I had been living in Missoula for less than a week when the news broke on the Tour Divide gossip thread: “Dave Blumenthal was hit by a truck.”
“What happened? Is he going to be okay?”
“He was riding downhill and took a turn wide. It was a head-on collision. He’s in the hospital.”
I remember sitting back in my chair at work, dumbstruck. My thoughts flashed back to a similar scenario I’d come upon one year earlier during my Tour Divide race. My Alaska bike hero, Pete Basinger, had been involved in a similar collision in southern Colorado. I was the first person to come upon the ambulance creeping down the rocky jeep road with him inside. As the medics waited for a helicopter, they let me briefly step inside the ambulance to visit Pete. He was drugged up and pinned down by traction devices. I interpreted his condition as dire. For the next 24 hours, I felt dumbstruck and distraught about this potentially life-changing incident.
I wrote in my journal: “Pete and I had both been out there on the Great Divide, riding the same muddy roads, climbing the same sweeping passes, watching the same spectacular sunsets. Both of us had been bound by this one thing, this totally unique thing, this effort to ride across the spine of the continent as fast as we possibly could. And to what end? To what end?”
Before I raced the Tour Divide, my relationship with endurance racing was simple, almost childlike: Endurance racing was exciting, it was rewarding, and it was fun to follow my heroes as they battled the elements. I was intellectually aware of the dangers, but I also felt an irrational sense of invincibility when I took on a big challenge. Even though I was plagued by anxiety in every other aspect of my life, I willed endurance racing to become my personal superhero cape. As long as I was wearing this cape, I could tackle big, scary situations without reservations. It wasn’t rational, but what about endurance racing is rational?
This cape seemed to be indestructible. After all, I developed a serious case of frostbite during the Iditarod in March 2009 and realistically could have died if just one more thing had gone wrong that night — yet I wasn’t scared. But Pete’s crash three months later — that scared me. And even though he ultimately recovered, the uneasiness persisted. My cape began to fray at the seams.
The day Dave Blumenthal was hit by a truck was June 23, 2010. A co-worker invited me out for a 50-mile ride to celebrate the Summer Solstice. For much of the ride, the uneasiness churned in my stomach.
I wrote: “We plummeted through the moss-lined forest and apocalyptic clear-cuts as the golden sun cast long shadows behind us. Down, down, down, with a cool wind whipping past our ears. ‘The Summer Solstice is such a strange thing to celebrate,’ I thought. ‘We're simply acknowledging the inevitable descent into winter darkness.’”
Dave Blumenthal died the following day. He was survived by a wife and a 4-year-old daughter. He was only 37 years old.
The 2010 Tour Divide marked the end of my endurance racing innocence. This wasn’t just a race. This was life. And like life, endurance racing is never free from danger. There are no superhero capes to protect us from harm. I realize danger lurks in every corner and fear is not a good reason to shy away from anything in life. But I could never again approach an adventure without asking myself the unanswerable question: To what end?
It’s not easy to be a Tour Divide fan, regardless of whether one idolizes the race with childlike awe or is weighed down by a complex muddle of emotions. The course is 2,800 miles long and takes participants anywhere from two to four weeks to finish. That’s a long time to pay attention to anything. Even as participation increased from about 50 in 2009 and 2010 to more than 200 by the end of the decade, it’s still a relatively small number of people spread across vast distances.
Tour Divide’s de facto race director, Matthew Lee, and GPS mapping guru Scott Morris partnered with SPOT to bring GPS tracking to the endurance racing world in 2008 — as far as I know, they were the first to streamline this type of tracking for a competitive event. Their business, Trackleaders, allowed fans to follow dots laid out on a map of the course and access relevant data such as average speed. In most ways, this was better than the old method of recording pay phone calls from designated towns. There was no more guesswork about racers’ positions on the course. The data spoke for itself. As fans, we could still speculate to our heart’s content about why certain dots were moving the way they were and then gossip about that on the forums.
I was enthusiastic about Trackleaders but admit that I feared losing my favorite aspect of this race — the storytelling. The previously mandatory call-ins were a smorgasbord of entertaining tidbits. From racers’ fatigued slurring of words to frantic descriptions of hallucinations, I could always count on these recordings for a good laugh along with a healthy dose of awe. The dots seemed more impersonal to me — they couldn’t tell you if they were nursing a broken freehub or stuck in the mud or hungover from too much whiskey with Wyoming ranchers at the bar where they stopped to resupply at 1 a.m. Social media posts were too scattered to follow closely. As the stories became more scattered, I admit that my interest did as well. But here are a few of my favorite tidbits from the next few years:
Justin Simoni’s Tour Divide snowshoe in 2011. This year was a weather anomaly with abundant snow still burying large sections of the route by the mid-June start. There is always some snow on the route, but the sheer amount this year led Matt Lee and others to determine it would be untenable and unsafe to send racers on the original course. They devised hundreds of miles of reroutes. Justin Simoni was the lone racer to attempt the established route — packing snowshoes and an ice ax. He hiked miles of deep snow, took a terrifying slide on Richmond Peak, and fell far behind the leaders that he likely would have been able to keep pace with otherwise. Sadly, he was injured in a crash and had to quit within 200 miles of finishing. But as far as I’m concerned, Justin has one of the more badass runs of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route on record.
Eszter Horanyi’s Tour Divide record in 2012. I knew when Eszter came on board, my record was going down. I was chuffed to hold onto it for three years, knowing it was a soft record even by my own less-than-elite standards. Eszter was one of the best Enduro racers at the time, even if she was relatively new to competitive bikepacking.
Since finishing the 2009 race in 24 days and 7 hours, I had spent too many nights mulling over my mistakes, doing some math, and pondering what I was capable of achieving. I decided sub-20 days was doable with a better plan, a bit of luck, and a lot of stubbornness, even if I couldn’t become a faster cyclist. So I watched Eszter’s race with great interest. To be honest, I had anticipated my ego getting the better of me and rooting for her to fail. But this never was the case. It was exciting to watch her methodically crush each day in a way I had hoped to do and then some. When she finished in 19 days and 3 hours — a time that seemed beyond my reach even in a best-case scenario — I was thrilled.
Mike Hall’s Tour Divide win in 2013. Mike entered the Tour Divide after setting a world record for bicycle circumnavigation of the globe. He was an early favorite and a joy to follow. Before 2013, no one had yet broken 16 days on the unmodified Tour Divide course. Mike crushed the race in 14 days and 11 hours — however, a detour around a wildfire in New Mexico prevented him from claiming the official record. Mike had such a friendly, unassuming demeanor, and yet he rode with quiet ferocity. Any interview he gave was peppered with brilliant truisms. One of my favorites:
“You’ve always got to tell yourself when you’re going through a bad patch — this won’t last.” He paused and grinned. “And when you’re going through a good patch, that won’t last either.”
In 2014, I was participating in the Race Across South Africa at the time of the Tour Divide and wasn’t able to follow the race. In 2015, I decided I was going to attempt my own triumphant return.
I was no longer a Tour Divide innocent and my motivations were no longer pure. I’d had a good few years of racing and amassed more confidence than I probably deserved. I still didn’t think I could seriously contend for Eszter’s record. But perhaps if everything went absolutely perfectly — perhaps it was within reach. I still believed sub-20 days was achievable. But my overarching motivation for this race was training for my ultimate goal — the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail. I convinced myself that a fast Tour Divide would help me sharpen the skills I’d need to tackle that challenge. With that in mind, I headed to Banff full of spit and vinegar.
The 2015 Tour Divide is not something I want to rehash in detail. If you are interested, you can read the series of posts on my blog starting here. The race was a disaster from the start. Literally the start. I woke up the morning of the race with a cough and congestion. As is typical for the first day through the Canadian Rockies, we battled cold rain, sleet, and mud. I pedaled more than 150 miles to grab a brief women’s lead, slept next to a stream in my wet clothes as temperatures dipped to 22 degrees, and woke up frozen and feeling like death. My illness only got worse. I fought congestion and wheezing all the way to Colorado, where a doctor in Steamboat Springs diagnosed me with bronchitis. I only lasted another two days — days I barely remember because I was so sick with what was becoming pneumonia.
I still carry resentment and anger about the 2015 Tour Divide — all directed at myself, of course. I can pinpoint this viral illness as the beginning of a prolonged deterioration in my health due to autoimmune conditions. And I’ve retained a fair amount of psychological trauma from the weakness and pain I experienced during the two weeks I was out on the route. It was objectively dangerous to pedal into remote places with such compromised lungs. I pushed myself so hard for so long. And to what end? To what end?
2015 was the year that Lael Wilcox set a women’s record that is absolutely out of my — and most mortals’ — reach. She started the race with what was likely the same virus I was stricken with and still managed to finish, although she unintentionally deviated from the route in Wyoming. So she returned later that summer to lay down an impossible standard at 15 days and 10 hours. No woman, including Lael, has been able to best that time yet.
In 2016, Mike Hall returned to scorch the overall record in 13 days and 22 hours. I found myself not willing to follow the race that year — admittedly, the 2015 trauma runs deep. As do elements of my first run in 2009 — Pete Basinger’s crash was just one trauma. In 2009, I was also trying to process the dissolution of a long-term relationship, uncertainties about my career and future in general, and stress about other crises happening in my family. It’s interesting to look back and realize that the source of so much joy can also be the catalyst of so much pain. It’s just one of those things about life. We follow the light into the darkness, knowing the light will eventually return.
And yet … even the light’s return isn’t guaranteed.
In March 2017, Mike Hall was killed after a car driver struck him during the Indian Pacific Wheel Race in Australia. He was 35 years old.
In my next and final Tour Divide post, I’ll write about the recent years of the race and what I hope the future holds. Thank you for reading!
I concur with those events/dates being significant in the history of the race. I can remember where I was and what I was doing each of those years.
I also remember pedalling up beside you on Day 2 in 2015 after you had hauled yourself out of your bivy by that frozen creek. I had stayed in a warm room in Sparwood and felt great. You, not so much but I also recall a week later watching your dot roll into Lima, just a few miles out the road, as I was packing my bike to roll out and thinking to myself “bloody hell, she’s on flat pedals and sick and I can barely keep in front”?!
You were on 20 day pace (I became the 20 day dot for a few years) so please don’t beat yourself up over it. Things happen. Some good, some not so good. None of us are the same person as we were then either physically or mentally. We just need to keep on going, as best we can.
You do alright Jill.
Cheers
Dave H.
P.S. Thank you for this history of the race. I get quite annoyed at the lack of research many modern racers display on that “social media website”. Bring back the wealth of info on bikepacking.net I say!
I was at Brush Lodge, 1/2 day behind Dave when I learned of his accident. TDR memories run deep in my head. ....Great writing as usual, keep it coming...