Marji Gesick - The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, and Really Quite Fantastic Day

You take Toodles out to the yard because she’s too old to go on walks. Or rather, she’ll still go on walks, but she huffs and lurches like a broken steam engine so instead you take her out to the yard where she wants to play frisbee, but not with you. She lies on her back and tosses the frisbee up in the air to herself. She does this for a long time. So long that you go back inside and make yourself a cocktail and pick up a book and leaf through it without absorbing a word, and when you look through the window to check on her she’s still writhing around out there, and it starts to make you feel uncomfortable. Why? You aren’t sure. You try to ignore the feeling and peel back the next page of your book in earnest, determined to move on, but you don’t read a word. You have a hunch that what’s making you uncomfortable is that you don’t want to wonder how long it’s been since you felt even a tinge of the joy and excitement that Toodles is feeling now, and has been feeling for the last seventeen minutes, which is one hundred and nineteen dog minutes. You don’t want to wonder about this because you're afraid of the answer, and of how long it’s probably been, and of whether the circuitry you need to feel those emotions is even still connected in your head.

The thought gnaws at you for days, and you internally become as discolored and deformed as Toodles’ frisbee, worked over by the wet jaws of self-apprehension. You have to do something rash, you realize, to see whether you can still feel these things that a dog who’s about ninety five dog years old can still feel. Because you’re an idiot, you set your sites on a bike race that’s halfway across the country and known for being “the hardest single-day mountain bike race” in that country. Drastic times call for drastic displeasures.

It’s impossible to register for the Marji Gesick, which sells out in under a minute, so you sign up for the Marji Gesick community Facebook page and wait for someone to announce they’re selling their entry. After you spend a few days on the page, you realize that on the rare occasion that a race entry is sold, the transaction occurs in eight minutes or less. Meaning someone will announce that an entry is for sale, and if you haven’t DM-ed that person in two hundred and fifteen dog seconds, the entry has been sold. It’s okay. You have constitution. You aren’t put off by setbacks. Well actually you are put off by setbacks, but after you put Enya on your headphones and cry in the closet for awhile, you resolve to not be put off by setbacks and you build a little bivouac at your desk. You get a coaster for your hot cocoa cup and a little lumbar pillow and a small pillow for your wrist to fend off tendonitis and a handkerchief to blot your tears. You hunker down in your bivouac that morning and every morning for about ten days and you refresh the Facebook page about every ten seconds. Even when you can’t be in your bivouac and have to leave the house you check Facebook every time you pee. After about ten days you think you’re having a heart attack when someone posts that she has an entry for sale and you DM her after approximately 6 seconds and she send a legitimate link to BikeReg and you buy her entry and you can see yourself on the Marji Gesick roster. It’s not a heart attack, just excitement, and you run outside into the yard and you flop onto your back and you throw Toodles’ frisbee up in the air to yourself. Your spouse presses her face up against the window, and though you’re looking at it—your spouse’s face—upside down you can tell they’re wearing an expression of horror. She opens the back door and calls out to you, and you tell her that these cries of joy that have brought a couple of neighbors outside are because of some bike race your spouse and neighbors have never heard of that’s some seven months and fifteen hundred miles away. That’s about ten thousand dog miles.

You explain to your spouse that you’ve gotten into the Marji Gesick, and your spouse goes to the event website and says, Oh there’s a guy lying in the woods looking very dead here on the home page. Don’t worry about that, you say, it’s just marketing. But as time passes you get worried, because you read phrases on the Marji Gesick social media feed like “It’s gets worse before it gets worse,” “welcome to hell,” “customer disservice team,” and “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” You’ve ridden long rides before. You’ve ridden hard rides before. You’re not worried. It’s not like you’re middle-aged now. It’s not like you’re feeling more and more tired every day, fatigued and run down. And it’s definitely not like you can feel your level of fitness declining any time you recline in a lounger or drink a beer or put Enya on your headphones and cry in the closet. It’s certainly definitely not like you threw your back out while removing your lumbar pillow and coaster from the desk as you packed up your bivouac. Remember that time seven years ago when you drove forty-nine dog hours to Durango for that 12-hour race and your knee blew up after ten minutes? No, of course not. That didn’t happen. Is this you getting winded just typing "who is Marji Gesick” into Google? Maybe you should stick to playing in the back yard. You don’t even like to go downtown; what are you doing flying across the country for a bike ride? What would Peter Singer say about that—flying across the country for a bike ride? You don’t have to wonder too hard to know the answer.

Then you’re at the starting line. What does “the hardest single-day mountain bike race in America” really mean when single days don’t seem to exist? Months melted away and here you are under the inflatable Start arch with five hundred other idiots while someone plays the national anthem on an electric guitar. "By the dawn’s early light” strikes you funny, as it’s dawn now and you might still be riding your bike and trying to finish this event the next time dawn rolls around. Are you ready? Stupid question. You have no idea. Who, truly, can ever truly be ready? Yeah, that’s the spirit! Equivocate!

Thanks to work and injuries, it’s been a couple of months since your last long ride. At the airport, you took a flight of stairs two-at-a-time to try to judge whether you’re ready for this 109-mile bike race. You didn’t collapse! No time to worry now because the starting pistol’s gone off. Are you excited? You can’t tell because you’re running, and running makes you numb to all things except your dislike for running. 

There are fifteen miles of double track in the first twenty miles of the race, and you eventually remember to take a photo, make a document of your presence here so that later, when it’s already somehow months after this day, you can prove to yourself that you were here. That you were excited about something in your mid-forties. This is the shape of your own personal frisbee. And chew it to pieces you shall.

These are the kind of woods where you can get baked into a pie.

“The hardest beach day in America.”

It’s rocky and you can’t take too many photos with one hand on the bars, but you won’t need photos to jog your memory later. It is one of the best days of riding you’ve ever had, even though it starts to rain around 10pm, fourteen hours into the race, it’s still fun. The last nineteen miles, which are the hardest miles, are now muddy, and sometimes the climbs get so steep that you can hardly inch upward in the mud, pushing and dragging and being dragged backwards by your bike. You will scour the woods for a glimpse of the dead guy.

In those last nineteen miles, you encounter people finishing up the 50-mile race. In fact you will pass a family of three, including a kid who’s too muddy to really judge the age of (twelve?), all pushing their bikes up a muddy wash at one in the morning. You will encounter many people who are finishing up the run. The woods, in fact, are packed with people in the rain in the middle of the night, and the mist from the rains is alight with the glow of a thousand headlamps. It is a party out there. A very good bad party or a very bad good party. It depends on whom you pass.

You have dutifully collected your tokens from hollowed pumpkins, which you present at the finish line just after 3am. You managed to collect the proper tokens and don’t have to backtrack. For your troubles, a wooden finisher’s token and a couple of Dum-Dums. Worth it. Not every dog truly lives.

Footnotes

1. Thanks to your pals Jeff and Chelsea, who took care of your travel and lodging logistics, and basically made this experience possible for you. Without them, you wouldn’t have a finisher’s token and your life would be devoid of meaning.

2. Toodles played with her frisbee for the last time early this February. Enjoy things while you can.

Alex Pretti Memorial Ride in Wheat Ridge

On Saturday, January 31st cyclists all over the world participated in memorial rides for Alex Pretti, the man who was shot in Minneapolis while coming to the aid of another. The event was launched by Angry Catfish in Minneapolis, and it brought countless thousands of people together. Thank you to all who attended. Below are the remarks with which we opened our ride. Stay strong and take care of one another.

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Hello. Welcome, and thank you for coming. Yawp! has had hundreds of group rides since we opened in 2014, but we’ve never done anything quite like this. I thought about not saying anything and letting events speak for themselves, but I think silence on my part might prove to be even more awkward than what I’ve decided to say. As the host of this ride, it’s probably my job to set a tone, because I don’t want us to get riled up and destroy public property, and I don’t want to feel like this event is performative. So I’d like to explain why I wanted to gather in remembrance of someone that I—and likely you— never met. This is probably obvious and could go without saying, but instead I’m going to make this take as long as possible.

The dead hold sway.

My mother-in-law, Jeanie, passed away last Thursday after a long battle with dementia. Although it wasn’t a battle. Not for her. She seemed to thoroughly enjoy her life in the immediate present in a way that I envy. To anyone who wants to live fully in the present, I can’t recommend anything more than dementia.

Each time grief enters my life it does something to my sense of time that’s difficult to describe. The losses may be years apart, but they feel continuous. It’s like grief pulls time inside-out through it’s own butthole. Or maybe it’s clearer and more polite to say that grief is a pond that I sink into with each loved one’s passing to relearn that those losses were never—and can never be—regained. My people are still slipping away, and I miss them even more now that time has passed. As I wrote this I was sitting at a desk made for me by my friend Blake, deceased. It is written in a notebook I made by hand for my friend Brian, deceased. Even though I am irredeemably introverted, we are likely here today because I’ve inherited an unexplainable drive to get people together from my extroverted mother, who, if she weren’t deceased already, would‘ve been killed the instant I said the word “butthole” in front of people.

We are most certainly here today because of my mother-in-law, Jeanie. About thirteen years ago she gave me a small amount of money, which I thought was enough money to start a bike shop. I couldn’t have been more wrong. She gave me enough to afford, say, a reliable used car, and it turned out to be nowhere near what I needed. The first two or three years were really tough. But all of the good things that have come into my life by way of this shop would’ve gone unknown without her, and if you are standing here today, or if Yawp! has benefited you in any way over the years, then Jeanie, whom you probably never met, holds sway over you.

Obviously we are here because of Alex Pretti. Alex was a stranger to me, but if you’re here you likely think he didn’t deserve to die, and whether you’re suffering from feelings of loss, anger, confusion, isolation, or whatever have you, you have chosen to seek community in this moment. This ride is a safe place for all of these emotions. Maybe you feel like you are going insane. You are not. We all feel insane. It is an insane time to have to live through. Whatever you’re feeling, you aren’t alone here today. This ride is happening all over the world because so many of us feel something akin to what you feel. This isn’t a protest, per se. We don’t have permits and as cyclists you know it’s dangerous out there even when you aren’t trying to block traffic. But if you are here in protest you are welcome. This is a show of support for our friends and family and fellow humans in Minneapolis who are living through what sounds and looks like hell. It is a way for us to be together when everything is scary, everybody is tense, and events seem determined to close The Doors between us. This is reckoning with a killing that, had it happened in a different instant, could have happened to someone you love but haven’t yet lost, or to you. It is how I choose to let Alex, in his death, hold sway over me. Or, in the annoyingly astute words of John Donne, “Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” John Donne died in 1631, which was I think before women existed, or I’m sure he’d have included you in his poem, too.

I’m going to pour one out for Jeanie, and for Alex Pretti, and for everyone on my list of departed and yours. That cousin of yours who drowned or the friend who committed suicide. The non-Hodgkins lymphoma. The ladder mishap. The heart attack. The trundle bed accident. The government sanctioned homicide. None of it makes sense. The only thing that does make sense is coming to the aid of others.

In the annoyingly relevant words of someone else deceased, “I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer, because the future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”

A moment of silence, please. [Pour out beer.]

Let’s ride bikes and enjoy this day.