I don’t remember when the idea to get gravel bikes started. Somewhere towards the end of the Pacific Crest Trail, Jeremy and I started dreaming about bikepacking: a seemingly perfect marriage of our favorite hobbies of cycling and camping. Load up the bikes and pedal off into the distance, covering many more miles than we ever could on foot.
Technically, my first camping trip ever was bikepacking. Nicole and I loaded up all of our gear onto a pair of bikes–pillows precipitously bungee-corded to panniers–and rolled onto a ferry. Teetering and laughing, we didn’t make it far from the landing before someone offered us a ride. The bikes weren’t the point of the trip, just a convenience, but they became a central part of how we navigated the island.
Cycling has always been a part of my life. I have memories of ten-plus Lindstroms pedaling around northern Michigan trails, filing into “Grandpa circles” around parking lots, begging to stop for cookies when Grandpa started another loop. I cycled to my first job down the street. I bought a road bike in college, and when crit racing proved not for me, I started measuring progress by distance. Twenty, thirty, forty miles. I convinced my dad to get a faster bike, and we spent summer evenings exploring the roads near town. Flying down a hill feels like childhood.
I’ve been told several times that Michigan has excellent gravel riding. I’ve never really known what that meant, other than a lot of roads are dirt, and scenic enough. And I’m not interested in fact-checking this statement. What I’m hearing is there’s a new way to explore my home state, and it’s accessible to me. And after a summer of hiking in dramatic mountains, I am craving a deeper connection to the land back home, both because it is familiar, and so that I won’t spend my days in the midwest longing to be elsewhere.
A month after I got home, and just when my cycling muscles were starting to return, Jeremy ran a marathon. I was excited to cheer him on, but I did not expect the race to be so emotional. I was on the verge of tears watching strangers run by in every imaginable garb: hats and gloves, tank tops, glitter shorts. As I’d quickly found with thru-hiking, once the leaders pulled away, everyone seemed so ordinary. Enough that my ego started to wonder if I could run a marathon one day.
Given that I hardly run, and my feet are still injured from hiking, I won’t be able to face the difficult reality of marathon training for years. But I still want the challenge of doing something difficult, surrounded by other sweaty people. I want to figure out what it was about marathoners that made me want to cry. That’s where the Michigan Gravel Race series comes in.
My only racing experience is my neighborhood swim team, and one crit race in college. In the former, my coach and parents kept insisting that I had great potential, despite my dismal performance and tendency to hide in the bathroom during practice. In the latter, I had the singular goal of not coming in last. I finished second to last. I never trained, so I wasn’t put out about it. I just rode my bike for fun on the weekends.
But still, with every new activity, I harbor this secret hope that I’ll be good, exceptional even. Like an optimistic parent, I keep hoping that someday I’ll find an activity where I excel, and everything will fall into place. I thought thru-hiking could be it for me. My tendons thought otherwise. Still, I enjoyed hiking at the back of the pack. It wasn’t a race anyways.
I have no intention of trying to be competitive in the gravel race series. I want to explore new roads and find camaraderie. But the secret hope is still there, a stubborn part of my brain. It doesn’t compel me to train harder, or to go for more rides, because it rests on assumptions about innate talent. Instead, it pushes me to look at bikes, and whispers buy the fast one. Just in case. Perhaps it’s the same impulse that gets cyclists everywhere to buy aerodynamic gear for weekend coffee rides, maybe it’s just my flavor of exceptionalism.
The key is to not let the secret hope ruin the fun, or spend all my money. It’s not going anywhere, but it doesn’t have to pull all the strings. So when the two bikes I was looking at went on sale–the fast one and the more rugged one–I chose what I’m calling the Adventure Bike. It’s a bit heavier, has room for wide tires, and mounting points all over to attach my tent, food, and gear a bit more securely than my high school rig.
Immediately, the voice in my head started worrying that the bike would hamstring my innate talent. But I remember coming in second-to-last. I know I’m not willing to train hard enough to win anything. I want the gravel bike to be a conduit to more adventure, and exploration. Cycling at the speed of curiosity, stopping for food, setting up camp whenever we get there. That mentality isn’t always intuitive, but it’s the one I want to nurture, so it’s the one that will inform my decisions.
My bike arrived two weeks ago, and Jeremy bought his own adventure bike days later. A friend took us to his local singletrack for our first ride. Winding around trees and hitting the brakes often, I felt like I was crawling along the trail. But every time I cleared a tree root, sailed through loose gravel, or made a sharp turn, I could feel the smile on my face widening. The crunch of leaves beneath my tires, the immediate feedback of uneven ground in my wobbling handlebars, and the intense focus on the trail before me was a tactile experience I just don’t get on the road. The bike can handle more than I have the skills for. No surprise talent surfaced. In fact, I’m pretty terrible.
Thank goodness, because now I get to plan for fun.
I chose the right bike.
Happy trails,
Mumble