Ammi Midstokke: Round-the-clock solo ride comes with dose of wisdom

For a moment, I was gifted with flight. Just before then I had been riding my bike. But now I was flying through the night air. Before I was able to consider this newfound superpower, I came to a scrape-thud-skid-crash-halt in the dirt. Flash back to five months earlier when I am having a conversation with my family about this fantastic new bad idea I had to ride my mountain bike solo in Spokane’s 24 Hours Round the Clock relay. “It’s called a relay,” my mom said. “I don’t have enough friends,” I answered. So at 2:30 in the morning while careening past trees with 1,500 lumens (just enough to make the wildlife assume spacecraft are landing and get safely out of the way), my mother’s observations came to mind and I made myself a promise to make more friends with bikes and a touch of the crazy. The trick to riding your bike for 24 hours is having a supply of industrial lubricant large enough to alarm most of your neighbors and appropriate training. While I had ensured the former, I may have been a bit lacking on the latter, but I figured I’d be well trained by the end of race day. I had procured The World’s Finest Pit Crew: one bike mechanic, one  massage therapist and one paramedic. Since my last sleeping-under-a-2-ton-boulder episode, I’ve been keen to bring medical professionals on all my outings. Being a nutritionist, my other concern was having the right food available. I showed up with enough pulled pork, chicken drumsticks, bacon, fresh fruit, chocolate energy bites, and coconut water to fuel an entire corporate team. This may explain why I didn’t lose any weight last week. The idea of this relay, for anyone in the dark, is to ride your bike on a 15-mile lap around Riverside State Park, after which point you pass your camp again and either hand the baton to a teammate or try to convince your pit crew to let you take a nap. Then you just keep doing that until the next day. My pit crew had strict instructions to not let me take a nap unless I was crying. I tried to fake it a few times and I may have shed a real tear or two during the shrieking and lamaze technique it took to go through my midnight short change, but I remained relatively stoic otherwise. Fact: You can never have too much Vaseline. I don’t care how slick your bike seat looks, you probably need more lube. For the most part, I was too busy stuffing my face to remember to cry. Then someone would shove my bike back in front of me and I’d climb aboard, utter a string of curse words fit for the docks, and pedal onward. Time passed, one lap at a time. The sun came up. The bone broth I was sipping at pit stops was replaced with coffee. The air warmed, the birds sang, and we could all see just how dirty and tired we looked. Amazingly, people were still smiling. Then it was noon all over again. Someone – probably an angel straight from the heavens – handed me a cocktail. Someone else stuffed an ice pack into my shorts. Slowly the realization came to me: I just rode my bike for 24 hours and 180 miles. And I didn’t die. A day earlier, I wasn’t convinced it was possible and I certainly did not think it would be as fun as it was. Now in the early days of recovery (in which my hands are still numb), I’m already wondering how many laps I can sneak in next year. If you haven’t done something crazy lately, I highly recommend trying. Chances are you’ll discover new things about yourself along the way, such as the surprising reality that you are capable of much more than you imagined. That, and pulled pork at 3 a.m. is a fine meal. With special thanks to the race organizers, all the riders who passed with such care, and the World’s Finest Pit Crew for keeping me on the bike.