Gran Gravel 500 2020 race report
I've wanted to do Gran Gravel since my friend José Bermúdez won the first iteration a few years ago. The event is a 500-mile lap around east Texas, mostly on dirt and gravel, starting and ending in Bryan, Texas, my old stompin' grounds. "I just don't have the right kind of bike," I used to think, since all the photos I had seen showed everyone on mountain bikes capable of running big tires.
This year I decided that the best bike in the world for me is the bike I have right now (2016 aluminum Salsa Warbird). I now live in Hewitt, an hour and a half away from College Station. I made some weekend trips over to ride parts of the course and realized that my bike would be a great choice over much of the course.
The race being cancelled didn't matter that much to me, even if I had to do an individual time trial. I figured the safest place in the world from the corona virus at that point would be behind the Pine Curtain in East Texas and I suspected this would be the last weekend before some kind of mandatory shelter in place for everybody. I was most concerned about the predicted heavy rains before and during the event. I had seen pictures of what looked like lakes of mud on the course the year before and I was hoping to avoid that.
I read somewhere that planning doesn't weigh anything, so I obsessively planned for where I could get food, water and sleep. When it looked like we'd get heavy rains through the whole race I ditched the bivy and air mattress and made reservations for a hotel in Palestine and the KOA campground in Onalaska. In view of how much it rained the first night and how cold and wet it was the second night, it was a good call and one of the key factors that enabled me to finish. If there's some kind of lifetime allocation of nights one must sleep in the rain, I got mine during my twenty years as a Marine Corps infantry and recon dude.
Bryan to Palestine - 210 mi.
On Thursday morning at 5:01 Billy Rice sent us off. I spent a lot of the first couple of hours stopping and trying to get my Spot tracker to be visible on the Trackleaders website. I had to struggle to catch up to the blinkies of Brian Steele and Hoss Kleinschmidt who were riding fast and strong. I stopped in Madisonville and got new lithium batteries. Nothing worked until the Trackleaders administrators (to whom I´m very grateful) fixed something in my registration the first night. The long day pedaling up to Palestine was uneventful, a pleasure, really, as the predicted thundershowers veered mercifully to the north of our course. The mental map made possible by my prior planning enabled me to easily find Kim's convenience store a few blocks off course in Elkhart. I bought water and a couple of BBQ pork sandwiches and continued to Palestine. Pro tip: don't fill your Camelback bladder with fizzy water. Adventure racing already has enough adventure.
Palestine to Onalaska - 127 mi.
Rain was chucking down on me when I availed myself of the 24-hour Whataburger in Palestine at five a.m. Friday morning on the way out of town. I can tell you that a 185-pound cyclist and loaded bicycle are not heavy enough to set off the sensor that announces one's presence at the little speaker box in the Whataburger drive through. You have to ride right up to the window.
I knew that Friday's ride down to Groveton, 110 support-free miles through the Crockett National Forest, would be an all day sucker, especially with the additional rainfall. Soon after daylight I found myself afoot negotiating red sticky clay, alternately pushing my bike and putting my paint stick to use to keep my wheels from jamming up in the bike frame. To be doing hike-a-bike so early in the day was demoralizing, but the road eventually became rideable for long stretches. I set my mind on an intermediate checkpoint where Hwy 7 crosses the course. There were several other muddy stretches that forced me off the bike and then off the road into the grassy, bumpy, briar-infested shoulders. I bought two sandwiches at the Exxon in Groveton, entertained questions from a fascinated fellow traveler, and called the KOA campground to assure them that I was indeed on the way to lodge with them that night. It's only 19 miles from Groveton to Onalaska, but I knew this stretch included the feared Old Groveton Road (it's called Old Onalaska Road as one travels from N to S), so I told the campground manager I thought I'd be there three hours hence. It was here that I noticed my iPhone was not charging. I resolved to try to solve the problem in Onalaska, quickly texted my wife to tell her I'd be without phone for a while and turned it off to preserve the 14% battery I still had.
Soon after turning off the hardball just south of Groveton I hit deep sandy silt that nearly unhorsed me before I could dismount. I postholed through the deep mud until the buildup on my wheels ground me to a halt. I repeatedly carried the bike to the ditch, where rivulets of water ran fast enough to wash the big chunks of mud off my wheels. The rapidly darkening sky and track of unchanging road disappearing into the distance made my heart sink, but I was grateful for a bit of information Billy Rice shared with me just before the race: he had done four miles of hike-a-bike on this road in a previous race. I told myself, "So it's about four miles and not fifteen miles of this to get to Onalaska. I can handle that." Within an hour of pushing the bike through soul-crushing mud I saw a sign announcing the road was closed ahead. "What kind of closed?" I thought. I couldn´t see anything ahead but a straight khaki line disappearing into a green horizon. I pushed on. An hour later I arrived at the closure. One of the wooden bridges had been destroyed. I babied the bike down into and through a rushing thigh-deep stream and back up the other side. Soon after, I was able to mount up and ride tentatively through tire tracks left by vehicles. The road was atrocious but I was deeply thankful to be moving at 7.5 mph instead of 2 mph. Within a half hour the road unceremoniously turned into blacktop leading to Onalaska. It was the closest I came to weeping during the entire race. By the time I got to Onalaska my brakes were not working. I attempted to adjust them at the fire station, but I could tell my brake pads had been eaten away by the sand.
When I got to the KOA campground, an hour and a half later than my slowest estimate, I hosed the bike off, hauled it into a spartan cabin and replaced the front brake pads with the only pair of spares I had brought. My spares weren´t brand new, but they should have been plenty serviceable. Deep fatigue pulled me down like a weighted vest while I sat on the bed and planned the final 160 miles to the finish. I resolved to leave my phone turned off and save whatever battery I might have left in case of emergency and reached for the arms of Morpheus. I awoke two hours later gripped by anxiety. Would my brakes get me through the next day? Is that noise I keep hearing the heat kicking on or torrential rainfall on the cabin roof? If it turns out my phone is dead, do I even remember my wife´s new cell number to ask someone to call her in case of emergency? What kind of person doesn´t know her/his spouse's cell phone number? I got up, packed my bike bags, wiped down my chain and put my wet clothes on.
Onalaska to Bryan - 165 miles
It was 43 degrees as I pedaled toward Point Blank in the inky darkness and I could feel a north wind rippling my rain jacket. "Well, this should be a good day." I thought. "The roads here can't be as bad as what I've already been through." But then I asked myself, "What makes you think the roads on the south side of Lake Livingston are going to be any different from the ones on the north side of Lake Livingston, knucklehead?" My question was soon answered. More hike-a-bike. Hours more. I thought about José Bermúdez having to push a loaded fat bike for hours and hours in Alaskan deep snow and didn´t feel so bad. I told myself I was prepared to follow that course line on my Wahoo for another eighteen hours if necessary. Eventually the roads got better and the weather got worse. I was way behind schedule, soaking wet, and ravenously hungry by the time I got to New Waverly. I found a convenience store with a little taco stand inside. "Three chorizo and egg tacos, please," I ordered, afraid that a tremor in my voice would betray my giddy anticipation and desperation. The tables in the seating area had been removed, so I stood by the trash can and ate the tacos. Their eyes got big when I ordered two more and poured myself a 16 oz. coffee. I immediately felt better with some food in me. Even when I carelessly knocked over my coffee in the parking lot, losing the last swallow and a half, I thought, "That´s OK, you´ve had enough. It´s a diuretic, anyway."
Riding through the Sam Houston National Forest near Huntsville was a genuine pleasure. The roads were decent, the woods were beautiful, it had warmed up a little and had stopped raining. There were also fewer dogs. One thing this adventure has done for me is to cure me of my concern about being chased by dogs. It seems to be a fundamental human right in the South to let your dogs get out on public roads and chase anyone not fortunate enough to be transiting the road in a motor vehicle. As a road cyclist, I´d ramp up my speed and yell angrily at the dogs. I´ve gotten less and less angry about them over the past few years, but they still raised my blood pressure. On a loaded gravel bike outrunning the dogs is not an option, so I learned to just pedal along and talk to them in a calm voice. I grew to welcome their presence which never failed to break the monotony. The dogs, seeing that I wasn´t frantic, fast, and loud enough to be any fun, would quickly get bored and trot home. I did have a setback when I took a wrong turn due to the fact that I was using an old map file that cost me about five miles. When I would hear about people´s navigational errors costing them precious time on an epic race, I´d always wonder how I would handle it when it happened to me. Would I lay down in the road and curl up into the fetal position? Would I shake my fists at the heavens and curse the race director´s name? I did neither. I just calmly changed map files, rode to the correct course and kept going. "OK, bud," I said to myself. "Maybe next time you´ll be a little less cavalier about ensuring you´re using the most updated map file."
At Haynie´s General Store in Richards I ate half a pizza and tried to adjust my brakes. After being behind on calories all day, I started to feel strong again about an hour after leaving Richards. I stopped and put my rain pants back on just before it started to pour again. Patrick Farnsworth, curator of the "Bikes or Death" podcast caught me just outside of Navasota. We chatted and he took a few pictures. I had never met him, but I had listened to every one of his podcasts and he felt like a friend to me.
I was riding strongly on pizza powered legs, but a little frustrated at how much time I had wasted throughout the day. Some wasted time you can´t avoid, like being caught in the check-out line behind the lady deliberating through the purchase of nine different types of lottery tickets in the store at New Waverly. And occasionally bikepacking becomes an ethical exercise in spite of potential time loss. Are you going to be patient with the lottery ticket lady? Are you going to stop and turn around and go pick up that piece of Snickers wrapper you dropped on the road? With sixty miles to go, I resolved to put my head down and not stop any more. "Everything you need to finish is either in you or on your bike. Let´s go."
North of Hwy 30, flashes of lightning heralded the arrival of an epic thunderstorm while I was still twenty miles outside of College Station. The pouring rain and darkness created a sensory deprivation chamber where I had nothing better to do than watch the time slowly creep by and play a cruel game of "see if you can manage your momentum up and down the inclines without using your nonexistent brakes." Eventually the sign for Cobb Rd. was illuminated by my dynamo-powered headlight. I was stoked. My suspicions that I had been on the "Bridges" gravel course I had ridden with my A&M cycling teammates while I was in grad school was confirmed. Cobb Rd. was the corner we'd turn on the Tuesday night Take No Prisoners ride before going full gas down Grassbur, suffering like dogs before emptying ourselves at the last sprint before Elmo Weedon Rd. I was nearly home, but now had the very real problem of riding through College Station and part of Bryan with no brakes. Luckily, I knew very well where the intersections and slight hills were. The final few miles, when I should have been pedaling triumphantly through the streets, I was mostly walking my bike. I felt the worst for my wife, Margaret and my brother-in-law, Loyd, who were waiting for me to finish. They had to have been looking at my tracker thinking, "Three mph? What is he doing?"
When I crossed Hwy 2818 I mounted up to ride the last half mile to the Stella Hotel. My loved ones were there applauding me under the parking lot lights. I had made it.
Some lessons learned:
-Bring more than one set of spare brake pads
-Rain tights are a great piece of gear
-Do the race-legal, ethical things that are necessary for you to finish (sleep in a bed under a roof if it's available and you know it's the best thing to do)
-You don't absolutely have to have your cell phone
-2 mph is better than 0 mph
-Fatigue is biochemical, not biomechanical. A big part of your fatigue may be due to calorie deficit.
-Suffering is not linear. Try to solve whatever is uncomfortable and it may get better or go away completely. In fact, studiously avoid doing "Suffering Algebra" which convinces you that you'll be hurting twice as much at 300 miles as you are at 150 miles.
-Whatever hardship you're going through, someone has been through much tougher. Lael Wilcox probably rode for weeks in colder, wetter weather in a t-shirt with a big smile on her face.
-The awful, horrendous road you're trying to navigate doesn't go on forever. Neither does the paved one.
This year I decided that the best bike in the world for me is the bike I have right now (2016 aluminum Salsa Warbird). I now live in Hewitt, an hour and a half away from College Station. I made some weekend trips over to ride parts of the course and realized that my bike would be a great choice over much of the course.
The race being cancelled didn't matter that much to me, even if I had to do an individual time trial. I figured the safest place in the world from the corona virus at that point would be behind the Pine Curtain in East Texas and I suspected this would be the last weekend before some kind of mandatory shelter in place for everybody. I was most concerned about the predicted heavy rains before and during the event. I had seen pictures of what looked like lakes of mud on the course the year before and I was hoping to avoid that.
I read somewhere that planning doesn't weigh anything, so I obsessively planned for where I could get food, water and sleep. When it looked like we'd get heavy rains through the whole race I ditched the bivy and air mattress and made reservations for a hotel in Palestine and the KOA campground in Onalaska. In view of how much it rained the first night and how cold and wet it was the second night, it was a good call and one of the key factors that enabled me to finish. If there's some kind of lifetime allocation of nights one must sleep in the rain, I got mine during my twenty years as a Marine Corps infantry and recon dude.
Bryan to Palestine - 210 mi.
Palestine to Onalaska - 127 mi.
Rain was chucking down on me when I availed myself of the 24-hour Whataburger in Palestine at five a.m. Friday morning on the way out of town. I can tell you that a 185-pound cyclist and loaded bicycle are not heavy enough to set off the sensor that announces one's presence at the little speaker box in the Whataburger drive through. You have to ride right up to the window.
I knew that Friday's ride down to Groveton, 110 support-free miles through the Crockett National Forest, would be an all day sucker, especially with the additional rainfall. Soon after daylight I found myself afoot negotiating red sticky clay, alternately pushing my bike and putting my paint stick to use to keep my wheels from jamming up in the bike frame. To be doing hike-a-bike so early in the day was demoralizing, but the road eventually became rideable for long stretches. I set my mind on an intermediate checkpoint where Hwy 7 crosses the course. There were several other muddy stretches that forced me off the bike and then off the road into the grassy, bumpy, briar-infested shoulders. I bought two sandwiches at the Exxon in Groveton, entertained questions from a fascinated fellow traveler, and called the KOA campground to assure them that I was indeed on the way to lodge with them that night. It's only 19 miles from Groveton to Onalaska, but I knew this stretch included the feared Old Groveton Road (it's called Old Onalaska Road as one travels from N to S), so I told the campground manager I thought I'd be there three hours hence. It was here that I noticed my iPhone was not charging. I resolved to try to solve the problem in Onalaska, quickly texted my wife to tell her I'd be without phone for a while and turned it off to preserve the 14% battery I still had.
Soon after turning off the hardball just south of Groveton I hit deep sandy silt that nearly unhorsed me before I could dismount. I postholed through the deep mud until the buildup on my wheels ground me to a halt. I repeatedly carried the bike to the ditch, where rivulets of water ran fast enough to wash the big chunks of mud off my wheels. The rapidly darkening sky and track of unchanging road disappearing into the distance made my heart sink, but I was grateful for a bit of information Billy Rice shared with me just before the race: he had done four miles of hike-a-bike on this road in a previous race. I told myself, "So it's about four miles and not fifteen miles of this to get to Onalaska. I can handle that." Within an hour of pushing the bike through soul-crushing mud I saw a sign announcing the road was closed ahead. "What kind of closed?" I thought. I couldn´t see anything ahead but a straight khaki line disappearing into a green horizon. I pushed on. An hour later I arrived at the closure. One of the wooden bridges had been destroyed. I babied the bike down into and through a rushing thigh-deep stream and back up the other side. Soon after, I was able to mount up and ride tentatively through tire tracks left by vehicles. The road was atrocious but I was deeply thankful to be moving at 7.5 mph instead of 2 mph. Within a half hour the road unceremoniously turned into blacktop leading to Onalaska. It was the closest I came to weeping during the entire race. By the time I got to Onalaska my brakes were not working. I attempted to adjust them at the fire station, but I could tell my brake pads had been eaten away by the sand.
When I got to the KOA campground, an hour and a half later than my slowest estimate, I hosed the bike off, hauled it into a spartan cabin and replaced the front brake pads with the only pair of spares I had brought. My spares weren´t brand new, but they should have been plenty serviceable. Deep fatigue pulled me down like a weighted vest while I sat on the bed and planned the final 160 miles to the finish. I resolved to leave my phone turned off and save whatever battery I might have left in case of emergency and reached for the arms of Morpheus. I awoke two hours later gripped by anxiety. Would my brakes get me through the next day? Is that noise I keep hearing the heat kicking on or torrential rainfall on the cabin roof? If it turns out my phone is dead, do I even remember my wife´s new cell number to ask someone to call her in case of emergency? What kind of person doesn´t know her/his spouse's cell phone number? I got up, packed my bike bags, wiped down my chain and put my wet clothes on.
Onalaska to Bryan - 165 miles
It was 43 degrees as I pedaled toward Point Blank in the inky darkness and I could feel a north wind rippling my rain jacket. "Well, this should be a good day." I thought. "The roads here can't be as bad as what I've already been through." But then I asked myself, "What makes you think the roads on the south side of Lake Livingston are going to be any different from the ones on the north side of Lake Livingston, knucklehead?" My question was soon answered. More hike-a-bike. Hours more. I thought about José Bermúdez having to push a loaded fat bike for hours and hours in Alaskan deep snow and didn´t feel so bad. I told myself I was prepared to follow that course line on my Wahoo for another eighteen hours if necessary. Eventually the roads got better and the weather got worse. I was way behind schedule, soaking wet, and ravenously hungry by the time I got to New Waverly. I found a convenience store with a little taco stand inside. "Three chorizo and egg tacos, please," I ordered, afraid that a tremor in my voice would betray my giddy anticipation and desperation. The tables in the seating area had been removed, so I stood by the trash can and ate the tacos. Their eyes got big when I ordered two more and poured myself a 16 oz. coffee. I immediately felt better with some food in me. Even when I carelessly knocked over my coffee in the parking lot, losing the last swallow and a half, I thought, "That´s OK, you´ve had enough. It´s a diuretic, anyway."
Riding through the Sam Houston National Forest near Huntsville was a genuine pleasure. The roads were decent, the woods were beautiful, it had warmed up a little and had stopped raining. There were also fewer dogs. One thing this adventure has done for me is to cure me of my concern about being chased by dogs. It seems to be a fundamental human right in the South to let your dogs get out on public roads and chase anyone not fortunate enough to be transiting the road in a motor vehicle. As a road cyclist, I´d ramp up my speed and yell angrily at the dogs. I´ve gotten less and less angry about them over the past few years, but they still raised my blood pressure. On a loaded gravel bike outrunning the dogs is not an option, so I learned to just pedal along and talk to them in a calm voice. I grew to welcome their presence which never failed to break the monotony. The dogs, seeing that I wasn´t frantic, fast, and loud enough to be any fun, would quickly get bored and trot home. I did have a setback when I took a wrong turn due to the fact that I was using an old map file that cost me about five miles. When I would hear about people´s navigational errors costing them precious time on an epic race, I´d always wonder how I would handle it when it happened to me. Would I lay down in the road and curl up into the fetal position? Would I shake my fists at the heavens and curse the race director´s name? I did neither. I just calmly changed map files, rode to the correct course and kept going. "OK, bud," I said to myself. "Maybe next time you´ll be a little less cavalier about ensuring you´re using the most updated map file."
At Haynie´s General Store in Richards I ate half a pizza and tried to adjust my brakes. After being behind on calories all day, I started to feel strong again about an hour after leaving Richards. I stopped and put my rain pants back on just before it started to pour again. Patrick Farnsworth, curator of the "Bikes or Death" podcast caught me just outside of Navasota. We chatted and he took a few pictures. I had never met him, but I had listened to every one of his podcasts and he felt like a friend to me.
North of Hwy 30, flashes of lightning heralded the arrival of an epic thunderstorm while I was still twenty miles outside of College Station. The pouring rain and darkness created a sensory deprivation chamber where I had nothing better to do than watch the time slowly creep by and play a cruel game of "see if you can manage your momentum up and down the inclines without using your nonexistent brakes." Eventually the sign for Cobb Rd. was illuminated by my dynamo-powered headlight. I was stoked. My suspicions that I had been on the "Bridges" gravel course I had ridden with my A&M cycling teammates while I was in grad school was confirmed. Cobb Rd. was the corner we'd turn on the Tuesday night Take No Prisoners ride before going full gas down Grassbur, suffering like dogs before emptying ourselves at the last sprint before Elmo Weedon Rd. I was nearly home, but now had the very real problem of riding through College Station and part of Bryan with no brakes. Luckily, I knew very well where the intersections and slight hills were. The final few miles, when I should have been pedaling triumphantly through the streets, I was mostly walking my bike. I felt the worst for my wife, Margaret and my brother-in-law, Loyd, who were waiting for me to finish. They had to have been looking at my tracker thinking, "Three mph? What is he doing?"
When I crossed Hwy 2818 I mounted up to ride the last half mile to the Stella Hotel. My loved ones were there applauding me under the parking lot lights. I had made it.
Some lessons learned:
-Bring more than one set of spare brake pads
-Rain tights are a great piece of gear
-Do the race-legal, ethical things that are necessary for you to finish (sleep in a bed under a roof if it's available and you know it's the best thing to do)
-You don't absolutely have to have your cell phone
-2 mph is better than 0 mph
-Fatigue is biochemical, not biomechanical. A big part of your fatigue may be due to calorie deficit.
-Suffering is not linear. Try to solve whatever is uncomfortable and it may get better or go away completely. In fact, studiously avoid doing "Suffering Algebra" which convinces you that you'll be hurting twice as much at 300 miles as you are at 150 miles.
-Whatever hardship you're going through, someone has been through much tougher. Lael Wilcox probably rode for weeks in colder, wetter weather in a t-shirt with a big smile on her face.
-The awful, horrendous road you're trying to navigate doesn't go on forever. Neither does the paved one.
