Seth Learns About Mountain Biking

Seth just got his first nice mountain bike yesterday. He was so excited. So today, we went out on his first ride in a long time, on his brand new bike.

Within the first fifty yards, he went down becuase of some roots on an uphill part. But far worse, he did a total endo while going over a tree. He said that his shin hurt a lot for a couple of minutes, but it got better, so we just kept riding.

When we got home about 40 minutes later, Seth looked down and saw a HUGE bulge under his tights in his lower left leg. He pulled the tights and sock up, and bright red blood started streaming out of his leg and all over the garage floor. I couldn't believe it when I looked over there!

The hematoma was really big. We just stood there and laughed, it was so weird. We put a compression bandage and ice on it. He had good pulses and capillary refill, and there was no neurologic deficit, but it is likely that the front chain ring caused a puncture wound and severed a small artery. The mass effect caused it to stop bleeding during the ride.

But this excursion reminds me of a very funny story of a time not long after I first met Seth. I was working at Eisenhower Army Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia, and there was a Toyota Tundra Spint Adventure Race coming to the area, so I was putting together a team. I had another team member, but the teams needed to consist of three people. Somehow, I convinced Seth to join our team.

Although Seth had been national crew champion in high school and had always placed physical fitness near the top of his priority list, the previous few years had taken a toll on his current level of fitness. But I needed a third partner for a sprint adventure race and I thought he’d do just fine. I began recruiting him in earnest.

A “sprint” in adventure racing is defined as any race that takes less than 12 hours to complete. The intriguing thing about adventure races is that one can never be sure what will be required or in what order the events will be run. There is sometimes a range of possible distances for possible events, but that is as much information as you have going into a race. So the description will go something like this: Bike 12-25 miles, Run 6-15 miles, Paddle 2-5 miles, Several Course Challenges. These challenges are always unknown and require some sort of problem solving and physical challenge. Nearly all of the adventure races are done “off road” on trails.

I told Seth that it didn’t matter how well we placed, but that it’d be fun to spend the day running, paddling, and biking through the forest. Had he known me better at the time, he’d have known to run away, lock his door, and not answer the phone or e-mail. He didn’t yet know that I am not the type of person who can hang back and “just have fun” in any sort of competition. So Seth unwittingly signed up for an “adventure race.” Indeed.

Everything was going well for our team. Seth was doing well on the run, which was the event about which he worried most. He used to be a good runner when he was in crew and even in medical school. He ran both competitively and for fitness. He is also a bit of a rebel, however. When Seth joined the Army to begin his medical residency, he decided that since there was no reward for getting a maximum score on the required physical fitness test (PFT), that he would instead do the minimum requirements – and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Rather than running the two miles and coming in first place, as he was capable of doing, he would run/walk and cross the line with seconds remaining before reaching a failing time. He had it down to a science. I don’t think he ever broke a sweat. Then he’d move on to Waffle House, a.k.a., Awful Waffle, for pecan pancakes and a double order of hash browns. I cannot say I blame him, other than the visits to Awful Waffle. The PFT test is a ridiculous waste of half a day to do a two-mile run and two minutes each of sit-ups and push-ups. It isn’t hard to get a maximum score, but what’s the point? There is no reward and it makes no difference if you get a maximum or a minimum score. It does irritate the non-commissioned officers to no end when maximum effort is not given, however, which is what I suspect drove Seth to wallow through the test every six months with snail-like effort. So not only had Seth failed to even run 2 miles every six months, but he had been busy with kids and doing other activities such as kayaking, canoeing, fly fishing, and hiking, so he was not at all in shape for running anymore.


But we finished the first leg of the adventure race, which was a very fast 4-mile run, in style. As I said, Seth did great, and we were in first place among the co-ed teams. I couldn’t be happier. Everything was going well and my psycho-competitive sprit was in high gear. Now I was getting energized. As we neared the first transition point, it became clear that the next leg was on mountain bike. That was great news, because Seth had assured me that if there were two things he was fit for and good at, it was mountain biking and paddling. I knew we could win this race now that I saw Seth run and that we were in first place. Does life get any better, I though? What fun!

Sometimes self-assessment is not accurate. The 12-mile highly technical mountain bike course absolutely punished poor Seth. He totally bonked about a mile into that leg of the race. The run had taken a much bigger toll that I thought. Perhaps the wheezing toward the end of the run should have been a clue. Thinking back, the run probably went so well because it was the first opportunity for Seth to save face. He gave 100% effort, but had expended most of his energy. Regardless of the cause, I’d ride ahead five minutes and wait five minutes. I am not kidding, and I was not kind. I became more and more agitated as team after team passed us. Now it is true that this course was difficult. When I was a teenager, I was second in the world in BMX racing, which is a style of off-road bicycle racing over jumps and other obstacles. I also worked as a police officer on mountain bike and did a lot of riding.

Even I found the course quite challenging and scary a times. There were some gullies that I thought to myself, “Oh My Gosh, you have GOT to be kidding me! Well, everyone else is riding this, so I guess I can do it, too.” The mistake in this logic was that NO one else was riding those crazy things…except for our team. I got through them with only a few heart palpitations and one minor crash, but Seth wasn’t so lucky. He went over the handlebars several times. I, of course, didn’t know this because the course was single-track, and I typically stayed ahead tens of yards (if not hundreds at times). Seth would ride up looking like a beaten puppy. I’d scowl and race off again. His face and head would drop, I’d hear a small grunt, and he’d push on. With my desire to win in overdrive, I must have overlooked the obvious clues of exhaustion and injury, and instead thought that Seth just wasn’t working hard enough. Fitfully riding off after one of the longer waits for him, I wondered if the genetics genie had forgotten to give him even a sprinkling of the competitive fire that was raging in me. We had to catch up! What was wrong with this man? What did I think we had remotely in common? How could it not matter that we weren’t winning? It is the only thing.

We finally made it to the transition point after a very long hour of riding. Seth suggested that it was a good time to just sit back, rest, and eat something. What? I ignored him, threw on my running shoes, and sprinted for the inflatable kayaks that would ferry us across the next leg of the course. Seth figured he might just survive because it was a paddling leg, and he’d been canoeing a lot, so he mustered his energy and sauntered over to the boats. We were given three kayaks, one kayak paddle, and two canoe paddles. That meant that two of us would have to go in boats with the canoe paddles and one would go in a boat with the kayak paddle. I was a good kayaker, so I took the double-sided paddle. Seth and Chris, our other partner, took the two canoe paddles. Chris was a champion canoe paddler and Seth was a very strong paddler as well. We made up for all of the time we lost on the bike leg. We were able to squeeze down some liquid energy in the form of power gel during this stage. It was gross, but it helped all of us a great deal. We paddled our way around a point on a large lake, battling the wind slightly as we skirted about a mile and a half of shoreline to the next transition.

We got out of the boats, and were immediately bound together by race staff with thick plastic quick ties. They are the same ones used by riot police to handcuff large numbers of people. Seth was in the middle, so both arms were tethered: one to mine and one to Chris’s. We were then instructed to begin running a course back to the main transition point. We started out at a fast jog, but it was clear that we were not running in sync, because Seth went down hard. This, of course, took the other team members with him. One of the thick quick ties broke. Yup. The tie they use to handcuff people actually broke. Do you know how much force it takes to break one of those things? It was the tie that was tethering Seth to me. So we had to hold hands, injured wrists and all.

Now adventure races tend to create tension among people. Although I had recovered from my wild irritation by a perceived lack of effort during the bike leg, I was quickly reminded of it as I hit the hard dirt with my hands and knees. Now I had to hold the sweaty hand of the person who was responsible for that for who knew how long!

Following that painful mistake, we quickly figured out how to run in sync and began the course through very thick forest and underbrush. There are a lot of tics and other yucky bugs in the South. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it yet, but I don’t like bugs. I mean I really don’t like bugs. My dad likes to tell a story about how he and I were sailing when I was about eight years old. It was extremely windy, and the boat kept capsizing. One of these caused me to be flung under the sail. When I swam to the surface, I found myself face-to-face with a grasshopper. I panicked and screamed at the top of my lungs. My dad thought that I was drowning. It wasn’t the capsizing and water that bothered me. In fact, that was sort of fun. What I was afraid of was the two-inch killer grasshopper! It took me a long time to get over my father’s response. After all, it was no laughing matter to me.

We were all a bit bloody from the initial fall and slithering through underbrush while tethered together. Even a group of choreographers who had access to a well-oiled troupe of limber dancers would have difficulty orchestrating an efficient low crawl with three tethered people through thick underbrush laden with all sorts of unusual bugs. But just when we thought this stage of the race was going to end, we discovered we were only half way there. We now had to run back to the other transition point, this time without being fettered. It sounds easy, but the course had taken us in all sorts of different directions, and I wasn’t clear what the direct path back even remotely looked like. I asked a course staff member how we had to go, and he responded, “Any way you can.” So I pleaded with the team to follow the shoreline, but lost. They thought it would be a shorter distance to go back a similar way that we had come and cut through the forest. We actually found a road down to the water. I took off at a run to get to the boats. When I looked back, not hearing any other footsteps by my own, I saw Seth walking down the road. Walking? I looked at him and said, “I don’t care how fast you run, but you’re a*# is running!” In retrospect, I’m not sure how our friendship survived this first gauntlet. I suppose it is a testament to Seth’s character that he could put up with me, given what I put him through that day.

When we got to the boats again, we were told that this was the last stage. We were back in the lead, remarkably, and I knew we could win because we were all such strong paddlers. This was sweet. It was our first adventure race, and we were on the verge of winning it. There was only a mile and a half to go before we ended this day. But a storm had sprung up, sporting massive thunderheads. As I got down to the water, I noticed an actual surface current. Can you guess which way it was running? If you guess in our favor, you’re incorrect. It was directly against our route of travel. Oh, and here’s a bonus, we got to do this with one less paddle. We got two canoe paddles and three boats. Hummm. We lashed two of the boats together so that Seth and I were towing a boat. Seth would paddle in the front boat, and I would do what resembled a butterfly stroke, hanging off the front of the boat being towed. Chris paddled the other boat by himself.

The waves were incredible! I’d never seen the lake quite like it. Paddling as hard as we could, we barely made any progress at all. Paddling at a comfortable cadence, and we actually went backwards. This was absolutely BRUTAL. Chris decided that he was getting profoundly hyperthermic, so he decided to jump in the water quickly. Well, as he did, the surface current ripped the boat from his grasp and he set out in pursuit. When he finally managed to get back inside the boat, the second place team was neck-and-neck with him, and he had lost about 100 yards of progress. He, and we, paddled for all he was worth.

The current was so bad that more than half the teams broke the rule of staying 20 yards off of the beach, and actually walked their boats parallel to the beach in the shallow water. Despite later protests, there was no penalty for breaking this rule. In retrospect, then, we should have done the same thing, but it wouldn’t have made a difference in the final outcome.


When we finally rounded the corner and saw our exit, we were still neck-and-neck with the other team. Chris jumped off his boat to pull it ashore. He tried to help Seth with his boat, too, but ended up flipping Seth into the water. The look of absolute hate on Seths face tickled my funny bone until the same face whipped around in the direction of my laughter. OK, that’s the end of this new friendship, I thought.

We dragged our boats to the staging area and ran off to the obstacle course. There was still a remote chance that we could win. One of the obstacles was a metal bar that we had to walk across. My shoes were so slippery and wet that I absolutely could not navigate it. Even with great balance, a coefficient of friction that is zero causes a great deal of difficulty on a small surface high above ground. I could not believe we were going to lose the race because of me, but that is what happened. We finished climbing and cursing our way over all of the barriers and sprinted into the finish in second place. At the end of the race, I had no one to blame but myself. Pitty.

Seth collapsed. Chris, who was meeting his wife and children for his birthday celebration and bar-b-q at the lake, looked absolutely green and lay down on the roadway. He didn’t last long, however, and ran into the woods to vomit. I saw a sign for a one-mile open water swim race that was starting in about an hour and I asked Seth if he wanted to do it. Remember the look he gave when I told him to run? Well if I had forgotten it, I was reminded of it again.

I didn’t end up doing the open water swim, but Seth and I remained friends. In fact, we became better friends and running partners because of it. Chris enjoyed the race, but over-taxed himself on the final paddle into gale force winds, and never did enjoy his birthday party because he continued to vomit for several hours.

Why do we do the adventure racing? We do it because it’s fun. If you don’t understand, there is absolutely no point in asking...

I sure do love this man. He is my best friend. :)