Iceland brought me back to Arrowhead and Tuscobia
Three-week expeditions like Iceland carry a responsibility beyond riding, and this is what I will tell anyone putting something like this together. Group management, travel logistics, disrupted routines, and prolonged recovery. Iceland showed me that the management load during the ride circles the expedition ethos and safety, and attention to these is essential.
For me on some days this load exceeded the physical load of riding. A group becomes stronger when the safety net is ubiquitous and when each person is prepared and self-contained (carriers their gear and can navigate); it becomes more fragile when someone’s responsibility migrates to others and when safety is an individual choice. By the sixth day, questions arose about whether riders were still expected to carry their own gear or whether the expedition’s ethos had changed. I raised the issue with the group because carrying what we needed was never merely a logistical choice; it was fundamental to the meaning of the undertaking and the invitation to folks. The group affirmed that principle and we continued self-contained. By the same token, shuttling to the ferry launch on August 8 due to high winds and a portion of that day’s route being on a more heavily traveled road was a decision made for group safety, even though anyone person may have been fine.
Understanding this accumulation of fatigue and responsibility brought me back to Arrowhead and Tuscobia and to shorter adventures. I don’t need an adventure longer than Iceland! For sure. I need adventures with depth, yes, but also a duration from which I can recover well. Probably quieter ones, too. And, under the radar?
At 68, a one- or two-day ultra still takes me deeply into uncertainty: “$#@%!, I’m wiped”; “Why the $#@%! did I think I could finish this?”; “I was prepared for snow, but not mashed $#@%!’n potatoes”; “Okay, I may actually $#@%!’n die right here.”
But an event of that length limits the accumulated sleep deprivation, inflammation, nutritional deficit, and repetitive strain that build over a three-week expedition. Recovery is simpler and can be measured in days, or perhaps a week.
Design, Build, Ride Winter? Build a bicycle capable of carrying me into deep winter, with Tuscobia and Arrowhead understood not simply as races or racecourses, but as expeditions through the cold, darkness, and forests of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota? As a project, it kind of retains everything that matters to me: specific landscape and purpose for bicycle design, while reducing the cumulative fatigue that is increasingly hard on this old duffer. In my mind, a sequence of carefully chosen one- and two-day ultras might just be my adventure over the next two years.
As adventuring goes, I’m making a course correction. I can see a loop that I need to attend to: an ambitious story earns praise; praise reinforces the identity of being the person who leads grand adventures; and then the next adventure begins to serve that identity. Not good.
Moving forward, I need to plan quietly. Let the story become the record afterward, not the engine that creates the expedition.
In that sense, Iceland brought me back to Arrowhead and Tuscobia.
Landmannalaugar, Iceland