The North South Colorado race starts on a basketball court in Fort Collins, behind a crack in the pavement that marks the beginning of 643 miles of mostly dirt between there and Trinidad.
I had ridden almost none of it, which was probably the thing that attracted me most.
Each year I try to find at least one race that brings back a little bit of the unknown. Something that makes me uncomfortable, maybe even scares me a little. I can obsess over routes and equipment with the best of them, but eventually all that planning starts to work against the reason I want to do these things in the first place.
At some point I want to stop knowing what comes next. There is something incredibly satisfying about pointing a bike toward a place you haven’t been and figuring it out as you go.
You know there will be mountains, food somewhere, hopefully water, probably a few bad decisions, and eventually a finish line. That feels like adventure to me.
For this trip, I decided to bring an analog camera and one roll of film. Thirty-six exposures across Colorado.
I knew I would be racing, so photography couldn't become another job I had to do along the way. I wasn’t going to document the route or make sure I captured every important landmark. I would pull the camera out when something caught my attention strongly enough that I was willing to stop moving for it.
That last part is crucial in a bikepacking race. Stopping is the enemy. At least that’s what my race brain tells me.
I’m not particularly explosive or fast, but I’m good at moving for a very long time. So much of racing these routes is just managing myself well enough to keep doing that. On the first day, when everybody is excited and flying up the road, I have to remind myself to calm down. Eat. Drink. Pedal. Don't chase every person who passes me. The race will eventually come back around.
The tortoise and the hare…
Later, usually sometime during the first night, the message gets even simpler: Keep moving, Gregg. That phrase has carried me through a lot of stupid situations.
North South Colorado is a little different from the races I normally gravitate toward. I like mountain biking, singletrack, hike-a-bike, and terrain that keeps my brain occupied. This route is largely gravel, and I wondered if I would get bored.
I did not get bored. Colorado is very good at preventing that.
The route rose quickly into the mountains, and within a few hours I was somewhere around 10,000 feet looking out at the Front Range and thinking that riding a bicycle was perhaps the perfect speed for seeing it. Fast enough to cover an absurd amount of ground, but slow enough that the landscape still feels enormous.
That first night I rolled into Granby, ate whatever looked good at 7-Eleven and discovered that the temperature had dropped into the low 30s. My brilliant plan had been to sleep behind a building somewhere. Instead, I found a room at a ski lodge, took a shower, and made the extremely reasonable decision to set my alarm for one hour.
When it went off, I woke up completely delirious. And then I had this wonderfully clarifying thought: Oh yeah. I’m racing. Back on the bike.
That next morning took me up Rollins Pass, a place I had heard about for years but had never seen. People were everywhere, riding, hiking, exploring, and somehow it never felt crowded. It felt like half of Colorado had collectively decided that Saturday morning was for going into the mountains. That became one of the surprises of the route. I wasn't just racing through big scenery. I was moving through little pieces of Colorado life.
Rolling into Central City, there was a boxing ring set up in the middle of the street, with an actual match underway. I went into the local dispensary, which also served as a convenience store, and asked whether they sold Coke.
The guy told me, very proudly, that they had four or five different kinds. When he found out what I was doing, he paid for my soda and sent me back out into the world.
Then there were the deer.
For reasons I can't really explain, deer became my cheerleaders during this race. Whenever I was tired or feeling sorry for myself, one seemed to appear.
You can do it, Gregg. Thanks, deer.
This is what prolonged sleep deprivation does to you. Wildlife becomes emotionally supportive.
Maverik gas stations do too. God bless the Maverik corporation of America, because I'm not convinced modern bikepacking racing would survive without giant convenience stores.
At one, I sat outside, shoving yogurt, pizza, Red Bull, chocolate milk, and chips into my mouth while a reporter interviewed me about why people do these races.
I don't remember what I told her. I'm not sure anyone knows.
Somewhere I started racing with two guys named Dylan and Tom. They were on mountain bikes, and I was on a gravel bike, so depending on the terrain we kept leapfrogging one another. I caught them. They caught me.
I tried to drop them, leaving a gas station called Stinker, which felt like a place specifically designed for a bikepacking race. Eventually the route hit some rough moto trail, and the two mountain bikers started crushing it.
Suddenly my entire universe became their rear wheels. I didn't care where we were in Colorado or how many miles were left. I just wanted to stay with them. This is another thing these races do. A 643-mile journey can suddenly become fifteen feet long. Just hold the wheel.
Hours later we stopped along Rampart Range Road. Dylan and Tom decided to sleep there, and because I had somehow convinced myself that camping wasn't part of my race plan, I got back on the bike.
Keep moving, Gregg.
An hour later I was falling asleep while riding. Then I hit a pocket of warm air.
It is difficult to explain how attractive warm air becomes after riding all night. It felt like I had discovered a small invisible hotel room in the forest.
I got off the bike, scraped together a mattress of pine needles, put on everything I owned, and set my alarm for an hour. I immediately fell asleep and dreamed that I had fallen into an icy river. I was underwater, gasping for air, trying to find my bike, while some strange music played in the distance.
It was my alarm. I asked Siri for another ten minutes.
By then my magical warm-air hotel had turned into an actual freezer, and I had no choice but to start riding again. Nature's alarm clock.
These are the moments I remember most clearly, even though they aren't necessarily the moments you'd expect to remember from riding across Colorado. The landscape was spectacular, but after enough hours, the huge things and the tiny things start to carry the same weight.
A mountain pass. A Coke. Warm air. A deer beside the road. The sound of your derailleur doing something it absolutely should not be doing. A stranger buying you a soda. Sunrise.
The world gets smaller as you get more tired, but somehow you also become more aware of it. That's part of why I keep racing these routes. Normal life is complicated. There are a thousand things asking for your attention at any given moment. Out there, after a couple of days, life becomes wonderfully stupid.
Am I eating enough? Where is the next water? Why is my bike making that noise? Can I stay awake?
Keep moving.
By the final day, the route had taken so much out of me that I was running on whatever strange backup operating system the brain installs for ultra-racing.
I call him Robot Gregg. Robot Gregg doesn't negotiate much.
He got me into Westcliffe for a few hours of sleep and eventually through Walsenburg, where I ate my first proper meal of the race at Carl's Jr. and took full advantage of the free soda refills. I even made the old-school fountain-drink suicide, mixing everything together because at that point there were no adults left in charge.
Later I sat outside a gas station in La Veta wearing rain gear and eating an ice cream sandwich while staring at the Spanish Peaks. They looked like Mount Doom. The peaks rise straight out of the landscape, and a storm had been building around them all afternoon. Somewhere over there was Trinidad.
I hadn't looked at the tracker. I imagined Dylan and Tom chasing me, which was enough motivation.
Keep moving, Gregg.
For a while I thought I had somehow threaded the weather needle. The sun came out, then I got hot, then I bonked, then I felt good again, which is basically the emotional range of an entire normal week compressed into about forty-five minutes.
Then the storm hit. Rain came down, the road turned to decomposed-granite mud, and my shifting problems returned. Mud packed into the bike, gears disappeared, and there wasn't anywhere to hide. I was wet, filthy and increasingly interested in being somewhere other than on top of a mountain. There was really only one option.
Keep moving, Gregg.
Eventually the sky cleared and the road dried out. The race had done what these races always seem to do near the end: stretch the final miles into some strange fever dream where five miles feels completely reasonable on the GPS but absolutely impossible to reconcile with your experience of time.
Then I saw the lights of Trinidad. I rolled into town, collected my $2 in prize money for my second-place finish, and lay spread-eagle on the concrete. Which brings me back to the question the reporter had asked me outside that Maverik.
Why do this? Why spend several days pushing yourself through the mountains in a race almost nobody knows exists? Why sleep in pine needles, eat dinner on the concrete floor in front of gas stations, and willingly ride into storms when you could instead be doing almost anything else?
I've tried to come up with sophisticated answers to that question over the years, but I don't think I have one. I know that I like finding out what is around the next corner. I like what happens when the things that normally fill my head gradually disappear and life gets reduced to moving, eating, sleeping, and paying attention to where I am. I like that there are still ways, even as an adult, to step into something without knowing exactly how it will unfold. And I love the feeling of covering enormous distances on my own power and seeing a place slowly change around me.
Maybe that is enough. I went to Colorado to race 643 miles as fast as I could. I had only thirty-six frames, so every photograph required a small decision: was this worth stopping for? Looking back at the roll now, these frames aren't necessarily the most beautiful things I saw. They aren't a complete record of the race either. They're simply the things that made me stop.
And on a trip where I spent nearly every waking hour telling myself to keep moving, I think that makes them a pretty good record after all.
