It took a man to break and hold a homestead of 160 acres even in the subhumid zone. It took a superhuman to do it on the arid plains. It could hardly, in fact, be done, though some heroes tried it.
- Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
Excuses rise faster than I do at five thirty on a Saturday morning. It's too early. It can wait... Then I remember the conversation with a close friend last night: How do I know if I am making the right decisions in my life? I don't want to have regrets, don't want to miss out. No, I think. This is the time. I drag myself out of bed, pour some tea into a thermos, load my bike into the back of my car, and set off in the dark.
It's two and a half hours west from Escalante to Cedar City, Utah, the shortest distance to an auto shop that I trust. My car is overdue for an oil change, and it has begun to weigh on my mind. But Jiffy Lube doesn't take reservations. "First come, first served," the clerk told me over the phone.
Cedar City was founded in 1851 by Mormon pioneers dispatched by Brigham Young who settled at the base of what they called Coal Creek. Up to that point, the Mormons had been expelled from every land they had previously settled. Driven west in search of religious liberty, they arrived in the Salt Lake valley and spread throughout the intermountains. It was no small task. Most western soils were, as Wallace Stegner put it, "exuberantly fertile if water could be applied." But there was not enough water—early surveys by John Wesley Powell estimated the amount of irrigable land in Utah at 3%, a figure that still holds. Where there was water, life was difficult. Settlers engineered and toiled to build by hand the waterworks—wells, dams, canals, and ditches—that carried it to their fields. They ran miles of fence across sagebrush ranges to pasture their cattle, sheep, and horses. They planted orchards and gardens, and cut roads into the mountains to harvest timber for homes and ornate places of worship.
Always, Stegner says, there was "sweat, the labor, the anxiety, the danger of flash floods that could wash out a dam and bury fields in unprofitable gravel, the wasteful breaks in ditch that leave a village dry." Outbreaks of smallpox, cholera, and diphtheria ragged communities, and over a third of children never reached adulthood.
Cedar City was strategically important for its proximity to deposits of iron ore in the mountains ten miles to the west and abundant fuel in the form of wood and coal up the canyon. They built an iron works, and set about forging a new outpost in the desert that would supply the raw materials for a holy empire.
The car whinnies and downshifts as I ascend the 8,000-foot pass west of Panguitch. It's dawn, and the hills are steeped in crimson light. "Welcome to IRON COUNTY", reads a sign at the summit. Descending back into the morning shadow, I turn south onto Interstate 15, where for another hour the sun slowly rises, yellow as an egg yolk then crystalline white, above the mountains. At nine I pull into the garage, unpack my bike, and hand over the keys. "I'll be back in a few hours," I tell the young clerk.
My plan is to take Route 14 to the top of the canyon, where the pink-and-orange Claron limestone is exposed in an amphitheater of hoodoos and spires called Cedar Breaks National Monument. Along the way, watch for ancient bristlecone pines and signs of an approaching storm that will bring wind and snow to the higher elevations by the afternoon. But for now it's sunny. I clip in and roll down the road.
Craggy ochre cliffs tower overhead as I pedal into the juniper-dotted canyon. Cottonwoods in their luminous autumn garb shimmy from the silty streamside. The road winds steeply, relentlessly up. There is no shoulder, and traffic zips by a little too close for comfort. I consider turning around.
At a road on the right, I see a few cyclists standing around, straddling their bikes. I wave. Seeing me, one raises his arms and calls me over. I slow and do a U-turn.
I roll up, freehub clicking like a Geiger counter. The man, who appears to be in his late forties, smiles and introduces himself in a heavy Polish accent. Peter, he says, with Cedar Cycle, a local club.
"Have you ridden here before?", he asks.
"No," I say. "Where does it go?"
"It's good climb. Eight miles to the end of pavement," Peter explains. "Much less cars, you know." He points to a couple of gray vans in a gravel pulloff. "There are three triathletes here today. Come, ride with us."
Triathletes?, I think.
A few other cyclists wearing club colors roll in, warming up. Then out of the vans come three familiar faces.
Lucy Charles-Barclay, of Great Britain, is the reigning 70.3 (half Ironman) world champion and the fastest open water swimmer in the sport. Wearing a pink longsleeve jersey and performance vest, she walks a beefy mountain bike up a short grade to the road. Gustav Iden, of Norway, is a two-time 70.3 world champion and the current Ironman world champion. And Kristian Blummenfelt, another Norwegian, is the reigning Olympic gold medalist, 2021 Ironman world champion, and current world record holder at the Ironman distance. They're in town getting ready for the 70.3 world championship in St. George next weekend, Peter says.
Blummenfelt, in a white kit and Red Bull helmet, throws his leg over a sleek black time trial bike and rolls up to the line, carbon shark-fin spokes coming to a stop to my left. The letters "KB" are emblazoned in gold chrome on the seat tube. A young woman with short hair and glasses walks in semicircles holding a video camera and microphone, filming for the athletes' social media feeds. A man snaps photos with a blocky camera.
"You didn't even shave for dis?", Blummenfelt remarks jokingly, pointing at my legs.
I smile, glance around incredulously, and laugh, starstruck.
My last summer of grad school, I went to Charlotte Beach, on Lake Ontario, to watch the Rochester Triathlon. From the wooden rail that lined the paved walking path above the beach, I watched swimmers in neon caps gallop out of the water, stripping off wetsuits as they found their bike. Behind me, athletes already out on the course, swooshed by with elbows down in aerodynamic positions. I can do that, I thought. I signed up for the sprint distance the following year, and placed second in my age group. After graduation and a move to Buffalo, I joined the Buffalo Triathlon Club, where I went on group rides, swam in the shadow of decommissioned grain elevators in the Outer Harbor, and supported friends training for a winter ultramarathon along the Erie Canal. I enjoyed the repetitiveness, the strength and clear-mindedness from long hours spent training, the challenge and thrill of racing, and hanging out with quirky, obsessive people who share the same passion for different reasons. I did a few other sprints, then eventually an Olympic distance, in the sycamore hills of Harriman State Park. I've watched on television the world championships and interviews with the athletes who now stand microphone-distance from me.
"Ready, set, GO!", yells a man wearing a Cedar Cycle jersey, holding a stopwatch. We start up the road.
An Ironman is a whole different beast. Consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and 26.2-mile run (the equivalent of four Olympic-distance), it's less a race, more voluntary attrition. The first triathlon I ever saw was an Ironman, in Lake Placid, where with two other forestry interns, I rented a dingy studio apartment—subject of its own hasty physical decline—on Sentinel Street. We sat at the side of the road in folding chairs, sipping beer and drinking in the fragrant Adirondack summer until eleven as the athletes, who had been swimming and biking since six thirty in the morning, shuffled past like mylar-blanketed zombies.
Blummenfelt and Iden are out of sight before the first bend, and the field strings out behind them. My heart rate quickly spikes, the road steeper even than on the canyon floor. Just barely, I keep Lucy in sight, handicapped by her mountain bike. A drone buzzes overhead. One of the vans leapfrogs us both the whole way up, the young woman hopping out at pulloffs to take photos.
By the time I hit the switchbacks, I am alone somewhere in the middle of the pack, grinding uphill. I breathe heavily and steady. Sweat beads on my forehead and drips down the inside of my sunglasses. The odometer on my watch shows I have passed the 7-mile mark.
I look up to see Blummenfelt and Iden, long finished, coasting down the hill toward me, then slow and spin around.
"Take my wheel!", shouts Blummenfelt.
I stand out of the saddle, upshift, and pedal a dozen hard strokes to match his speed.
"Three minutes left!", he shouts.
He looks over his shoulder to make sure I am still there. I dig deep and grit my teeth.
"You are a giant!", he says. "You are a GOD!"
Don't stop, I tell myself. Whatever you do, don't stop.
"One minute left!"
I gasp for air, lungs and legs burning, heart thumping out of my chest.
"You can do anything!", he says.
We come over the final crest and I see the vans parked at the side of the road. A few club members stand over their bikes. I don't stop pedaling until I hit gravel, then splay over the handlebars, heaving.
I catch my breath, my eyes readjust. The cold front has arrived, and the wind tosses bare aspens against a gray sky. I take a swig from my water bottle and look out across the city, interstate, and earth-toned polka dots of pivot-irrigated fields in the valley below. This city of thirty-five thousand is now the largest in the county, linchpin of the southern Utah economy. Home to a Division I university and a world-renowned Shakespeare festival with its own replica of the Globe Theater. There, standing sentinel on a hill visible from the valley surrounds, a white temple.
The athletes load their bikes into the back of the vans. Before he gets in, I ask Blummenfelt for a selfie, then give him a fist bump and wish him good luck.
I think back to the conversation with my friend. She lost a child last year, in March, and knows more than most about catastrophe, about endurance. You don't realize how much a friendship can change until something like that happens. The void that words can never fill. What then? What does it take to pick yourself up? How do we learn to keep going? One foot in front of the other is such a cheap cliché.
Half an hour later, after navigating the fast and tricky descent, I turn onto the main drag and roll back to the shop. I am chilled to the bone but radiant, like I've been touched by the sun. I lean my bike against the glass and wearing full lycra, helmet in hand, click awkwardly across the floor. A short mustachioed man stands behind the counter.
"We don't do bikes," he says with a smirk, before handing me the keys.
[On October 29, one week after the events depicted here, Kristian Blummenfelt won the 2022 Ironman 70.3 World Championship in St. George, Utah. Blummenfelt's dominance of the sport—at every distance—over the past two years has come from the embrace of big data and adoption of a low intensity/high volume training program that is pushing the boundaries of what was previously thought possible and revolutionizing the way endurance athletes around the world approach their respective disciplines.]
Thanks for sharing your adventure.