Great Lakes Fat Bike Series: (not racing) Cuyuna & the Fat Bike Birkie

On the drive home from the frozen 40, Danielle and I couldn’t decide if we should go to Cuyuna or not. The goal had been to snag first and second place overall for the series for Tom and for the rest of the Grand Rapids Bicycle Company, and we had the series on lock down so long as we finished one more race. Knowing that the final race, the Fat Bike Birkie, was going to also be the last race of the series… we made a decision to stay home and to race that weekend at Pando Winter Sports Park in the duo category…

But then, a few days before registration closed for race #7, Cuyuna Lakes Whiteout, I got anxious and started panicking over missing one of the races in the whole series. “We’ve gone to every other race! What if the promoter hates me?” I tried reasoning with Danielle. I felt real guilty for a while there and almost had Danielle convinced to hop back in her mom’s maroon minivan with me… until I realized something was wrong with my best friend, Ninja. My 10-year-old humane society special fur-machine wasn’t acting like his usual self. He just spent a whole a weekend with his grandma in Grand Haven, and he should have been perkier. He should have been more excited to see me as soon as he got home from the beach. His furry black body usually waggles with excitement when I get home from work or when he gets home from being gone all weekend. He just sort of walked in to the apartment and lay down on the living room floor without acknowledging me. I went to bed worried, with plans to take him to the vet in the morning.

This is Ninja being all dreamy on a log in the woods.

Turns out my buddy had cancer on his spleen and needed to have a very scary splenectomy. A stressful and miserable couple of days followed in which we didn’t know if he’d survive and fed him his “last meal” consisting of chocolate and KFC, decided to fight for him no matter what it cost,  spent a day and a half at the vets in a kennel with a woozy dog trying to get him to eat, and finally sleeping on the bedroom floor next to Ninja waking up every few hours to make sure he was doing okay. It also consisted of feeling incredibly lucky and humbled by the amount of friends and family we had who pooled together funds to help us pay for the surgery. I cried a lot that week, both out of extreme sadness and out of disbelief at how awesome our little community of friends over the years has become. Ninja is a rock star and he survived! He’s still kicking it with us and is doing really well! The vet removed a mass that weighed at least five pounds out of his body and kept it to show to us. The piece of the tumor that was sent in came back cancer-free… which is awesome… but we were warned that false negatives happen a lot. So I spent race #7 of the Great Lakes Fat Bike Series at home not wanting to be anywhere else but right next to my dog. That doesn’t mean that I’m not planning on going next year, though! The pictures posted from the race looked really fun!

Caught being dreamy again by Katy Batdorff.

Danielle and I did wind up racing duo at Pando Winter Sports Park and had a lot of fun doing that, too! The Le Mans start at the beginning was something I don’t think anyone racing had ever seen before—we had to set our bikes down at the bottom of the tubing hill and catch a lift to the top before Brent from Fun Promotions LLC shouted, “GO!” Or rather, Danielle had to do all of that since she was racing the first half of the race. She claimed that she was on call and might have to go in to work so she should race first just in case, but I think it was secretly because she wanted to go tubing for free at Pando, which neither of us have done before!

Tubing Le Mans start

The first half of the race went by really quickly, and before I knew it Danielle was coming down the hill and I was getting ready to roll out. She was laughing uncontrollably when she came up to me and I began laughing just as hard when I rolled out. I knew parts of the trail were getting sloshy and witnessed some pretty impressive crashes down that final hill while cheering at the bottom. The second half of the race went by just as quickly and I was able to head back out with 2 minutes to the cut-off time. I wasn’t sure how many laps our competitors had logged in and was really afraid of letting my partner down! Danielle didn’t know how many laps the other duo team had done, either, and was just as nervous as I was (probably for the same reasons I was, too!) The results were posted and we had lapped them a few times. We were so excited we couldn’t stop laughing and cheering!

First and Second place duo teams

Mackenzie Woodring had raced as Peter Piper and had placed fourth in the men’s and Kim Thomas had come in first in the women’s. I couldn’t wipe the grin from my face and am still so excited to be on a team with these kick ass ladies! What a fun race!

GRBC Ladies: Mackenzie Woodring, Kim Thomas, Fatty Martindale, Fatty Musto

The Fat Bike Birkie was rapidly approaching, and as the final race in the Great Lakes Fat Bike Series, I knew it was going to be bitter sweet. The winter had been so much fun and I had met some really incredible people, but I was so tired of traveling every weekend. There were 10 weeks in a row where every weekend I was at a race and having a couple of weekends off of that was actually pretty nice. I worked at the shop those Saturdays and was surprised that I had actually missed working Saturdays! The bike shop has been so lenient and awesome in letting me race fat bikes this winter and I really hope they know how much I appreciate it. It seriously has been my favorite winter ever and has sparked a love of racing in me that I didn’t think existed. I am going to have to work extra hard this summer to make sure I can make up all the time I took off! Thanks again, guys!

I was trying hard not to stress about the Birkie because I knew it was going to be different from racing against the same ladies I had been racing against all series. We had all gotten to be really good friends over the last couple months and I knew there were going to be some really fast riders, including Jenna Rinehart and a very tough Rebecca Rusch, who had just dropped out of JP’s Fat Pursuit the week before because her asthma had been so bad she was coughing up blood. Going in to the Birkie I felt puny and like such a fresh, baby-faced rookie compared to these women. Danielle made me feel better by reminding me that I play roller derby and rode my bicycle around Lake Superior unsupported last fall. I can be tough too! My goal for race #8 of the series was to finish the race and to have fun doing so. It was all going to be a learning experience.

Boy, was it an experience. Thursday morning when I woke up I felt a little nauseous. I sat down for a moment to tell myself I wasn’t sick before gathering the rest of my stuff together and heading over to meet Danielle and Scott. We hopped in the minivan and headed out towards northern Wisconsin. Before reaching Chicago, my stomach started feeling like a knife or two were jabbing in to it. After Chicago it felt worse. By time we made it to our traditional Chipotle stop in Madison, I told Danielle and Scott I was going to go to the nutrition store next door to get some aloe vera juice to help ease my stomach. I puked in the bathroom for a long time. I chalked it up to food poisoning, thinking I had eaten something the day before, and refused to admit that I was sick. I puked again in Chipotle before we left and tried to sleep in the back of the van for the rest of the drive, puking at each rest stop on the way to the River’s Eatery in Cable, Wi, where I puked some more and then ate a can of split pea soup. 

The next morning I was feeling better, but the thought of putting anything in my stomach made me feel queasy. So much for the food poisoning theory, Danielle’s stomach was starting to feel just as wonky as mine. I felt like such a jerk. Danielle had invited me to travel with her and to race with her, and here I was making her feel nauseous. Total jerk move! I ate some rice noodles in broth that day and went to pre-ride part of the course. It was all super slick corduroy and at one point, so icy that my wheels kept spinning on a climb and when I put a foot down to catch myself it was swept out from underneath me and I fell! I could hear Danielle laughing at me as I tried to catch hold but kept sliding down on my butt. (There was a caption contest later that night on Mountain Bike Radio’s Instagram of my captured embarrassing attempt to get back on my feet.) After pre-riding we went back to our cabin for pasta and to meet up with our friend Chelsea Strate, who was also racing the next day. I called it bedtime pretty early on and was hoping that another good night’s sleep would have me feeling back to normal in the morning.

Nope. I still felt terrible. I was able to put half of a banana in my mouth and a couple spoonfuls of oatmeal before I lost my appetite and felt nauseous again. My parents had confirmed Friday night that they were making the drive out from Richmond, Mi to come see their first fat bike race and I kept trying to mentally will away the upset stomach. I found myself in the porta-john minutes before race start and was able to find my parents for a quick hug just before being called up to the front of the 500+ mass start.

Dad, the favorite child, Mom

That was actually the happiest I felt during the whole race—hearing the race promoter announce Ned Overend, Rebecca Rusch, Danielle Musto, Jorden Wakely, and all these other fast and inspiring mountain bike racers to the front of the pack. I didn’t get a specific name shout-out but I got to line up with them for doing so well in the overall series. That was pretty awesome!

They counted us down and we were off! Well, sort of… I started pedaling and people started passing me. I looked over and saw Danielle struggling next to me. We shouted about how crappy we felt and cheered as Chelsea Strate pulled away from us. I felt like both of my tires were flat and as though I had been riding my bicycle for days. A few racers tried making conversation with me as I rode, and I could only grunt back single-word responses until they pulled away from me. The trail was really beautiful and I kept kicking myself in the butt for being sick. I know it really wasn’t my fault for getting the stomach flu, but I couldn’t help but think that if I had just drank more water, or more orange juice, or if I had just gotten a few more hours or sleep during the week…that maybe I could have avoided it. There were a lot of aid stations along the way and I tried my best to be cheery as I was handed water or warm tea. The more I drank the crappier I felt, so I stopped drinking. I finally made it to the turn-around point and found a little more energy to keep going. I knew I wasn’t going to finish fast, but I just wanted to finish period. When I heard the music at the finish line I was so relieved! I rolled through the finish and felt really spacey for a minute before I went in to the warming tent to find my parents and my friends. I had finished 21^st overall female and 4^th in my age group. 

GLFBS Overall Series Top 5 Women

For all of the races I did over the winter, I’m glad I only felt this terrible at one of them. I can’t help but wish, though, that I had felt crappy at a different race. The Fat Bike Birkie was such a cool event and was organized so well. Everything about it, from the Rivers Eatery packet pick-up and the race after party, to the warming tent and the volunteers, was just incredible. Racing with over 500 other fat bikers was so much fun and I can’t wait to see how many more are there next time! Next year I will also be living in a quarantined bubble for a week before the race drinking Emergen-C , Echinacea tea, and getting plenty of beauty rest.

Gah! So that’s the series in an over-extended wrap-up. I honestly had so much fun I can’t even put it in to words. This winter really has been the best winter ever! Not only compared to last winter, where I was laid up, wearing a brace, and having my knee bled (thanks, torn ACL), but compared to any winter I can imagine. I’ve always really enjoyed the outdoors and winter sports, but fat biking to me is so much more fun than cross country skiing, snowboarding, or sledding. Every person will have their favorite winter activity, but mine will forever be fat biking after this Great Lakes Fat Bike Series. Every bit of it was an adventure! Great people, great food, and great fat bike trails. Part of me is a tiny bit sad that it’s April already, because that means I have nearly 8 more months until more fat bike races! The good news is that this summer is full of more races and time spent on a bike so I really can’t dwell on the post-race blues too much! 

Martha Flynn, Bill Fartindale, Danielle Musto, Chelsea Strate, April Morgan, and some photo bombers.
I AM GOING TO MISS THESE LADIES.