Bruntjen forced to drop out of Tour Divide

Last summer, when he completed the rugged Tour Divide mountain bike race in honor of a Selah veteran injured in Iraq, Eric Bruntjen’s heart was clearly in the right place.

Eric Bruntjen

This summer, though, his knee wasn’t.

Nearly halfway through the 2010 Tour Divide, Bruntjen was on pace to improve dramatically on his 2009 performance over the 2,780-mile course along the Continental Divide between Banff, Canada, and the New Mexico-Mexico border.

“I was really racing well,” said Bruntjen, a 39-year-old information-technology specialist and Yakima resident. “My head was in it, and my heart was in it.

“But I just really overdid it.”

Bruntjen had ridden the 2009 race to raise enough money to buy a specialized all-terrain wheelchair for injured Army veteran Evan Mettie of Selah. His goal that year was to go the full distance, because the pledges he had collected were based on how many miles he rode.

This summer, Bruntjen was in the race strictly to compete, and he was churning out 150-mile days and running nearly 31 hours ahead of his 21 1/2-day 2009 pace by the time he reached the Teton Range in Wyoming. But he was paying a steep price. The harder he pushed himself, the more the muscles, ligaments and tendons securing his patella — his kneecap — tended to pull it out of place.

The issue, called patella tracking disorder, is often hereditary and related to the knee structure itself. It can sometimes be caused by failing to stretch properly prior to exertion.

Bruntjen knows he wasn’t stretching properly. He was in a hurry. Every day.

“I’ve had it in training before and I’ve always been able to stretch my way out of it. This time it didn’t stretch off,” Bruntjen said. “The crazy thing is I had no pain walking — I could walk just fine. I’d get off my bike and walk for a while and I’d think, ‘OK, I’m cured, I’m fine,’ and I’d get back on my bike and start again and my knees would be in agony right away.”

Bruntjen pulled out of the race on the eighth day near Jackson, Wyo., and although he regrets not being able to complete the race — and, of course, improve on the time from his 2009 Tour Divide debut — he doesn’t have any second thoughts about his decision.

“It was super frustrating for me, but it was actually clear-cut. I didn’t waffle about it,” he said. “I was just mechanically unable to go any further.”

Another Tour Divide racer, a 37-year-old Vermont resident named Dave

Blumenthal, died after he was struck by a pickup truck near Steamboat Springs, Colo. Bruntjen had gotten to know Blumenthal earlier in the race, when the two were both camping at Wise River, Mont.

“He was this 6-foot-7, just towering guy — a nice guy,” said Bruntjen, who had already left the race and returned home when he heard about Blumenthal’s accident.

Despite the rough going in the 2010 race, Bruntjen said his Tour Divide days may not be over.

“If I have enough time to train — and to stretch,” he added, laughing, “I might do it again. There’s nothing like it. You feel like you’re a superhero out there, like a cowboy out in the wild west. It’s so remote out there. No one can help you, no one can save you, and you’re trying to go as fast as you can.

“I’ve never found a sport like it, or like the feeling you get in that race.”