Jeff's Epic Recap

Monday, 8 days post Epic
Back in Los Angeles. My body is still achy in places, my toes on my left foot still numb and the healing is not quite done on my ass. Knowing what such a race demands, I will train differently next time. Next time!? Yes, I would like to continue to do these types of races but now having done, arguably, the hardest, I feel better prepared for the other ‘easier’ races.

It was an epic race on many levels. It coincided with the 10yr passing of my mother from leukemia, I carried a healing stone in my saddlebag for Geoff who has MS and leukemia and whose struggles got me through the hardest day, another good friend, Michael tragically died very young on the day of the 3rd stage and his memory propelled me through the 7th stage. The physical breakdown every day left me utterly empty. Survival to the finish was the only thought, sometimes it was a rush to finish so as to end the pain from the saddle beating my sores or to stop the intense burning in my feet from the pressures of pushing down on the pedals.

On easier days(!), it was to reach the end in time for my 4 o’clock massage. That meant, as we started at 7am, 7-8 hours in the saddle… the 30 minutes rub down were simply put, a lifeline that I grasped for in a sea of suffering. It allowed me some sense of normalcy in a seemingly chaotic struggle to finish the daily courses laid out by ‘Dr. Evil’. The physical expenditure had to be measured so as to have enough to finish and be able to ride another day. To understand consider doing a marathon every day for 8 days in a row! The stages demanded more than I thought I had to give or even had in my body. I was, it is now clear, wrong on all counts. My body had more than my mind thought, my mind was pushed further than my own preset boundaries allowed. Simply put, when faced with the 2 choices, give up my number, get on a quad and quit or go on riding, I chose to ride. Some days, riding in endless sand, over rocks that tore at my sores, up hills that were too steep, too high and hard with legs empty of energy unable, I thought, to turn another stroke, it came really, really close.

My bike was the instrument of my pain and also of my salvation. It is a heavy bike for such a race at around 30lbs (average weight for this race around 23lbs). Not a cross-country bike but not quite a freeride bike either. It was a beast to get up the mountains but boy, when I descended, it was a dream passing most of the riders who climbed faster than me. My bike ate up the washboard, technical downhill’s but ultimately my legs suffered and I was almost done in by it.

Ironically it is called the “Id” – ‘The id is responsible for our basic drives such as food, sex, and aggressive impulses. It is amoral and egocentric, ruled by the pleasure–pain principle; it is without a sense of time, completely illogical, primarily sexual, infantile in its emotional development, and will not take "no" for an answer. It is regarded as the reservoir of the libido or "love energy".’ Haha. now that’s funny.

So I come to the reason for doing this race… the actual why of the doing.

I have always wondered about the super human feats of athletes and acrobats who have always seemed untouchable to me. I could never quite relate to their abilities so they became ‘beyond’ my comprehension. I decided that for me, that was not an image of myself I wanted to keep. Having completed this “epic” the world has become a smaller place now. What was seemingly unreachable had been just in my mind. Hills are not unclimbable anymore, tasks are now doable instead of questionable. My perspective has switched from ‘if’ to ‘when’ and more importantly that it would happen sooner than later. My need to get to the end of a stage, made me focus on the hill or sand at hand and that very basic level of survival was what I needed to relearn the lesson of actions over theories… very painful but necessary for my personal evolution.

The epic continues to evolve in my mind… I will share more as it becomes clearer and as the lactic is purged from my recovering legs.