The Wallowing: TransRockies Days 4 and 5

I hate cow poo.  This may come as no surprise, as most sane people wouldn’t profess to a penchant for bovine feces, but I really, really hate cowshit.  We’ve spent Stages 4 and 5 riding in it, walking in it, and falling in it.  Our most detested practice entails riding behind your partner, mouth agape because you’re in the hurt locker, and a big blob of fresh cow poo shoots off his spinning rear wheel straight into your mouth.  This was not an uncommon experience.

Over the last two days, the course has taken us down the eastern slopes of the continental divide and into the lowlands of Kananaskis Country.  We’ve encountered some incredible climbs, insane downhills, but without doubt, the majority of the last 10 hours of racing we’ve done has been spent slogging through endless bog-like pastures amongst herds of cattle who were none too happy that we were anywhere near them.  At one point, as we were crossing a pasture, Rumon, from behind, shouts up to me ‘Cow Back!’ and I look back over to my shoulder to see 1000 lbs of agitated beef bounding up the trail behind me. Normally, I’d be damn scared of being flattened, but the sight of this ungainly behemoth jumping and bucking actually elicited a laugh, in light of the dismal poo-walking we’d been enduring.

If we were lucky, we could manage to ride through the bogs, hopping through the muck from hummock to hummock in a jerky, spastic fashion.  If we weren’t, which was the norm, we’d be up to our shins post-holing through a poo/clay goop having the consistency of soggy polenta.  Bikes, which at times had to be carried over our heads, gained a good 5 pounds of sludge, and any moving part eventually revolted as gears, shocks, and wheels succumbed to the invasive stuff.  I was actually able to tolerate these ‘Trans Walkies’ stages quite well, but I have to admit, that yesterday, after wallowing for two straight hours, I had my own little tourettes fit, flung my poo-caked bike into one of the many rivers we had to cross, and vowed that if I saw the Course Director trail-side, I would manually remove his arm and feed it to him.

Keith, showing the effort of a glacier-fed river crossing (with a mangled shoulder) near race end

Maybe I’m painting a bit of a dark picture, but we really did spend a lot of time off the bike, miserable and caked.  Fortunately, the multiple glacial-fed creeks and rivers that we had to cross did well to keep us marginally clean, and very, very refreshed.  Some of them were small enough that we’d be able to wheelie through them, but others provided spectacular crashes.  Today, at about four and a half hours into the ride, Rumon and I came barreling out of the woods to cross the Elbow River.  Knowing full well the river is hard enough to even walk through let alone ride, we exchanged a quick grin, dropped a couple of gears, and accelerated off the bank into the grey-white torrent.  We managed to get halfway across before the current swept our bikes out, leaving us laughing, splashing, and clawing our way to the far shore.  The numbing effect of the icy bath even provided a temporary reprieve to our naughty bits, which, after five days of being thoroughly punished by mud filled shorts, hard bike seats, and endless rocks and roots, now resembled veal picatta.

The weather has actually been our nemesis (although, because I can’t take out my frustration on Mother Nature, I still wanna stuff the Course Director’s hand down his gullot), with continuous drizzle interspersed with torrential downpours over the last two days that had me debating whether I should toss the bike and start building an arc.  Rumon and I had a pretty good ride on Stage 5, coming in before all hell broke loose, but Tickles and Bushleague weren’t so fortunate and ended up being caught out, along with the majority of the other competitors, when a huge thunderstorm rolled through the valley we finished in.

Bushleague's revolutionary back exfoliation technique: Ride your bike through a hailstorm.

Riders were crossing the finish line looking as if they had just come down from Hamburger Hill, and it wasn’t until Bush explained that they rode through a hailstorm, pummeled by marble-sized hailstones, that we fully realized what we’d narrowly avoided.

The last two days have been the most arduous, challenging riding I’ve ever done.  I’ve hit the wall a couple of times, unsure if I could even climb the next hill, let alone finish the stage and the race, yet Rumon has managed to say just the right thing to keep my pedals turning.  The guy is pure nails.  Here I am, questioning if I’m able to haul my carcass up the next 400m climb, and I look over at Hurricane, knowing full well that his heart is functioning like the wheezing six-banger of a ’76 AMC Gremlin, and see the freak with his head down and eyes fixed with a stare that says ‘fuck quitting.’  Guess I better suck it up and keep climbing…

Advertisement