How do you measure difficulty?

Jul 31, 2024

How difficult is too difficult? How do you find your limits? How do you know when something is so difficult you just can’t do anything harder? You can’t know any of that. It’s like looking up at a cloud deck and trying to guess how far it is to the blue sky.

Last July, my friend Michael Staley and I tackled the 65 mile version of The Rift gravel race in the remote highlands of Iceland. It was hard — really hard. Volcanic sand too deep to ride through. Two river crossings with glacial runoff that deep-chilled your feet. Washboard roads. Embedded rock. Steep loose climbs. Midway through I told Michael I couldn’t imagine doing the 200 kilometer, 127-mile version of the race. “There’s no way” were my exact words. In fact, I’ve got video…

But after a beer (or two) and a hotdog at the finish, I started to reconsider. Why do we so quickly forget how hard and painful things are and then sign up for something that seems objectively even harder and more painful? I don’t know how it works, but I do know if we weren’t wired that way we’d never make progress.

A year later, Michael and I and another friend, Brian Toone, were signed up for the full 200 kilometer race. Brian is legitimately a legend in global endurance cycling. When I was picking up my bike at the Reykjavik airport, a guy said he had done the 3,000-mile Race Across America. I told him I knew a guy who had done it, and a bystander asked where I was from. When I told him Alabama, he said “Oh yeah, Brian Toone.”

I spent the spring building fitness to try to complete what I had thought a year ago was impossible. And then on June 9, just 41 days before The Rift, I crashed on a gravel ride. Hitting the deck at 20 mph on a hard Alabama red clay road broke my collarbone in four places (plus “kibbles and bits” as my surgeon, Dr. Amit Momaya, put it.)

Moments after the crash in Chilton County, Ala. (Photo by Roxanne Smith)

When I first saw Dr. Momaya, I told him I was five weeks out from doing a 127-mile gravel race in Iceland. He didn’t blink. He looked at me like the pro cyclist I am definitely not and said he’d operate the following Monday. He put in a plate with a dozen or so screws to hold my collarbone together and told my wife that before he closed me up he shook it to make sure it was solid. He asked me to give him one week off the bike completely, and then I could do easy rides as pain and common sense allowed. And I couldn’t crash. That would be catastrophic. Here’s how he described it: Crashing at this point in recovery would be like hanging pictures with drywall anchors, ripping the frames off the wall, and then trying to put the anchors back in the shredded holes.

I’d lost two full weeks of riding, but that and the collarbone were not the real limiters. I’d also cracked eight ribs and bruised my lung, and the inability to take deep breaths meant that I couldn’t get enough oxygen to my muscles. Short rides were difficult and slow. A three-hour “easy” ride left me exhausted.

Last year at The Rift, the winning rider in my 60+ age group finished in about 10 hours; I was now targeting a 12 hour race, including stops.

One week before The Rift, I rode on gravel for the first time since the crash — and I descended the same section of washboard road that took me down a month before. This was the ride I had picked for making a final go/no go decision on The Rift. In the group were most of my regular gravel crew, including Merrill and Roxanne Smith, (Merrill had taken me to the emergency room), and Greg Caldwell, who helped me when I DNF’d 260 miles into the 300 mile Delta Epic.

The gravel crew on the go/no go ride in Chilton County, Ala. (Photo by Bo Bozeman)

I was slow, but by the end I had decided that it was worth giving The Rift a shot. And my supremely understanding wife, Susan, didn’t try to dissuade me. Worst case, I could do the shorter version, but (short of crashing) that was truly the worst case. I wasn’t going all that way to do something I’d already done.

On race day, Michael, Brian and I lined up with about 700 other racers in the little village of Hvolsvöllur (population 1,036), about 65 miles southeast of Reykjavik. The 200 kilometer course was a large loop around Hekla, one of the most active volcanoes in Iceland. There were at least five frigid river crossings, typically ankle- to calf-deep but with a river bed that varied from small smooth stones to large softball-size rocks. I decided to walk across all of them rather than risk a crash. I wasn’t the only one; former World Tour pro rider Chad Haga, who finished 10th overall this year, made the same call.

Michael took it upon himself to make sure I got to the finish safely and stayed with me throughout the race even though he could have finished much faster.

The route is overwhelmingly beautiful but looks like it could be another planet. And it had all the features I remembered and dreaded from the prior year, but with additional challenges.

One of several lava fields with “roads” cut through them.

While the climbs were all fairly short, some were very steep and loose, and many of us were forced to walk them. One climb in particular, Krakatindur, was so steep and loose that the photographer at the top told us that no one had been able to ride it, not even the pros.

One unexpected advantage of the longer route was that the aid stations had more and better food choices than the 100 kilometer course, including smoked lamb sandwiches at one stop. At another stop they were pumping glacial runoff directly from the river into the water jugs. It’s that clean.

As the miles ticked by slowly, my lower back began to tighten to the point that I had to stop to stretch (and Michael patiently waited.) I read later that the same thing happened to pro Chad Haga. I think the extremely rough surface causes you to ride more actively and use — or overuse — muscles that aren’t on duty as much on paved roads or smoother gravel.

After I stopped to stretch one last time about two miles from Hvolsvöllur, Michael and I finished. Total elapsed time was 11:48:54, more than three hours behind the 60+ age-group winner and five and half hours behind the overall winner. Brian finished in 8:33 but came back to the finish three hours later to cheer us on.

Crossing the finish line with Michael; with Susan, my biggest supporter.

It’s definitely the hardest ride I’ve ever done. But I don’t think it was twice as hard as the previous year; it was just twice as long. Sitting on that red clay road in June after my crash, I figured that racing The Rift was impossible. And while I wouldn’t recommend doing it 33 days after collarbone surgery, it showed me that we can be wrong when we think we know our limits.

A friend likes to say that rainbows only follow storms, and while that’s not literally true, I appreciate the sentiment. But a more positive approach occurred to me as we were flying out of Iceland.

The blue sky is always there; you just have to figure out how to get through the clouds to see it.

150 words about a ride

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