Coast-to-coast bike race rolls out Sunday from Astoria
· Yahoo Sports
For over a decade, a group of ultra cyclists have been meeting annually in the wee hours of a summer morning in Astoria. This year, about 50 riders will gather at 6 a.m. on Sunday, June 7 at the Columbia River Maritime Museum, to begin the Trans Am Bike Nonstop Race, a trek of 4,200+ miles. Like a vanishing act, they’ll assemble and depart with little fanfare before most have their first cup of coffee.
The multi-month-long continuous coast-to-coast race derives its name from the route. It traverses America along the oldest cycling route in the country — the historic TransAmerica Bike Trail, curated by the Adventure Cycling Association. The race begins on the Pacific coast in Astoria and ends on the Atlantic coast in Yorktown, Virginia, attracting riders worldwide.
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Except “race” isn’t entirely an accurate term. While times are recorded and posted online, the race is unsupported — riders are on their own. They carry their own provisions and are responsible for re-stocking along the way. Some spend up to 20 hours “in the saddle” — the seat of their bike — riding over 250 miles a day.
Even though it’s a do-it-yourself style race, founder Nathan Jones said it’s still a lot of work. Jones, 44, who also organizes a handful of other similar races, is a self employed developer and operates “Ride Yr Bike LLC” in Portland.
“On the surface, it shouldn’t take much,” he said. “The reality is I spend most of the year toiling with it from one way or another. It takes as much work as I have the bandwidth for, which for an endurance cyclist is variable and seemingly endless for better or worse.”
Jones travels to Astoria every year to see the riders off and “to make sure the race goes off without a hitch,” he said. “For the most part, racers come in and leave just as quickly as they show up. The footprint is fairly small, aside from the number of hotels we may book up,” he said.
The most laborious task for Jones is keeping track of the competitors via a customized computer app he created, the Ride Yr Bike App, that tracks riders who appear as dots on a map of the United States. The app is available to the general public, and many fans also monitor the racers’ progress. In addition, race participants track themselves with satellite trackers.
“Aside from the trackers and emergency contacts, there is no support,” said Jones. Once they leave on their own, “they are of their own volition.”
Fans — nicknamed “the dot watchers” — follow the cyclists across the county. “The dot watching trail angel community has developed naturally over the years with great results,” said Jones. “Lots of lifelong friends have been made through this event.”
The race attracted as many as 138 riders in 2017, but Jones has since honed it down to a sweet spot of 50 riders, “because that number is stable enough for me to watch for 40+ days straight.”
Reporter’s notebook: Meet Felix
I became a “dot watcher,” along with my husband Corey, in 2015, when there were 24 riders in the race. Through a booking app, we hosted one of them, Felix Wong, at our house for two nights before it began. Felix was an endurance athlete-blogger-mechanical engineer from Fort Collins, Colorado.
I recently emailed Felix. It had been over 10 years since our brief but memorable meeting in the days leading up to his race. He quickly responded with an update. He lives in Galicia Spain these days with his partner.
Felix remembered his visit and our house. “I contacted Corey out of desperation,” he wrote. The start of the race coincided with “The Goonies” 25th Anniversary festival that year and literally every hotel and hostel within 10 miles of Astoria was sold out.
Felix had heard about the race from watching an award-winning documentary called “Ride the Divide.” Among those in the cycling community, the film “is now something of a cult classic,” he said.
So, he signed up for the 2015 race. It was also Felix’s first time visiting Astoria, which he remembers as “absolutely gorgeous.”
Becoming a dot watcher
On the morning of Felix’s race, my husband left the house before sunrise to watch the riders depart in front of the Maritime Museum.
Over the weeks, we fell into a routine of watching the dots move across the map on our computer screen. While Felix was still in Oregon, we asked my mother-in-law, Gretchen Newlin, to cheer Felix on as he passed through near Corvallis where she lived. Because of the GPS tracking and Jones’s app, we were able to pinpoint the exact moment he rode in on Peoria Road so she could wave him on as he passed by.
Watching the dots on the screen was addictive and we began following others in the race as well. One, on a recumbent bike dropped to the back of the pack. It was just as much fun watching the stragglers as the jackrabbits out front. We could see how many miles each rider covered in a day and when they turned in for the night. I also enjoyed watching two lone women riders — especially one who went by the name “Vespa Chick,” who I followed until she dropped out.
It was like watching a feature film in dots. Some riders dropped out or had no choice but to quit due to injury. Some riders at the front of the pack hardly rested and when they did it was barely off the side of the highway, often at a random picnic table or on the porch of a building. We watched as two dots dropped behind the group riding as a pair. The stragglers stopped at the same hotels — rather than sleeping under a random picnic table — and covered a small number of miles each day. We created a made-up narrative around them and imagined they were in a bike-riding romance — two dots clinging to each other through rain, sleep, sun and wind falling deeper in love mile-by-mile, enjoying their own luxurious schedule.
We watched as Felix’s dot moved across the country and became alarmed when it stopped moving one morning in rural Appalachian country. Felix was not one to sleep in as we had learned from weeks observing his dot on the app. “Felix’s dot hasn’t moved,” said Corey. We pulled up Google Earth and located a grocery store across the street from Felix’s last known GPS location. Corey called the store owner. “There is this cross country race … can you just walk across the street and look for him? Yes, his name is Felix, he’s on a bike.”
Felix was nowhere to be found. Turned out, he was safe. While he can’t recall if his tracking unit stopped working or his phone malfunctioned, he does remember being “exhausted and mentally drained. I don’t remember much beyond desperately trying to make progress and reach the finish line to recover from my injuries.”
The race itself is an imposing beast. Over 4,200 miles, it’s 40% longer than more well-known races, including The Race Across America and the Tour de France. “Once I got past the Cascade Mountains, the temperatures in the West every day were usually over 90 degrees every day all the way to Illinois,” said Feliz. “The UV index was at times off the charts, particularly in the eastern Oregon desert. There were some racers who would nap in the afternoon and ride through the night, just to avoid the heat. That wasn’t a good option for me because my lights weren’t great and nighttime always slowed me down, so I sweated it out.”
It was a grueling undertaking, he said. He suffered sunburn, saddle sores, muscle aches and loss of feeling in his hands after reaching Wyoming. “By the end of the race, it was hard for me to shift gears — particularly downshift the rear derailleur or upshift the front derailleur — because my hands were so weak. Undoing buttons became near impossible. Ultimately, after the race, it took two and a half months for my right hand and seven and a half months for my left hand to regain all feeling. … It takes a long time for nerves to regenerate,” he said.
Felix also developed “Shermer’s Neck,” a condition named after one of the first four cyclists to do the Race Across America, Michael Shermer. Shermer came down with it during the 1983 race after 2,000 miles. It’s when neck muscles weaken to the point one can no longer hold up their head. “Only ultra distance cyclists riding a ridiculous amount of miles get Shermer’s Neck, so there are only maybe a few dozen people each year who are afflicted by it,” said Felix.
“For me, not only was it painful, but it made cycling dangerous. I couldn’t see the road ahead, nor could I turn my head around to look for traffic. To make a left turn, I’d have to stop along the right side of the road, pick up my bike, and rotate it 90 degrees to the left, and then ride straight across the intersection simply because I couldn’t look behind me,” he said. His neck muscles recovered a week after the race, he said, “and that was only after I visited a massage therapist who spent nearly an hour-and-a-half working on (my neck).”
Felix said he never encountered any close calls with cars, but it was an ever-present danger. “I was both surprised and grateful for the courteous behavior of drivers, especially in the South and East where shoulder roads are often nonexistent.” He said others haven’t been as lucky. “There have been several cyclists involved in — and even tragically lost their lives due to — accidents with motor vehicles in the history of the race.”
Felix said he was also “chased by at least a hundred dogs in Kentucky.” He was able to get away from them by “yelling a sharp and loud ‘hey.’ … I never got bitten.”
The pain cave
Race organizer Jones grew up racing mountain bikes in Missouri and did the race in its first year. “These races are more about challenging yourself than competing against others,” Jones said. “This event is very much ‘choose your own adventure.’ If you want to make friends and community, well you’ll do that, if you want to suffer in the ‘pain cave’ and tune out the excess noise of the world, well you can do that as well. It’s great that it can be many things to different people. … The overarching message is to do it yourself, and be sure to pass along the goodwill that you receive along the way.”
Felix said he felt the pull of the “pain cave” at an early age. “During my senior year in high school, my friend Ken and I had the wild idea of entering the Delta Century — a 100-mile ride held by the Stockton Bike Club that started in Lodi, California. Never mind that I had not biked 100 miles total the whole year and that my longest ride in my lifetime was around 20 miles. It sounded like a fun challenge and a great way to punctuate my high school years before heading off to college,” he said.
He borrowed “a classic Bianchi race bike” from a friend “since my own bike was a $5 garage sale special that had perpetually exploding tires.” The Bianchi was much lighter and faster, but it also had a genuine Brooks leather saddle that was supposed to conform to one’s backside. “It never conformed to mine and was a literal pain in the butt after seven miles,” Felix said.
At mile 30 his legs began to cramp and he had to dismount and walk up the only hills there were during the “mostly pancake-flat ride.” In the end, all that mattered was he did it. “We finished — and from then on, I was hooked,” he said.
Then, in 1996, Felix completed his first “double century” 200-mile ride. “Ever since then I have ridden at least one double century a year,” he said. In addition to the 2015 Trans Am Bike Race (since renamed the “Trans Am Bike Nonstop Race”), Felix completed the inaugural Tour Divide in 2008 and the Furnace Creek 508 in 2011. The Tour Divide — a mountain bike race from Banff, Canada to the New Mexico-Mexico border is now considered the “granddaddy” of all ultra-distance bikepacking races. Felix finished in sixth place.
Not satisfied with one ultra sport, Felix is also a marathon runner. He recently completed a goal years in the making — of running 50 26.2-mile marathons in all 50 states. “It took me 23 years,” he said. “Now I am trying to run a marathon in under four hours. So far I’ve run sub-four-hour marathons in 40 states. I’d also like to run all of the World Marathon Majors.”
For those who may not know, the Abbott World Marathon Majors is a series of seven of the largest and most renowned marathons in the world: Tokyo, Boston, London, Sydney, Berlin, Chicago and New York City.
Still rolling after all these years
I asked Felix if he would ever do the TABR again. “After completing the first 1,000 miles, I made a resolution to avoid participating in any future races exceeding 1,000 miles,” he said. “Bicycle tours, where you can stop, rest, and recover normally, are perfectly acceptable. So far, I’ve adhered to that decision.”
But he has no regrets. “Despite the challenges, the entire experience was an adventure of a lifetime. I cherish the beautiful landscapes and charming towns I passed through, the camaraderie of the other racers — in the rare instances I encountered them — and the exhilarating days when I felt incredibly strong, riding as much as 311 miles in a single 24-hour period.” He even documented his journey in a blog he created on his website at felixwong.com.
Felix said an upside to the TABR is that it’s accessible with no entry fees, and few rules. “This is to keep the playing field as level as possible,” he said. But it can also be a double-edged sword. “The clock never stops until you finish in Yorktown, Virginia, so keeping sleeping to a minimum is crucial in order to finish in a good placing.”
The record for finishing the TABR is around 14 and a half days, but stragglers in the back can stretch the race out up to four months. Felix finished in Yorktown in eighth place after 23 days, 23 hours and 17 minutes. In the photo he emailed me a few months ago, showing the moment he reached the finish line in Yorktown over 10 years ago, he is smiling through Shermer’s Neck.
I asked race organizer Jones if there was a hedonistic party on the other side of the pain cave. “Functionally no, it’s very anticlimactic,” he said. “In some years there have been enough finishers in Yorktown to have an informal get-together. The Yorktown finish has historically had a group of Trail Angels that meet riders at the finish but the D.C. riders typically arrive alone or if they are lucky to a friend or family member awaiting them.”
It turns out that the end of the race is just like the beginning — with little fanfare except for saddle sores, lingering pain and hard earned self-satisfaction. Combining the Trans Am Bike Race with the Tour Divide, Felix’s goal was to become one of the first people in the world to successfully race both north to south and west to east across the United States in a self-supported manner. “From my research, I was the 10th person to have done so,” he said.
Felix said, after all was said and done, he’s glad for it all, no matter the hardships along the way.
“It gave me an opportunity to see the beautiful landscapes across 10 states from sea to shining sea.”