Out There

2,780-mile bike journey can take toll on body, mind ||

YAKIMA, Wash. — Twelve months ago, Stephen Gleasner was a lot like Eric Bruntjen: He knew what he was getting into … and had no idea what he was getting into.

As Bruntjen will do this year, Gleasner, a resident of Appleton, Maine, was preparing to enter the 2008 Tour Divide, a 2,780-mile mountain bike experience.

Yes, it’s a “race,”  but that word doesn’t begin to describe a three- to four-week nonstop test of enduring solitude, physical stamina and willful insanity.

When Gleasner was told about Bruntjen’s plans to do this year’s Tour, he asked about the Yakima man’s state of mind going into what will almost certainly be the most memorable month of his life.

In a way, Gleasner was told, he thinks he’s crazy.

“Well, that’s good,” Gleasner said. “That’s a good start.

“That will serve him well out there.”

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Out there.

That may well be the best two-word description of the Tour Divide — or, for that matter, anybody making the conscious decision to do it.

Gleasner was 47 when he set out last June on his mountain bike from Banff, a Canadian resort town nestled in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, to follow the Continental Divide all the way to the tiny Mexican border crossing at Antelope Wells, N.M.

He wasn’t an athlete. He’s an artist — in an aptly “out there” medium, plywood (see for yourself at www.stephengleasner.com) — who signed up in search of a memorable experience, a personal test.

“It was the quest,” Gleasner says. “The cliche thing.”

It was anything but a cliche experience.

For perspective, imagine doing this workout:

You set out on a mountain bike from Yakima and ride for 74 miles up and over Chinook Pass (elev. 5,430 feet) to Cayuse Pass, where you turn south onto State Route 123. You ride basically downhill for 11 miles, until you hang a right at the Stevens Canyon entrance into Mount Rainier National Park. Now it’s uphill for 21 miles to Paradise … and, for good measure, climb another 1,400 feet to Panorama Point (elev. 6,800 feet).

You’ve ridden roughly 107 miles, with perhaps 9,000 cumulative feet of elevation gain. Long day, right?
OK: Now bike that same thigh-killing, will-draining route every day for the next four weeks … virtually all of it on rough trail and gravel road, not pavement … carrying weight (tent, food, water, camping essentials) … in weather that runs the gamut from snow and freezing cold to 95-degree, waterless stretches of yucca desert.

Day after day after day.

Trying to follow on the map through countless turns that shouldn’t be there … or you shouldn’t be here … and there’s nobody around to tell you if you’re lost or by how much. And at the end of the day you may be sleeping in your tent in a grassy field … or on a sidewalk … or in a ditch … or, if you time it just right, maybe even on a motel bed with an actual toilet and shower.

But don’t sleep in, because you’ll be doing it all again tomorrow.

That’s the Tour Divide.

It’s out there.

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The experience, Stephen Gleasner says, “was more emotional than it was about bike riding.

“The bike riding never seemed to be difficult, but being outdoors and never really feeling safe for a month — that was, I thought, the most difficult. It’s trying to keep your head together on food, water, directions and keeping a focus.

“This gets into a Chinese water torture thing. Nothing is really difficult, but it accumulates. One drop on your head and you’re fine, but a couple of days of water dropping on your head and eventually it gets very difficult.”

The Tour Divide is a constant juggling act in the most trying of circumstances. The rider is physically exhausted from the long hours and miles, but must vigilantly maintain proper (or at least passable) nutrition, the mechanical state of the bicycle and one’s emotional and mental state, all while the directions on the map are getting more confusing with each passing day.

In short, the various aspects of each rider’s mental and emotional “dashboard.”

“We had this funny little game,” Gleasner recalls. “We’d talk about taking a ball-peen hammer to the dashboard, so you’re no longer receiving information. The guy who can switch all that stuff off can ride away from everybody else.

“From day one, those gauges were truly screwed. They were all Super-Glue’d, they were smashed, they didn’t work.”

There was the morning he was rolling up his tent and wondering why his fingers were so stiff and painful, until he noticed the dinner-plate-sized chunks of ice coming off the tent. “I’m not stupid,” he says with a laugh, “but it’s, ‘Oh, it’s freezing, I’ll put my gloves on.’”

Another day, on mental autopilot during an arid crossing of Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin, Gleasner couldn’t quite figure out why he was feeling so out of it. Finally, upon arriving in the town of Rawlins, he learned the temperatures were in the mid-90s, and he was wearing black, long-sleeved attire. “It never occurred to me I was hot,” he says.

He had taken a hammer to the dashboard. He was no longer receiving information.

He was out there.

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Gleasner sometimes went days between refueling stops at gas stations — food, water, tire air. He made countless mistakes with the route over literally thousands of turns. His diet, he says, was “horrid. Just awful. Constantly.”

The simple toll of being out in the boonies, alone, for weeks at a time sometimes created some bad choices. Sometimes, looking ahead on the route map and believing he would be able to reach a town with a motel by nightfall, he would pick up the pace and push himself — potentially at his own peril.

“Then you’d roll into that town at 2 in the morning, and you didn’t eat or drink right all day because you had this idea that you were going to have a hot meal and a hotel,” he says. “And instead, even the 7-Eleven is closed.”

People far more qualified than Gleasner — younger, stronger endurance athletes — dropped out. But he never gave up. In the final days, riding through New Mexico desert, he found himself having a conversation with a kindly woman cyclist in her 70s, and although the conversation wasn’t making sense to him, he didn’t mind: He was convinced he was imagining her and was really just talking to himself. Or not talking at all.

He took a photograph of this apparition, just to prove to himself later he had imagined her.

Then he saw the photograph. She had been real after all.

So were the 29 days, 17 hours and 37 minutes Gleasner spent on the trail. Eight riders out of 17 starters completed the 2008 Tour Divide, and Stephen Gleasner was one of them. He made it to the Mexican border and back to his wife and two kids in Maine. He may write a book about the experience. He’s not sure. He hasn’t quite gotten a handle on just what the whole thing meant.

It’s an feeling Eric Bruntjen may become familiar with.

“He’s getting into something really big,” Gleasner says. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means the biggest thing you have to take is your ability to get around whatever your brain comes up with to tell you, ‘You’re not doing it today.’ And it will.

“Nobody knows what they’re getting into with this.”

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