadn’t really chatted with many people since I got in the state (except for Michele!).

I stopped in Harrodsburg at a random spot, again hoping to avoid the other two, and got three Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches (yeah, capitalized). PB&Js are a riding staple for me at home, but I’d only had the ones in Ash Grove all race. I was hungry in Harrodsburg so ate one of the sandwiches and other snacks (Chocolate milk, obviously), and set out for the run to Berea.

Somewhere along this stretch I passed a kid throwing a football through a tire hanging from the tree in a front lawn, and I stopped to give it a shot. The kid had a cannon and he tossed it to me out on the street, and I quickly took two throws but both times the ball slipped out of my completely numb hand and flailed 15 yards in front of me. Whoops, that didn’t work out. I swear I can throw, kid. I apologized to the future first rounder and set off down the road again while his mom laughed from the front door.

BTW, since Kansas, every stop I made would start with chugging a bottle of chocolate milk. I’d walk around the gas station drinking it while getting other things just to get calories in me as fast as possible.

I started worrying soon after leaving town that I didn’t have enough food, so I popped into a convenience store in Bryantsville to get some peace of mind. The ride to Berea was quick and mostly downhill at the end, but I rolled in pretty hungry.

I smashed a Subway footlong and got two for the road, and got some snacks at the next door gas station when Sofiane and Ken rolled in. I put down lots of coffee as they came in, and they laughed again at my shirtless state. Sofiane took a pic:

After chatting for a few, they moved quickly and I let them go ahead so I wouldn’t dwell on where they were behind me. I was feeling saucy and strong rolling out to go up the first big climb of Kentucky. I think the climb out of Big Hill is maybe only 2 miles or something, but it looks big on the elevation profile and was pretty steep going up. I was out of the saddle a good bit, but not as much as I would be later in Kentucky.

In the rolling hills after the Big Hill climb, I got pretty drowsy on the descents but felt good on the climbs. I stopped to fill up a little water in McKee (I’d broken one of my 1L bottles a couple days before and only had two bottles) and pull food out of my bag. Because I was flying shirtless, I didn’t have anywhere to store food aside from my feedbag and had to go into my back bag more regularly.

The road from Berea to Booneville is exactly like it is through most of the rest of Kentucky — almost constant up and down with the occasional flat stretch at the bottom of a valley. I was getting really tired and the stop in McKee helped pick me up for a bit but I kept stopping for dumb reasons. Put on a jacket, take it off, put on my jersey. I felt a little lost, I was disoriented and none of my gps devices were working properly so I couldn’t tell where I was, but it seemed like I was on the route. I had to keep slowing down to make sure, and it felt like this last stretch was taking forever. I was hardly awake, but finally I reached Booneville after 2 AM and a quick descent.

I was happy that I’d put down some big miles that day, even though there could have been more if I’d woken up earlier. Richard and Michel were a ways up the road, on the other side of some passes, and they seemed totally out of reach. I knew Michel had been asleep for a little while and would get out well before Richard, and I wanted to try and get out before Sofiane and Ken, who were at a hotel in Booneville. I set up shop in the post office — a really quite nice and large one — and did the standard business for the evening of falling asleep with food in my mouth.

Trans Am 2017 Intro

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