Our alarms went off at….I don’t know o’clock.  Unfortunately I never made a voice recording for this day and never bothered writing down notes for this day with Chris like I did for the others, and now it’s March 25th, 2020. Many thank you’s to COVID-19 for finally forcing me to finish this blog. 🙂 

It doesn’t really matter when we woke up this morning, because we were in full on touring mode.  I rolled out of bed and opened up the blinds to let the bright daylight into our room. Soon we were walking/limping over to the lodge for breakfast in our only street clothes.  For me, that meant a merino wool t-shirt that I also kept on hand as a base layer for extra cold mornings, and the tiniest pair of hot pink jogging shorts that I could find at our local bargain store.  It’s nice not sleeping totally naked while you are drying your only pair of cycling shorts, just in case you need to leave the room for anything.  

We sat down next to each other at a giant table in the middle of the room, and tried to connect to the internet one more time.  No dice. We were both so hungry that we pondered ordering multiple meals each, but I decided not to since we probably weren’t going to be riding far enough to warrant it today.  We weren’t sure what we were going to do, but we knew that if we wanted to keep going past Missoula there was a town about 100 miles away from here. We could do that in our sleep, with as many leisurely breaks as we wanted.  We settled on one meal each plus a giant cinnamon roll to share, and I believe we both ordered caffeinated coffees. After eating, we hobbled over to the little general store to pick up snacks for the day. 

When we arrived back at our room to pack up for the day, I was overcome with extreme sleepiness and lethargy.  I crawled back into bed and Chris allowed me to snooze for a few minutes while he did some packing. We were reaching the point when it was so late that we were actually in danger of passing the checkout window, so I eventually had to get up and gather my things.  We headed out into the cheery summer day, and began negotiating the last few miles of hill. Why did we often have to start the morning with multi-mile climbs?

I started off the morning still thinking we might skip Missoula and move farther along the route. I really wanted to find every excuse possible to stay in the race. However, it became clear within the first few miles that continuing on just wasn’t going to happen. I was stopping every 5 minutes to rest, and at one point I found Chris sitting on the side of the road with his head in his hands, groaning in frustration. It was time to execute plan B.

Missoula is located about 10 miles off of the race route, but it was a bustling college town with lots of services. This would put us at a total of 60 miles for the day. We decided to take two or three days off, which is absolutely unheard of for a TABR racer. I could use that time to rest, and then we would try to carry on at a faster pace afterwards. We almost certainly didn’t have enough time off to be able to finish the race any longer, and the only question was whether we were in good enough shape to have fun touring the route.  Chris was a good sport 99% of the time, but I knew I was holding him back and it was really difficult to reconcile in my mind.

After the decision was made, we both felt a little better.  We crawled up to the top of Lolo pass and stopped to check out the visitor center.  Hey – they had internet! We finally checked in with our family and told them about our plan to visit Missoula.  Chris booked us a few nights at a decent hotel, and I made an overly dramatic Instagram post about pondering whether or not we would be scratching from the race.  Then, we enjoyed flying down the mountain! We were in Montana, finally!

As the highway finally leveled out, we rode past a stretch of forest that had been ravaged by a wildfire. Then, we hit the town of Lolo. This was the junction where we would leave the route for the first time in 9 days, and I wondered if we’d see it again.  We noticed one of the gas stations had a Quizno’s, and for some odd reason that sounded good to me. We briefly stopped to eat some disappointing sandwiches, and then headed off on a bike trail that we thought might lead us to Missoula.  Afer this turn, the race map showed our “dots” frozen at mile 960. (Spoiler alert: Kym ended up scratching and turning left at Lolo too, but she went up to Glacier National Park to ride Going-To-The-Sun Road. This means we technically tied in the race, scratching at the same exact mile marker!)  

We realized quickly that our hotel was right by the Adventure Cycling Association headquarters.  They are the amazing organization that maintains the TransAmerica Trail maps, and they invite all touring cyclists to stop by their building for a tour and an ice cream sandwich.  Most racers are moving too fast to stop, but famous repeat-finisher Thomas Camaro always takes the time to stop by and encourages other racers to do the same. We really had no excuse, so we walked a few blocks over and took the tour.  

While we were there, we met an older couple who were touring the route together, one by bike and the other driving a little van behind him.  To no one’s surprise, they had met Kym the day before and raved about how wonderful she was. After dealing with illness and disappointment, Kym had made an amazing mental comeback and decided to maximize her enjoyment touring the route.  After that she met a ton of amazing people and ate a ton of amazing food and took a ton of amazing photos. She really squeezed every second out of her time off work, and she’s continued to post gorgeous cycling photos ever since then. Kym – I know that you felt you let yourself down, but I think you displayed an amazing attitude and great strength throughout your journey and I’m proud of you. Your superpower is seeing the best in people, and I love seeing your interactions with people you meet on your adventures. Keep it up!

Afterwards, we headed back to the hotel where I iced and propped up my knees. I chatted with a couple family members and friends, all of whom seemed confused about whether or not they were supposed to be encouraging me to get back into the race. We debated about going out for pizza, but I had already consumed way more food than I needed for the day. I thought it made perfect sense to skip straight to dessert instead.  As the sun set, we walked a few blocks over to Big Dipper Ice Cream and I enjoyed an amazing mint brownie sundae. We settled back at the hotel to watch Ice Road Truckers and enjoy a full night of sleep.  We didn’t set an alarm for the next morning, and we tried hard not to think about the looming decision ahead of us. As we drifted off to sleep, I was overcome with a whole lot of pain pretty much everywhere and I realized that I was heading into another big ‘flare up’ of my mystery symptoms.