14th August, 2020
I’ll always remember my first bike. It was Christmas Day, I was eleven years old, and my parents had bought be me a new bike for Christmas. I remember heading out on my first ride, it was a cold Christmas morning and I rode down to and along the canal path in my home town of Ulverston, in the Northwest of England. I remember riding through frozen puddles, and I remember my ears and fingers becoming almost uncomfortably cold, but I also remember the peace, the tranquility and the sense of freedom.
In 1997, eighteen years later, I bought by first mountain, bike. A GT Karakorum which was a fully rigid bike with LX components. I bought the bike in March, and competed in my first race in May – at a cross country race at the Land of Nod near Haslemere, Surrey in the UK. I was living in Hove at the time, spent my weeknights riding the South Downs and Sundays were spent racing at events throughout the South of England.
I never hoped to be competitive or even come close to winning a race, but racing was fun and gave me motivation to ride. One of my best friends, Paul Dover, whom I’d been the best man for at his wedding (as he would be for mine) lived close to many of the races. Paul was a very experienced mountain biker, and he encouraged me to race. We’d meet up most weekends and race together. Through Paul, I met two of his friends from work, Paul Partridge and Paul Hamilton. We raced most weekends together as ‘Team Paul’ and enjoyed competing against each other and other friends we’d made through racing.
Some time during the summer, I managed to break the frame on the Karakoram. I upgraded through warranty to a GT Zaskar, which was GT’s top aluminum frame at the time. Over time, this evoloved into a high end build which included Pace forks, 9 speed XTR and Hope disc brakes and hubs.
In 1998 my employer Ricardo, sent me to the US for three months to work on a project at our Detroit Technical Center. I took my bike with me and thoroughly enjoyed the summer living in Ann Arbor and riding the superb singletrack SE Michigan has to offer.
I arrived on a Friday evening in July. Saturday morning I was up early, and went into town to find the bike stores. The Ann Arbor art festival was on that weekend so the streets were full of art stalls. The first bike store I visited was Great Lakes Cyclery on Main Street, I picked up some trail maps and also some flyers for local races. I noticed there was a race at Pando Ski Area the next day, so Sunday morning I was up early, drove the two hours and raced.
I also took a trip to visit friends in California, which included rides around the Laguna Hills and a weekend riding at Snow Summit at Big Bear Lake, where I hired a GT-Lobo downhill bike for the day. I also maganed to tour GT’s factory in Santa Anna.
Another highlight was a trip to the Mountain Bike World Championships in Mont St Anne, Quebec in September.
Back to England, and the winter, but mountain bike racing continued.
Some time during the winter of 1999, my Zaskar was stolen. Insurance covered the loss and after much research I purchased a Yeti ARC with a custom build which included 9 speed XTR, Pace forks and Hope disc brakes and hubs. I had my dream bike, I had fallen in love with Yeti when I saw a turquoise FRO in a high end bike store in Irvine during my trip to California.
A highlight of the year was racing in the support race at UK round of the UCI cross country World Cup, which was the longest and hardest race I’d done at the time.
At this point, I was probably the fittest and the lightest I’d been during my adult life. I weighed over 250 pounds in 1995 when I graduated from University and by 1999 I weighed 210 pounds. This was due to cycling, gym work and watching what I ate and drank during the week. I was in danger of no longer being eligible to race in the Clydesdale category.
In June 1999, I had a bad crash hitting a gatepost face first riding down Newtimber Hill on the South Downs outside Brighton. A doctor spent 3 hours and 150 stitches putting my face back together, but two days later I was back on the bike to meet friends who were finishing the London to Brighton charity bike ride – which I had to miss.
October 1999, I had a week of great mountain biking with friends from home in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Spain, where we rode some very challenging terrain.
November 1999, I moved to the US, for what has become a permanent move. Since then I’ve lived in Northville, MI.
In April 2000 I had one of the best bike experiences of my life when I rode the White Rim Trail in Utah with Joe Hendrickson and a group of his friends.
https://www.mtbproject.com/trail/205150/white-rim-trail
Joe worked for Yeti Cycles and I got to know Joe when he helped me with a new derailleur hanger following my incident with the gatepost. When I let Joe know I was moving to the US, he invited me to Colorado to ride with him.
And so started a series of regular trips to ride with Joe and his friends in Colorado. This included the annual Pro Leisure Tour (PLT) which consisted of camping for a week in a different Colorado mountain biking location, with a ride each morning (usually epic with too much climbing), followed by an afternoon of lounging around the campsite drinking beer. I visited many of the great places to mountain bike in Colorado: Winter Park, Salida, Crested Butte, Fruita, Durango, Denver Front Range and several trips to Moab, Utah.
In 2001 I bought my first road bike (as an adult), a Yeti Road Project. I still mainly rode the mountain bike, but had the occasional road bike ride with a couple of friends to Ann Arbor and back, which is a 40 mile loop. The longest ride I did was 75 miles when my girlfriend at the time wanted to visit her mother in Toledo, and I wanted to go on a bike ride. We compromised, she drove and I rode there. I remember it was mid summer, stinking hot and I suffered towards the end of the ride.
In 2001 I also bought my first full suspension bike, a top spec Yeti AS-R with XTR and a wheel set with Chris King hubs. It rode great. The geometry was identical to my ARC, but I found the problem with having two bikes nearly the same is you only ride the nicer of the two, which in this case was the AS-R due to the addition of rear suspension.
Another highlight of 2001 was a trip to Breckenridge in September. My friends Sian and Carl, whom I’d worked with in the Shipyard in the late 80’s, were good friends with Caroline Alexander and her boyfriend Barry Clarke – Britain’s top cross country mountain bike racers, who competed at the top level of the sport. In September they were competing in the UCI World Championships in Vail, CO. I and a group of friends from the UK was planning to join them, to watch them race over the weekend, then spend the next week in Breckenridge riding. The week before the race, the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center grounded all the flights, cancelling my flight and fights from the UK for my friends. I missed the World Championships, but when flights resumed, I was on the first flight to Denver and enjoyed a week riding in Breckenridge.
The AS-R was a great bike, but I broke the frame (in Winter Park) and the replacement frame (in Fruita in 2004). I then replaced it with something I wouldn’t break, a Yeti AS-X ‘freeride’ bike with a 180mm fork and 7″ travel at the rear.
I built the bike up with parts from the AS-R at the 2005 Pro Leisure Tour , which was in Salida that year. My first ride was the Monarch Crest Trail, which is an epic ride that starts at 11,000 ft at the top of Monarch Pass, climbs from there followed by one of the longest and most epic descents in Colorado.
https://www.mtbproject.com/trail/3671983/monarch-crest-imba-epic
The AS-X was great on the descents, tolerable climbing, but too much bike for Michigan singletrack.
Between 2005 and 2015, cycling took a back seat to family and golf. I made a trip to Moab with friends Thanksgiving 2006, and spent a couple of days cycling with Sian and Carl who were living in Morzine, France at the end of a family vacation for my Mother’s 70th birthday.
Otherwise, I hardly rode and packed the weight on, peaking at over 260 pounds.
I rode infrequently, mainly on the trail at Maybury State Park, which is 6.5 miles of twisty undulating singletrack only 1.5 miles from home. Towards the end of 2015 I was lapping Maybury in around 48 minutes. In 2000, when I was in my prime, Maybury was only 4 miles long, but I could do that in under 19 minutes.
Golf had become my passion. I’d been playing golf with a group of friends with a standing 7:21 am tee time on Sundays between April and September. However, I was growing increasing frustrated with golf. It seemed the harder I worked at it, the worse I became. In March of 2016, before golf season started, I began riding the mountain bike on Sunday mornings at the time I would be playing golf. I found it much more enjoyable and made the decision to focus again on cycling rather than golf.
2016, I biked more, still mainly around Maybury, with the occasional road bike ride. My goal was to lap Maybury in under 40 minutes. I posted my first sub 40 minute lap in August 2016.
In July, I spent a weekend downhill mountain biking in Schladming, Austria following meetings at AVL (my employer since 2007) headquarters in Graz.
Having ridden more than in previous years I decided join friends and ‘race’ at the Iceman Cometh in 2016. The ‘Iceman Cometh’ is a point to point race from Kalkaska to Timber Ridge RV Park outside Traverse City, Northern Michigan. It’s held the first Saturday of November every year, which means there could be snow on the ground and it could be bitterly cold. It attracts over 5,000 competitors and sells out every year.
The race went well, and I rode as hard as I could, but it was hardly ‘Iceman’ with temperatures in the mid sixties at the finish.
A couple of months before the race, I’d noticed a crack in the top/seat tube weld on my beloved Yeti ARC, which would have have been my first choice for the race. Needing a bike for the race, and not being able to find a Yeti I could justify buying at the time, I picked up a Santa Cruz Tallboy off eBay. This turned out to be a great deal and a great mountain bike for SE Michigan and for the Iceman.
As bought, the bike had a hybrid SRAM/Shimano 2×10 setup, which I replaced with a Shimano XT M8000 1x setup. The previous owner had otherwise spec’d the bike quite nicely with lightweight carbon bars and seat post and Stan’s tubeless rims with Chris King hubs.
In 2017 I started taking fitness and cycling more seriously. In the winter I was spinning and weight training at the Sports Club of Novi. I was tracking calories using myfitnesspal.com which meant I was watching what I ate, and how much I burned exercising. I went from 252 pounds in January to 216 pounds in July. I was now almost as light as I’d been in 1999.
In the spring, while the trails were still wet, I started riding the road bike, and relearned how much I enjoyed riding on the road. I also found that I was riding not just further, but for longer than my typical mountain bike ride. As a family man with limited time, I began to ride the road bike more than the mountain bike.
Hence, I decided I needed a road bike upgrade and bought this:
In August 2017, I completed my first century ride. I rode solo from Tobermory to Kincardine in Ontario, in 4 hours 52 minutes without stopping. Not quite knowing what to expect, I was very pleased with this performance.
I also spent plenty of time on the mountain bike however – still trying to better my lap time at Maybury. During the Maybury time trial on August 27, 2017 I lapped Maybury in 31 minutes 45 seconds, which is still my fastest time to date.
September 2017, I had my first cycling trip out West in over a decade, with a boy’s trip to Fruita, CO.
Then competed again in the Iceman in November.
For the winter, when it can be difficult to ride outside in Michigan due to the ice and snow, rather than spinning at the gym, I bought a trainer and started training using Trainer Road and Zwift. The Yeti Road Project has since become almost permanently attached to the trainer.
Gravel riding and racing had become very popular in Michigan. Many of the rural roads are dirt roads which see fewer cars than the paved roads, and thus provide a safer environment for riding. In April each year the Barry Roubaix gravel race takes place in Hastings Michigan. Barry Roubaix is the world’s largest gravel race with over 5,000 participants. Racers can chose to race 22, 36, 62 or 100 miles. I registered for the 36 mile race which was to be held on April 21, 2018. This provided the motivation to train throughout the winter.
But then I needed a bike for the race, so I bought this:
I didn’t quite know what to expect during the Barry Roubaix race, I hadn’t ridden the Kona much and I hadn’t ridden much on gravel either, however the race went well.
About that time, I joined R3 (River Rouge Revolution) a road bike club that meets in Plymouth and rides on Hines Drive, a popular 18 mile cycling route between Northville and Dearborn.
Riding with a club took my road cycling to a new level, and it was good to ride with some strong riders. They’re a great group and I appreciate their friendship.
In September we had another boy’s mountain bike trip out west. This time Moab was the destination. We had some incredible rides, but the highlight was riding ‘The Whole Enchilada’, a 28 mile ride from 11,200 feet elevation in the La Sal Mountains to the Colorado River just outside Moab, with over 7,000 ft descent.
Another Iceman in November followed by another winter on the trainer.
2019 turned out to be one of my biggest years cycling. Colin Chisholm, a friend from AVL, assembled a group to ride the Michigan Coast to Coast Gravel Race in June. This is a 210 mile race from Au Gres on Lake Huron to Luddington on Lake Michigan. It was a mixed surface race including pavement, gravel and deep sand through Manistee National Forest. The race became my focus for the year and I set about putting base miles in to train and prepare for the race.
I rode a 104 mile gravel ride with Colin and the group in March, raced the 100 mile Barry Roubaix (Psycho Killer) race at the beginning of April, and completed a solo century on the road bike in late April.
By the time the Coast to Coast race came around, I was feeling pretty fit. My friend Jerry Kleinhenz enlisted his Daughter to drive our support vehicle, which would meet at check points 53, 103 and 165 miles into the race.
Mentally, I treated the race as four separate races. The first 53 miles were uneventful – apart from realizing I’d set off without my race number attached to the bike. We averaged over 17 mph with our group riding in a pace line with various other riders, over a mix of pavement and gravel that was relatively easy going.
At the first checkpoint, I retrieved my race number from the car, ran it across the timing strip at the checkpoint and attached it to my bike. After a bathroom break, refreshments and reloading my nutrition (SIS gels and Hammer Perpetuem) we set off for the second section.
That went well also, and I was pleased with how I felt after 103 miles. We were ahead of schedule, but wasted a bit too much time at the checkpoint.
As I was setting off, my right calf locked up with cramp, which wasn’t a good sign. I had some Hot Shot with me, which is a drink designed to combat cramping. I drank one, but I found it ineffective. I pushed on, persevering through the pain.
In order to avoid the onset of more intense cramp, I fell off the back of our group and continued alone. This 3rd section was the longest section of the race. It had the most challenging terrain, and it was the hottest part of the day. I was beginning to run out of water, and my cramp was getting worse. Around the 145 mile mark, I found myself stopped on the road, in pain, and with both legs locked up with cramp. A fellow cyclist stopped to offer assistance, he gave me two salt tablets and some water, and I pushed on, very grateful for his assistance. The cramp gradually subsided. I didn’t cramp again for the remainder of the race.
It was a relief to get to the 165 mile checkpoint.
I met up with Jerry at the checkpoint and spent way too long before setting off for the last section of the race. I drank plenty and tried to eat, but had no appetite. It was swelteringly hot, the sun was blaring and we had no shade. I could have quite easily have given up, but the thought of having to come back the following year to do it again if I failed kept me going.
Jerry and I set out again for the 4th and final section. We still had some horrible sections of trail through Manistee National Forest to ride. Much of it was deep sand, and if I could have ridden it (which I couldn’t with 38mm wide tires), I would have expended too much energy.
Around mile 180, Jerry and I took a right turn onto a very sandy road. It was that sandy it was almost impossible to ride, so we alternated between riding and pushing. We continued down the road for about 2 miles, when it became apparent that we’d made a wrong turn. We needed to go back along the two miles of unrideable road we’d just been struggling along. We backtracked and got back on course. Our detour had cost us over 40 minutes and a lot of valuable energy.
From there, it was without incident to the finish line, just a matter of perseverance and continuing through the pain and suffering.
I finished the race with an official elapsed time of 16 hours 11 minutes. My goal was to finish, and I’d achieved it. The stretch goal was to finish before sunset which was at 9:33. I missed that by 38 minutes. However my race had been 216 miles not 210 miles due to the wrong turns (the one I described plus one other). My ‘moving time’ in Strava was 14 hours 29 minutes, meaning that I spent 1 hour 42 minutes at the checkpoints. Considering that, I felt quite pleased with my performance.
In July, I rode One Helluva Ride with a group from R3. One Helluva Ride is a 100 mile ride from Chelsea that passes through Hell, Michigan. Our group rode hard and I finished with a moving time of 4 hours 39 minutes, although we stopped twice for refreshments. I suffered cramp again at the end. So that was my 4th century of the year on top of the Coast to Coast double.
In September, I decided I needed a new road bike, and this came along and joined the collection:
Iceman rounded out the year again, this time with a muddy race and lots of standing around waiting for riders to pass through the muddy singletrack.
Then 2020 and COVID-19 happened!
More on 2020 and beyond in posts.