Good Life Gravel Gran Fondo #goodlifegravel

Roads like these!

It's shaping to be a busy (for me) race season this year. A couple weekends ago Rafal held his annual Gravel Gran Fondo starting from Malvern, IA. I'd had this on our calendar tentatively since he announced the date, but with the Lewis & Clark Crusher and Odin's Revenge both in June already, adding the gravel grand fondo would have made three weekends in a row of events for me. In recent years that would have been too much for our young family, but I was keeping the date open just in case we felt it was something we could handle. And as it turns out, we could handle it this year with little extra stress. It's crazy what a difference a year can make with young kids.

My idea for this ride was to simply ride hard. I wanted to see how long I could stick with the real fast guys. A few of the Harvest Racing guys were going to be there plus Jonathan Wait and other who were for sure going to really throw down. I figured I'd hang with them as long as I could and then ride my own pace to the finish. The only distance offered this year was a 63 mile route and I knew I could manage to crawl through the rest of that kind of distance if I totally blew up.

I was also trying out a new set of tires. My brother had purchased a set of Compass' Bon Jon Pass Tires for his new cross bike recently. They're a 35mm full file treaded tire with a tubeless ready bead.They're really light for their size at 300ish grams per tire. Tyler was having a hell of a time getting them set up tubeless on the Stan's Grail rims that came on his new cross bike and then when they finally did set up, they blew off the rim just sitting there later on. Once that happened, he decided to give up on them feeling he couldn't really trust them again. I had heard other reports of the tires doing just fine so I wondered if they would play better with my Pacenti SL23s. Tyler, being the generous guy he is, gave the pair to me to try. They weren't nearly as easy to set up on my rims as my WTB Cross Bosses were, but once I blasted them with 80+ psi from my air compressor they seated with a few nice snaps. I handled them with care for a while waiting for a tire to blow off a rim, but it never happened. Talking with Lucas Marshall later on, he theorized that the more supple sidewall of the tires are what made it hard to get the bead to take.I think he may be right there.

Anyway, I still had my doubts on these tires. With anything less than 30 psi of pressure in them, I could take my thumbs and force air out of the bead. The sidewalls are pretty thin too so I wondered if they would be more prone to sidewall cuts. However, it's rare for something to put pressure on a sidewall like my two thumbs while you're riding and the gravel we have around here isn't very sharp so I figured I should, in theory, be okay. The lack of any kind of knobs on the tread was something I knew I'd have to get over in my head too. I generally believe that tread doesn't really do much for you on gravel roads, but it's still hard for me to translate that knowledge to confidence while I'm flying down a gravel road at 35+ mph with a corner at the bottom!

So, back to the gran fondo. Somehow I managed to lead out the group with Kevin Gilinsky. As we hit the first section of gravel, all I could think was, "don't crash!" Fortunately, the tires were feeling okay on the flat gravel that we started on. I set about a pace that was not hard but not super easy either, waiting for others to come around soon, but it seemed as though everyone was quite satisfied with the pace I was setting, so even though there was another line of riders next to me, no one was wanting to push the pace must faster. Once we hit the hills, it was another story all together. Pretty soon I was riding just about as hard as I could in order to stick with the front guys up the hills and spinning out my 38x11 as fast as I dared on a couple downhills as well. 

When we hit the first MMR is when I lost the front group. I just didn't yet have the confidence in my tires in the dusty dirt and they rode away. Within a few miles though, I settled in with Thomas Torres and my team mate, Jakob Wilson. We were still riding pretty hard up the hills until I mentioned something about not loving seeing 400+ watts on my Garmin every time we went uphill. I don't know if my comment caused the other two to back off a bit or if the gradients just got easier, but I started feeling like our pace became more manageable for me after that.

As we neared the checkpoint at close to the halfway point, Thomas was starting to act a bit fatigued. We definitely didn't want to lose him. as three is better than two with something like 40 miles to go so we worked on not pushing it so hard as to drop Thomas. At the checkpoint, we refilled water quickly and got back out on the road within a few minutes. Thomas was thinking about just hanging out there for a bit, but made a snap decision to continue on with Jakob and me instead. The next several miles were dead flat and we cruised along all together pretty quickly. Thomas took the lead for the last bit of the flat sections and I remember thinking he seemed to really be working hard. The very next hill was probably the steepest one in the whole route and as we turned onto it, Thomas looked up and said something like, "Oh shit. I'm cramping. See you guys later!" The way he said it was pretty funny, but I still felt bad for him as cramping there with like 30 hilly mile to go would not be fun! However, I quickly turned my attention to riding up this crazy hill. My lowest gear was a 38x36 and so I just stood up and cranked away at like 50 rpm and tried not to look up too often to see how much further I had to go.

Fred Hinsley always gets your best side in pictures.

The rest of the route was just me and Jakob. He had made it up the brute of a hill probably 30 seconds faster than me, but he soft-pedaled at the top to wait for me so we could work together. In the distance ahead, we could see someone who had been dropped from the lead group and so we kind of used him as a rabbit to reel in. We rode conservatively so we could pass him with enough energy to make it hard for him to latch on to our wheels though that turned out to be unnecessary as he had been cramping we found out later and didn't even try to hold on as we passed.

Thomas loves cramps, apparently!

Surprisingly enough, I was feeling relatively fresh as we moved into the final fourth of the ride. That was good, cause Jakob was starting to feel less than fresh, I think. A low gear of 34x26 on a hilly ride like that will do that to you! Since I was feeling pretty decent yet, I was able to take longer pulls,and since we are team mates, I didn't have to worry about him attacking me later on. The only other notable thing about the last bit of the ride was the really funny (at least after-the-fact) one-two canine punch that happened at the top of a hill. I think we were just cresting a hill when this tiny little dog come rushing out of a yard yipping and yapping at us with all the ferocity of a 15 pound furball. We laugh and shake our heads at the cute little "guard dog" until two seconds later when his buddy, the 80+ pound german shepherd came flying out of the yard heading straight after us looking less than friendly! We got to practice our dog-sprints then!

Jakob and I rolled in together to finish in the top ten and under 4 hours total ride time. I think both of us were pretty happy with out performance and pretty stoked on the whole event. Afterwards there was delicious food for each rider from local chef/cyclist Eric Marshall and, of course, beer! I thought the event was fantastic and I hope to do it again next year!

I found the hills in northern North Dakota and they found me out

It’s becoming something of a tradition to go visit my mom’s family in North Dakota for the 4th of July weekend. Last year, Tyler and I brought our bikes up and did a little gravel riding out near the town my mom grew up nearest, Munich, ND. It was a fun 50ish mile ride and we found some interesting minimum maintenance roads, yet like most of northern North Dakota, it was very flat.

A few times, when we’ve driven up to where my grandparents live in Langon, ND by a different route, I’ve noticed this ravine-type area and I’ve been wanting to figure out what kind of riding might be available around there. So, this year I mapped out a route that would take me to that area. I found what looked like minimum maintenance roads that followed the river that runs through the ravine. I also noted that there were some gravel roads running through there that had some nice elevation changes. The MMR I saw on google maps looked nearly non-existant in spots and I figured I may need to backtrack and figure out a different route when I got out there. But that’s just part of the fun of exploring new roads, right?

Google Maps called this a road. Note to self: when riding gravel in North Dakota, never assume that what looks like a road on a map is actually a road!

The route I mapped out was about 78 miles in distance so it would be a pretty long ride though since more than half of it was pretty much pancake flat, I figured it would be completely doable in 5 or so hours which would get me back to my grandparents house before the afternoon got too far along as long as I left before 7 or so.

The day before I rode this longer route I did a 25ish mile ride and I ended up wearing leg and arm warmers as well as a wind vest, cause it was a foggy 55 degrees that morning! Fortunately, the day I went exploring it was in the 70s when I left. As I rode out, I realized that I was riding with a tail wind. As fun as it is to ride with the wind when you’re really fresh, it did not bode well for later in the day when I’d have to ride back in to that same wind. For the time, though, I made good use of the wind and made really good time without putting a whole lot of effort into it.

As I approached the river, the roads started getting really cool. There was some fun descending on dirt and gravel and at one point I realized I was going downhill for longer than I ever do back home. I did not expect that in North Dakota!

This is where the road started going down. Fun, fun, fun! There's pretty much a constant haze in the air from the Canadian fires right now.

These birds were going nutty over something at the bridge over the river at the bottom of the descent pictured above.

When I got down to the river, I turned north onto a road that would lead me to the MMR that may or may not actually exist. After scaling a fence, the road turned into a double track ATV path through some really pretty meadows and increasingly thick trees. I knew from google maps that technically this trail ended at a bit of a stream. However it appeared that the stream was easily crossable on foot and the trail seemed to pick up again after the stream crossing. When I reached the stream, it was slightly more difficult to cross, but really only becase I was wearing stiff, carbon-soled MTB shoes and trying to carry a bike over muddy and wet rocks.

I had to stop half way through the stream crossing to get some pictures. This is looking toward where the stream enters the Pembina River.

This is looking away from the river.

The stream crossing went okay, if a bit awkwardly, but once I got across to where I thought the trail should be and rode a little ways, I realized that the challenge was really only beginning. This is where the maps showed a “road” but the satellite images only showed grass. I had been hoping that the grass would be kind of mowed or beaten down my some sort of traffic.

Nope! Not at all. The grass was as tall as me much of the time and several times I wondered if I was on a fool’s errand trying to go any further. However, there was always an indication that someone or something had been through there not too long before me and so I could sort of follow the trail of slightly parted grass. There were also flags tied to branches and shrubs every so often that seemed to indicate that I was still on the right path. So, I kept riding on, glad for the assurance of tubeless tires and the fact that I hadn’t seen any nettles or poison ivy yet.

Eventually, I got through that section of bushwacking and hit more ATV trails. This is where the real fun began. I had assumed that, since these trails pretty much followed a river, that they would be pretty flat. I assumed wrong! They were never flat at all! Up steep gravelly dirt paths and down fast and loose downhills with water bars you could get a little air off of if you so chose. I laughed out loud a couple times taking corners a little faster than I intended. Such fun! But it was sometimes hard to tell how long a little climb would be so I found myself getting stuck standing and grinding a hard gear more often than I would have liked for longer than I would have liked several times.

There were a lot of these spots on the trails where water runs over the path. Most of them you can kind of lift your front wheel over and be okay. A MTB could probably plow right through them. There were a few that required a bit more caution though.

I followed these trails north until they ended at the river at a spot that couldn’t have been much more than a mile away from the Canadian border. I turned around and rode back to a spot where you could exit on to a gravel road and started my return trip. I was running behind my scheduled plan due to all the slow bushwacking I did. An approximately 8 mph average for about 5 miles will really kill some time! So, I started motoring along my planned route back. There was more long climbing that I had forgotten about and the landscape was still quite gorgeous so I was really enjoying myself.

Canada is over there somewhere!

I got back to where I had turned north next to the river and my planned route had me heading south along the river, but I couldn’t see the road from where I was and I was pretty sure that it was going to mean more bushwacking so I opted to simply follow the roads I came in on. That meant I had to climb back up out the river gorge on the road that had been such fun to bomb down earlier. Only now I was almost 50 miles in and this road just kept going up and up and up for way longer than I expected! It turns out that this climb was over a mile long and averaged almost 6% gradient. I was using every bit of my 34x36 low gear for a looooong time!

I paced myself pretty well going up that climb, but when I got to the top, it was mostly fresh gravel and my energy and patience for things like loose gravel was starting to wane. Also, that wind I was going to be riding into had picked up a bit more. I did not relish the idea of riding any more gravel into that wind knowing that I was already later getting back at my grandparent’s house than I had wanted. We were in North Dakota to see them after all. So, I decided to take paved roads back in stead of the gravel I had planned on.

The Pembina River winding it's way south.

Even on pavement, the wind really slowed me down and my legs had very little oomph left in them. My arms were also getting tired. I really should get a longer stem for road riding on my Crux. Long rides on the bike as it is make me feel a little cramped and always make my triceps a little sore.

The last 9 miles stretch was straight south directly into the wind. I was shattered. Every pedal stroke was a burden. I seriously considered calling my wife to come pick me up at least a dozen times. I’m still not sure why I didn’t. I suppose I knew that if I did, I’d feel like I hadn’t HTFU’d enough. And I was right. The last 20 miles were pretty miserable, but I got them done even though I didn't enjoy it. That’s good mental training right there!

The views from the MMRs I found did not disappoint!

I got back to the house, staggered inside, and promptly laid down on the floor to the amusement of my grandfather and my aunt. Meanwhile, my grandma did what she does and warmed up some pizza and got me whole pitcher of water before I even knew she was in the room! Gotta love grandmas!!

I can’t wait to get a chance to ride up in the Pembina River gorge again! Hopefully Tyler can come with next time cause I know he'd have a hoot and a half! Though, I fear the next time we’re up there together will not be for circumstances that lend themselves to wanting to ride bikes.