Prologue: For those of you not familiar with Chinese geography, Inner Mongolia is not the same as Mongolia. Mongolia is its own country while Inner Mongolia is part of China. I still don’t understand how this works, but there you go. This will be the only thing educational in this blog post. It’s worth noting, however, that Inner Mongolia is a lot like Wyoming. Big sky. Open spaces. No people. Lots of animals. Beautiful landscapes. It was everything that Changchun is not. It was really quite striking being in the middle of big sky country after so long in the city. It was good for the soul.
This past weekend, I thought it would be great to take a little trip with a couple other families to Inner Mongolia. Dee and the kids were on their way back to the US, and I was free to relax and do whatever I felt like doing. Turns out I ‘felt like’ riding on a bus for 13 hours so that I could ride my bike for 3 days and make myself think I was going to die. Sometimes I don’t understand the choices I make.
Day 1: We left Thursday night at 7:00 pm. There were 5 families (10 adults and 4 kids) that piled into a 50 passenger bus and headed out of Changchun. You would think there would be plenty of space on a bus that size, but you would be wrong. Between luggage and kids and the Chinese seats leaving 6” of leg room there wasn’t much space left to stretch out. Also the roads in north east china aren’t quite as nice as some others. When you think your bus might actually tip over, it’s kind of hard to fall asleep. Also, the roads are always under construction/repair with no marked detour. At one point we were driving down a side gravel road that turned and went under the road under construction through a large culvert. Cars could make it through that tunnel, but there was no way our bus was going to make it. It took awhile for our driver to agree that giving it the ‘ol college try’ was not in any of our best interests.
Day 2: We arrived Friday morning to a steady rain. We were staying in Yurts (little Tepee like buildings made of canvas and wood). They added plumbing so we could have a bathroom that kind of took away from the rustic feel the outside gave you, but it was still fun.
Friday afternoon, the race started. The rain had stopped and the sun was out along with a 20 mph wind. The first day was only 53 km. I quickly realized I hadn’t spent enough time in the saddle for this weekend. The trail was mostly 2 track with a lot of hard pack grooves. I’ve never really seen the point of a full suspension bike until this point. Having your bones rattled by non-stop hammering on the trail can really fatigue your shoulders, back, and backside. (More on the backside coming soon).
The course basically went uphill for 30 km. I wanted to either throw up or pass out. It was actually at this point that I knew why I like mountain biking. It really tells you something about yourself. Anyone can be all nice and polite and think good things about themselves when their comfortable. When you feel like you’ve been run over by a freight train, you lose a lot of the pretty illusions you have about yourself. It’s a pretty spiritual moment actually. I found myself like David calling out to God in the Psalms. ‘Ok God, I know I don’t have much to bring to this negotiation, but if you could find a way to not have me kill myself on this Chinese hillside I would really appreciate it’. It sounds like a trite prayer as I’m typing it now, but it was quite the cry of desperation at the time.
So at the 35km mark, I’m heading up a small incline and I can see over the ridge, the trail turns to the left and goes straight up a side of the mountain. At this point my whole body aches. Back to prayer. ‘OK God. That’s not funny. I’m counting on you here cuz I got nothing’. Then the mystery of grace kicks in. I get over the small ridge and see that the trail forks left and right with the race markers sending me down the hill to the right and the path leading up to the left being just an intimidating pair of brown lines that were not going to be part of my day. I think I actually cried a bit at that moment.
Of course, just like life, the trail keeps going. Now, instead of crawling my way up the hill, I’m bombing down a serious decline. I’m too tired to really control my bike and have no interest in losing any momentum that I worked so hard to earn. ½ way down this descent the trail decided to do a little jog to the left before continuing down. The ‘trail managers’ also thought it would be wise to have some nice loose gravel in the turn. Now you may be thinking that the crazy ½ conscious guy would try to turn hard in the gravel and wipe out and make a mess of himself. You would be wrong. I was way too smart for that. I took a nice slow turn to make sure that didn’t happen. Turns out the reason the trail turned left was to get over a 12” water runoff ravine. You may also think that a 12” ravine shouldn’t be too much of a problem. But when you’re going 30 mph with a loose grip on reality that little ditch can cause some problems. I got my front tire over cleanly, but did not pull up on my back tire fast enough so the back tire went into the ditch and came back out with a lot of vertical acceleration.
This is where the sore backside turned into the ‘holy crap I think I just lost some of my backside’. I coasted for another ½ mile hoping that the pain would settle a little bit. Once it did, I sat back on my seat and realized the seat frame was bent up quite a bit. And then it took a few more minutes to realize that my seat was actually no longer attached to my bike. All that was left was the 2 aluminum rods that hold the seat. (As a side note, I’m now wondering how sore my tushy must have been to not realize immediately that it was sitting on 2 metal rods and not a seat)
So now I get to ride the last 15 km of the race standing up. My only saving grace was that I was so delusional, I thought the race was 58 km, so when I hit the 53 km finish line I still thought I had 5 km to go. Sometimes it’s good to lie to yourself.
After I got across the finish line, the Chinese media realized I had no seat and knew they had the ‘special interest story’ they had been looking for. So I got interviewed by CCTV in Mongolia. ‘How did you break your seat? How did that feel?’ I tried my best to be gracious when all I wanted to say was ‘can you get me a piece of that watermelon over there so I can have a couple bites before I collapse ‘. You can see the picture of this in the Nordic ways website.
Day2 ends with a formal dinner back at the Yurt lodge including Mongolian dancing and singing and the ceremonial lamb roast followed by the dance around the bonfire. I was asleep by 9:00.
Day 3: Only 41 km this day. Piece of cake. It actually turned out OK. I felt good the whole time and enjoyed the day. We finished with 4 of us side by side. Two of the women in our group took home some prizes in the running races (Laura took 1st in the 20k and Anne took 2nd in the 10k). I met a woman from Oregon who was visiting her daughter from Qingdao who was running the marathon. We had dinner at a hot pot restaurant and polished off about 2 kg of lamb per person. It was a gorgeous sunset over the mountains and then the stars came out. Awe inspiring. It was just a good day.
The only unusual thing that happened that day was when I went to bed, there was another dance party around the bonfire but there were no people around to dance. My Yurt was closest to the bonfire, so it was pretty much like having a stereo in my Yurt. On this night they went from ‘sweet home Alabama’ to MJ’s ‘beat it’ and were in the middle of 3 straight ‘Morrissey’ singles before I dozed off. Moments like this make you realize how small the world actually is. It’s hard to describe exactly how far in the middle of nowhere we were and we were listening to British and American music from the 80’s.
Day 4: 82 km. You might think that seems like a long ways to go on a mountain bike on really rough terrain. I thought it would be OK. You would have been right. The guys I was biking with let me draft behind them all day, so I was feeling ok. They would get away from me up the hills and I would catch up on the downhills (the benefit of mass on momentum). Up until km67, I only hurt a normal amount. And then my body told me something I should have known. You can’t bike for 3.5 hours straight without pumping in any additional calories. A good breakfast is not enough at that point. So my body shut down. The proverbial wall. It was not going one meter further let alone 15 km. I walked up a 1 km hill. At the top of the climb was an aid station with water and bananas. I asked for some bananas. They brought me 1/2 of one. I said ‘no. Bring me some bananas’. I ate two bananas and drank 2 bottles of Gatorade. My peripheral vision started coming back.
It was mostly downhill from there and then I got dumped out on the road for the last 5 km. At this point I knew I was going to make it but I still felt pretty wobbly. And then grace hit again. A small boy (8-10 maybe) runs out into the road and hands me a bottle of Pepsi. It was cold and unopened. I’m not entirely sure that this boy was not an angel. He was all alone with no one to impress with his gesture. A bottle of pop costs about $.75 a bottle which is about the same as meal of noodles. How he had the money for a bottle of pop in the first place is a mystery. Why he would give it to a stranger instead of drinking it himself is beyond me. I’m guessing sugar and caffeine are not so great in the middle of a race, but with 5 km to go it was brilliant. I felt like I was in a commercial drinking my ice cold bottle of Pepsi as I approached the finish line. I kept looking for the cameras.
After the race I ate another 6 bananas and a couple of whole watermelons. I wasn’t dead so it was time to celebrate. I returned the loaner bike seat back to the hotel registration area. And then I saw it. The sign with that magical little word that can change your whole day. ‘Massage.’ There was a little Chinese man standing next to the sign with a white lab coat looking very professorial. I asked him if he was the massage guy. He said ‘yes’. I said ‘how much?’ He said ‘$15’. I didn’t say anything, I just handed him the money.
Turns out when you offer massage services in the lobby of a hotel, you get the massage in your room. It took a few minutes and several trips around the hotel for me to realize he was waiting for me to take him to my room and I was waiting for him to take me to his massage room. Finally we went back to the lobby and he told me he would do the massage on the couch in the lobby.
Now I’m a pretty sweaty, muddy, stinky mess at this point, but if he wants me to sprawl out on leather couch so he can rub me down, I was OK with that. I’m guessing he was not the best masseuse ever, but I could not have been happier at that moment. Although it was another odd moment of self realization. Half way through the message I started thinking ‘I wonder if this guy is going to rub my butt in the middle of this lobby as part of this massage.’ And I have to say for the first time in my life I really was hoping this guy would give my butt a good rub down. I don’t know if it was lucky or not, but he had no issues with digging in and working the kinks out of whatever muscles I had left back there. After he was done, I was a new man. (Although the desire to have a little Chinese man in a white lab coat touch my bum has gratefully passed)
We ended the day by heading back to the Yurts to take a shower, pack up, and have a beer before hitting the road at 5:00. We got back to Changchun at 5:00 am and I headed home to take another shower before heading to work for the week.
