Why I Ride the Death Ride
It seems that family and non cycling friends are curious as to why someone, me in
particular, would bother to even wonder about riding this crazy thing called the Death
Ride. Despite knowing I have enjoyed nearly fifty-five years of adventurous living, people
in my life still seem to have almost zero understanding as to why someone would sign up
for a road biking event that is 129 miles long and climbs over five huge mountain passes,
for a total of 15,000 feet of climbing in one day's ride. The event dates back to 1980, and
starts in the little town of Markleeville, about thirty minutes south of South Lake Tahoe.
It has become the biggest fundraiser for Alpine County, which has the smallest
population of any county in California; about 1,000 residents. On some lists, the Death
Ride is considered one of the ten hardest one day cycling event in the world!
With all of the questions, concerns, and persistent dissuasions from some family
members, I figured I really needed to explain myself. Not just to family and friends, but
probably most importantly, to myself. So here I go . . . and bear with me, this will come
back around.
My journey began as a young child with severe asthma. I was on all these seemingly
weird elixirs, and had one to three trips to the ER each year, struggling to breathe. While
other parts of my childhood were great fun, this asthma stuff was absolutely not. At age
12, I met my good friend Loren Wilken. He loved sports and running around, and, well,
running itself. I loved those things in a more theoretical way. I had read about Teddy
Roosevelt and John Muir, and how they persevered, despite medical issues young in life.
With inspiration form Loren, I began trying to run, even though I couldn't at first. Things
slowly progressed, and the asthma lessened as I exercised more. I also loved exploring on
our annual summer family trips to Yosemite. By age 13, I was able to hike 16 miles with
a friend from Yosemite Valley to the top of Half Dome. That was thrilling at such a tender
age. So running led to more freedom from asthma, and, . . . Adventure!
Alas, as I seemed to begin to manage the asthma, another big health hit arrived. I was
nearly 18, had just won Junior Nationals in sailboat racing and had been accepted with a
scholarship to MIT, when I came down with meningoencephalitis (aka bad brain
infection). Ouch. After the acute phase, I was exhausted for many many months after,
and developed other lifelong sequelae. Any Olympic Sailing plans and MIT plans were
toast. Luckily, I had already learned the benefits of exercise for managing asthma, and so
I dug in with what I knew. In the wake of the meningoencephalitis, I have remained on the
sleepy side, despite underneath being a passionate and quite energetic person.
I continued my love of exercise into adulthood. First, this tended to be in more
adventurous sports, with a focus on downhill skiing. In medical school, student living on
limited funds led to the discovery of back country skiing, which was more affordable. It
was also great to meet some new friends, and to explore the backcountry when the trails
are buried under snow. The adventures were often all day affairs, and it was great fun
learning to navigate without trails or signs to help. Also, once you taste skiing in the
backcountry, the ridiculously crowded and noisy downhill ski slopes become far less
enjoyable. In the backcountry, you can often find supreme untracked powder! My great
friend, Barney Jones, 30 years my senior, was my favorite telemark skiing companion.
He lived in Truckee in later years, and always knew where the good snow was! It was also
enjoyable to learn the art of free heel skiing (telemark style). Humbling at first, and
nearly impossible to master. A great way as an adult to still PLAY. Especially for an adult
like me, who tends to battle fatigue. It was just simply great incredible fun dancing
around in the Tahoe Sierra Backcountry! I actually have back country skied many of the
mountains along the DR route, having experienced them all deep under snow, long before
any summertime encounters.
OK, I'm getting a bit far afield of the Death Ride. After my wonderful son, Wesley, came
along, all day backcountry trips were not easy to pull off. I got into doing one fun cross
country ski race a year, and did a bit of endurance training throughout the year to help
me with that one race. I saw it as a way to trick myself into staying fit, and to avoid the
inertia that can so easily take over adult life, leading to the "spare tire," and general
adult exercise apathy. Also, the health benefits of exercise are well known. Without
guarantees, it is arguably the best cancer fighter and also appears to be the best way to
reduce risk of dementia. I also discovered mountain biking from my good friend Tom
Pattison, and that gave me another excuse to stay fit. I consistently noticed that, the
more fit I stayed, the better I could manage the residual fatigue from the
meningoencephalitis in childhood. So staying fit, while clearly inherently good for people,
became for me basically a matter of survival.
When I met my dear wife, Celia, ten years ago, she persistently nagged me to consider
road biking with her. I had a lot of excuses, with danger at the top of the list. I didn't like
the idea of the pavement, higher speeds than mountain biking, and cars. Indeed, road
biking is sadly a fairly dangerous sport. I finally relented to Celia's urgings, and bought a
nice Specialized Roubaix Road Bike in early 2012. The sport dovetailed in nicely with
my ongoing love of endurance challenges. My son and I had gotten more into cross
country ski racing, and that sport pushed me along further. A big discovery for my wife
and me has been Pilates on a reformer, which strengthens the core and allows us fiftysomethings to still survive long exercise days. Pilates enhanced my cross country ski
racing substantially, and has been quite helpful with road biking.
In parallel to my love of endurance sports has been my spiritual growth. I have struggled
with how to integrate the two. For now, I see the endurance sports as a useful living
metaphor of spiritual perseverance. I also hope to integrate sports and church more fully
by leading adventurous outings with fellow congregants.
So finally to my Death Ride outing this year in 2015. Exciting was that my wife, Celia,
had been foolish enough to sign up for a late ticket in April. The Death Ride is so hard,
that I couldn't recommend it to her. Along her life's journey, she had experienced some
setbacks that could make completion of the Death Ride a low probability. When she got
her entry in April, I truly felt the odds of her completing all five passes were about one
percent!
A treasure for both of us were the numerous training rides. We tried to coordinate a bit
with others, but found it easiest by far to be one another's main training partner and
supporter. Seven weeks before the Death Ride, I had my second kidney stone, and was
knocked out for a few days. Then a week later, I had a really bad asthma exacerbation
that required awful meds, including an antibiotic heavily feared in endurance circles,
because of the risk of tendon ruptures related to use of the med. For two more weeks, no
training. I road around in my car, ringing a Norwegian cowbell I had purchased, cheering
Celia on in her training rides. I was beside myself that I couldn't be out riding, too. With
asthma, you have to wait for things to settle down. If you push it, as I tried a few years
back, you can end up with two or more months sidelined from endurance sports. As I was
finally getting back on the bike, I had another kidney stone, and then another. They have
always occurred for me after a long endurance day, and I had to limit hours on the bike to
minimize further recurrences. My kidney Doc has not been happy about my love of
endurance sports!
Fast forward finally to the actual DR, Saturday July 11th, 2015. The plan for me was to
go 100% from the beginning. With these darn kidney stones the last two years, there is a
chance my long endurance days are limited. I am in my fifty-fifth year, and decided I
would go full bore. We started just before light with headlamps and taillights, to give my
dear wife, Celia, the best chance of completing all five passes. I had done the DR just one
other time, in 2014. In your first DR, it is a good idea to pace yourself, to have the best
chance of completing all five passes. That is what I did in 2014. I just plunked along, and
reached the top of Carson Pass at exactly 4 PM. I was quite excited to get there. I had
only ridden 100 miles or more one other time, and I had bonked badly that previous time
(which almost never happens for me).
2015 was going to be all out. They say you might want to choose goals that would make
people laugh at you. More than a month before the DR, I chose this odd goal of trying to
finish by 1:58 PM. Don't have any idea how that number popped into my head. In the end,
I only told my wife and a few non cyclists, because it seemed absolutely absurd that I
could somehow be two hours faster this year. On the ride itself, I tore into each pass with
abandon. I was fairly careful on the descents, with speeds of mostly 30-35mph. Each
pass went about as planned. I hit the top of Monitor shortly after six, and was back up
the east side of Monitor to the pass at 7:30. Hit the top of Ebbett's Pass at 9:32 and was
pleased. It was an unusually cool day, and heat is my Kryptonite. It was the first time I
have ridden the east side of Ebbett's without encountering those steep long parts where I
normally say to myself, "You've got to be kidding." It just didn't happen, and I felt like I
flew up the road. Something very odd, was the nearly total absence of other riders on the
east side of Ebbett's. I saw almost no one the entire 13 mile climb. In 2014, I was in the
middle of many many people, and always working out how to pass folks. This time, the
road was entirely mine. I did miss the faster riders, who can have a tendency to pull you
along and cause you to push a little harder, as you try to keep up. Four young racer
hotshots did pass me on the long climb, but that was it. I passed a couple of two pass
riders (they only had one sticker on their bib, meaning they had only done the west side
of Monitor Pass), but otherwise the east side of Ebbett's Pass was all mine. On the fourth
climb, the west side of Ebbett's Pass, I finally started to notice the problem with going
100% hard on the climbs, along with minimal breaks at the rest stops. My quads were
finally screaming, and a few more young hotshots passed me on the five mile climb, by
far the shortest in the DR. I hit the top of Ebbett's again at 10:30. From there, I had an
odd descent. Because I was one of the early riders at that point, the basically peloton
climbing the east side of Ebbett's was enjoying the luxury of almost no descenders yet. As
I tried to descend at my usual 30-35mph descent pace, I had to politely yell out to the
ascenders, who were taking up nearly the entire road. For those who don't know, all of
Ebbett's and Monitor are closed during the DR, so it's only bikes! But on my descent of the
east side of Ebbett's, lots and lots of bikes were filling the entire road! My polite yelling
helped, and a few yahoo descenders who flew by me also got the ascenders more
accustomed to calling out "bike up!" to their fellow riders. This made the remainder of
the descent more enjoyable.
For lunch, I had parked along the DR route, with an ice chest stocked with goodies in the
car. This allowed me to skip the usually busy lunch stop, which actually might not have
been quite open for lunch anyway, as I had flown by. With a quick snack at the car, and
replenishment of ice in my bike bottles (can't emphasize enough the value of ICE on these
endurance events for helping to cool your core), I was off again. Some of the roughly
twenty riders ahead of me had ducked into the lunch stop, and so I got back on the road
ahead of them, at least for awhile.
By Carson Pass, my plan of all out 100% attacks with minimal rest stops was really
catching up with me. The climb from Woodfords to Pickett's Junction was getting a bit
hot for my liking, and I had to slow down accordingly. At Pickett's, the young female
volunteers were ridiculously helpful, and filled my bottles completely with ice and
Gatorade for me. They said I was about the fifteenth rider in at that point. I was shocked.
I never did any formal bike racing, and don't want to. Broke my femur once in 1997; don't
need to do that again! So this was indeed surprising news to me.
On the final nine miles, about twenty more riders snuck by. Most were young racers,
wearing kits that harkened to likely former or possibly even ongoing racing days. I left
Pickett's Junction rest stop at 1:05 PM, and my goal of summiting Carson Pass by 1:58
seemed impossible, with nine miles and about 1,400 feet of climbing to go. Good news,
though, was that the temperature was much cooler from Hope Valley on up to Carson
Pass. I started to see that 1:58 was maybe possible, and then I hit the road construction.
The final two miles of Carson Pass was severely scraped, in preparation for resurfacing.
It was like riding on cobblestones! More than a few of us later reflected that it was like
the famed Paris-Roubaix road bike race in France; renowned especially for the long
stretch of old cobbles. There was also a ridiculously stiff headwind along almost all of the
Carson Pass climb, and especially severe along that rough road stretch. There was
nothing pretty about it. It was brutal. Despite my all out 100% strategy, I didn't bonk,
and that sure saved me. When I rolled in to get my fifth pass sticker and to get clocked
out, I could not believe my eyes. It was exactly 1:58 PM! I had set a goal that would make
people laugh; made me laugh; made me disbelieve; and yet there it was. 1:58 PM!
Atop Carson Pass, I noticed almost exclusively carbon fiber wheelsets, juxtaposed
against my rather pedestrian Kysrium Elite aluminum wheelset. Same for the gruppos.
Perhaps I can buy a little more speed for next time!
After finishing, I was able to collect our car, and found Celia at the Pickett's junction rest
stop. Nine miles to go, but as she handed me her bike, it was clear her tank was empty. She
said she was done. I got her into a chair, and got her some ice and Gatorade from the
amazing volunteers. After about ten minutes, she started to come back to life. We got
some sports gel into her, and even some Fritos corn chips, which are helpful late in rides
for the calories and the salt. And with that she slowly came back to life! Our plan was
that I would drive about two miles ahead and cheer her on. I had a chair for her, and my
Norwegian cowbell to cheer her and other riders along. As we leapfrogged our way up the
last nine miles and 1,400 feet of climbing, Celia did great. She finished at 6:28 PM, and
we were both thrilled! What a day. For Celia, it was well over thirteen hours on the bike,
with fairly minimal breaks. Quite a long day, but she was OK.
My wife, Celia, and I atop Carson Pass just after Celia finished (below)
At the top of Carson, many of our fellow spin class riders from Rocklin came in shortly
after Celia. Most heartwarming was Janel. She had made four passes the prior year. All
year she rode so hard in spin class and outdoors, to be ready to make the fifth pass in the
DR. She had struggled some, and so our spin class instructor, Rod Halbert, got back on his
bike after finishing his own DR, and rode with her up Carson. When she came in, she was
trembling throughout her entire body, obviously done, and in tears. Job well done to
Janel, and our spin instructor, Rod. I need to add, I always thought the DR was completely
nuts. Thanks to Rod, we have had thirty plus entered in the DR the last two years from
our gym in Rocklin, and 19 five pass finishers in 2015!
Our spin class (below) from Rocklin, CA at Carson Pass. Instructor Rod is far left, I am far
right. Lots of joy!
So to recap, I ride the Death Ride for physical survival vis a vis various medical issues,
and as a metaphor for perseverance in my "this world" life and my spiritual life. I also do
the ride to feel fully alive and to commune with God. It is also great being a part of the
joy of all the riders and the amazing volunteers. The scenery is stunning, both on the DR,
and on all the high altitude training rides Celia and I did together.
I am called to do this, and so I do. To have such a surprising day in my fifty-fifth year
with such a good result in a sport I began relatively recently, just caps it off. And
unbelievable, to get to share this with Celia, the woman of my dreams, who, against all
odds, pulled off all five passes on her first DR.
I want to clearly add that this special day of flying along for me was simply not possible
without God in my life. As I reflect further on the limited length of my training rides due
to recurrent kidney stones, I have come to a remarkable conclusion. I don't believe that
that was me alone out there. I didn't charge up the east side of Ebbett's and hardly even
notice the exertion in isolation. The only explanation I can come up with is that God was
with me to achieve a result outside of my realm of possibility in order to clearly
demonstrate to me that He was there with me; to teach me about faith.
My 16 year-old son, Wesley, says he wants to join this DR stuff in a few years! I will tell
him, "This ride is so hard, I can't recommend it!" And of course, we will be out there
again!
Thank you so much to Alpine County and all of the amazing volunteers who put on this
remarkable event. And many thanks to the many and brave firefighters who
extinguished the Washington Fire, which two weeks before the DR, engulfed much of the
ride route in flames and smoke.
Blessings,
Blair Romer