207 Miles and Out of My MInd (Part 2 of 3)

Part two....

8 days. 8 days since I’d set off from the sun baked asphalt behind Gravel City Adventure in Emporia Kansas. 

350 miles laid ahead. The task? The Dirty Kanza XL. A gravel bike race/adventure who’s idea was to be the first version of the Dirty Kanza but was seen as perhaps too foreboding and had been shelved for a only slightly more tame 200 mile version traversing the Flint Hills region of Kansas. 

Dirty Kanza has become, from it’s first year start list of 34 hearty souls, to what is now dubbed, rightly so, “The World’s Premier Gravel Grinder”, a test that brings gravel riding enthusiasts, some would argue masochists, from all states of the union and beyond. 

The idea to honor and bring to life the original “Kanza” apparently had become enough of a mental nuisance, recurring with such regularity that it became necessary to make it reality. 

The excitement, as Jim Cummins, race director announced the goings ons to those in attendance, hundreds of racers, family and friends that would be taking on the 200 miler the next day, was as palpable as the most unwelcome temperatures. 90 plus, the thermometer would read, rumor had it, as high as 101 before day’s end. 

What was said, I can’t be sure. Equal parts excitement and concern kept my attention away from Jim’s pre-race comments. 35 of us had the honor to be inaugural participants. I hoped I had the salt for such an undertaking. It turned out on this particular afternoon deep in the overheated belly of this Kansas beast, buffeted by a relentless hair dryer in your face 20 mile an hour wind  headwind and a Louisiana swamp worthy humidity, I did not.

At 6 am the next morning, rolling into town just prior to a thunderstorm promising some relief to relentless conditions that waned not in the evening hours, far behind the imposed time cutoffs the race requires, I all too gladly excepted my fate over a couple Arizona Ice Teas from the Casey’s convenience store cooler. The first it seemed evaporated upon impact with an overheated core. The second, following immediately the first, brought back online a few systems that had shut down in hopes of resurfacing once the coast was clear. Things like rational thought, a remembrance of my name and dare I say, a flicker, a small flicker of joy.

I recently stumbled upon a quote by Teddy Roosevelt where he as much as praised failure ... “Far better it is to date mighty things, to gain glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

I tasted both during the 14 hours I battled the indomitable hills, heat and humidity of the Dirty Kanza XL. In the end though, it was failure. Not ultimate failure however. For that would be in not showing up, not putting it on the line, being content in the gray twilight, which I am not. 

Show me someone that has never “failed”,  I’ll show you a life spent safely, wasted.

So now, almost exactly a week to the hour that I drowned my sorrows in nearly a gallon of over sugared green tea on that Casey’s curb, winds howling, thunder clapping, picked up, dusted off, I was rolling off to avenge my Kansas defeat. To do so, meant covering the 207 race miles of Black Hills high country gravel known as “The Mother Lode.” 

Heat and headwinds were again forecast. Body, I believed, was ready. Would the mind, the spirit, also rise to the challenge?

I wondered.

Part 2 of 3