The Traka: Prologue
bear with me lol
Wednesday early, low fog muting the waking-up of the neighborhood. It’s my second full day back home after over five weeks away. I’m used to spending days not speaking a word to anyone except myself; maybe that’s unhealthy for some people but personally it’s grounding. Away from home that’s impossible. Especially when most of the away is in Girona. So as eye-opening and immersive and exceptional as the last five weeks have been, there is an undeniable comfort in being back, my house, my things, my coffee equipment. Grand Tour racing on at 630 in the morning, as it ought to be. Easy to pretend April was a dream. In a lot of ways, it was.
The best excuse I have for the mini sabbatical of the newsletter was that things like this easily evade description— that is to say, the fullness of the experience is forever more than the sum of whatever vocabulary I can dig up to represent it, and hard-headed perfectionism keeps me from trying. My month in Catalonia was more people than it was place. The generosity of everyone there is awe-inspiring, generosity of time, of knowledge, of patience and love and energy. It’s also the first time I’ve fully felt “professional”; weird to say since I’ve been doing this full-time since the Unbound victory mid-2019. But for the very first time in my career, every day was centered around my existence as an athlete, training, first and foremost, then also recovery and eating right and meeting industry people and meeting my coach and meeting fellow professionals and coordinating content productions and sorting out race logistics and reconning race segments and suddenly, race day, and then a bit of recuperating and just like that I’m back. Sometimes it feels as though the central struggle of my career isn’t the physical, obvious one, but rather this internal push and pull of desperately wanting to find out what I’m capable of if I fully, totally, commit, and at the same time, wanting more for myself, wanting to indulge my creative proclivities and exist in many spaces at once. Girona was a window into what life would be if I zeroed in. If I put the bread and the writing and the art and all the extracurriculars to the side and became a Cyclist.
And to my surprise, I was happy. Like, really, really happy. All this time I’ve been telling myself that isn’t the life I want. But I think specifically, there, I can see it. And it’s good for me. I was working on a project while living there that brought up references to one of my favorite books - The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera - in which one of the central struggles is the acknowledgment that life happens but once, and if only once, there is no way to determine good or bad in our decisions that shape things, big and small. Like with no way of knowing what would happen had we done otherwise, it is impossible to determine the significance of anything at all, which imparts a lightness, a cruel casualness to our existence. Anyways it’s infinitely more complex than that but you get the idea. And I guess my noncommittal nature will never let me find out what would happen, were I to become a Cyclist, and leave the other identities behind. But to have a month to pretend, to embrace that single-mindedness, was seriously able to shift my perspective on it. Like sure I’m never going to actually hand my whole life over, but as a heavier dose, it paid off in spades. So maybe instead of spending every day split between all these things I love, doing none of them justice, there’s value in focusing for a certain, longer amount of time. In theory.
Enough prevaricating, I think most of you are here to find out about the race. The Traka. Woof. It’s been nine days since and to me, I’m like, that’s it!! Only nine days!! But in the social media world that’s an eternity and even not posting about it for a week had me worried I’d missed the crucial window of momentum. The thing is, I did not understand the significance of this win until well after it happened. In a public sense, at least. The Traka has held major significance to me since Olivia Dillon won it a few years back, but not for its notoriety, not for being “the biggest gravel event in Europe” or for its perceived impact. No, for me it was about the distance. 360 kilometers, 5400 meters of climbing. (That’s 223 miles, nearly 18k vert, for my Americans ◡̈ ) Combined field. Technical, diverse terrain. Perfection, in my mind, the sort of track I would draw if somebody tasked me with building the ultimate gravel race, suited to not only my abilities but what I love the most. And I fucking loved it. And not just because I won.
The lead-up was not perfect, it never is, but I had the cushion of having been in the area for weeks, learning the different surfaces, adjusting to the time and the food and the way Spain works (everything and everyone late, always, except when it’s not), and crucially I was able to recon specific sections of the route. Endless gratitude to Xavi and Sergi for making that possible. But also as a result of having been around for weeks, talking to everyone, making the PR rounds, I was largely regarded as the pick to win the thing, which is a position I do not cope with well. Events like these are inherently uncontrollable, and to stand at the start line, knowing most of what is about to happen is far outside of what you can predict, with all the pressure to conquer it regardless, is unsettling. No matter how confident I may be in my ability to ride a harder 200 miles than most. So I talk myself down, act coy about my chances, try to talk about who else might show up. Having never raced in Europe it was impossible to eye up the competition anyways, so I tried to see it as a battle with myself, preparation and execution, and forget the rest. That is, except Sarah Sturm. Sarah has a few years of experience on me and if you were to pull our results against each other for the last 3 or 4 years, she consistently comes out ahead. So I knew, among my challengers, she’d be right there. I also knew she’d be coming from Sea Otter which I so happily avoided this year, and hoped she’d be a little tired. But then again, maybe sharper, maybe with a racing edge I lost in choosing fewer events this season.
Race week arrived, and with it, so many people. They descended on Girona in a veritable swarm, the sound of freewheels vibrating through Old Town at an even higher frequency than usual. I went for a coffee on Monday and went home four hours, three coffees, and 12 different conversations later, still no breakfast, hands shaky. This week was going to be hard to manage. Central to all my nerves was the fact my period was slated to arrive the day after the race. In a hormonal sense, there is no worse situation. Women go through a monthly fluctuation of estrogen and progesterone that deeply impacts performance; it’s different for everyone but in a very generalized picture, we are at our strongest and sharpest for about a week from the day our cycle begins, and weakest and most fatigued during the week leading up to it. Not only that, but soreness sticks around a lot longer that final week, and for me, it shows up mostly in my quads, the same exact feeling of trying to pedal the day after a massive effort, a pervasive heaviness. And to top it off, my tolerance for people goes from an “oh that’s cute” sort of attitude to a “do not so much as look at me I will end you.” The more I pay attention to the phases, the more I notice their impact, on training, on racing, on daily life. I was begging my body to speed things up a little but I’m usually super regular and was not optimistic. I had several shoots in the days leading up, and while I’m going to risk sounding ungrateful, it will never make sense to me the way brands continue to approach gravel this way. You’d think we were at a point by now where it’s serious enough that your investors would not want to interfere, that preparation would be prioritized above content production, but alas. We are not there yet. I’ve learned enough at this stage to be a hard-ass about exactly what I can and cannot do, but then am made to feel bad about it, and it sucks. And yea I’m sure PMSing made it all worse.
Here we go. Saturday morning. 4:15am alarm. I slept really well, if only for 5 hours and change. I’m already nervous so it’s easy to get up. Bad coffee, half a banana, chocolate muesli and a Greek yogurt. Some light stretching. I go to pee before kitting up and I’m bleeding. I’m so relieved I could cry, but stop myself. No wasted energy please. Cargo bibs, because this course is crazy and I know pocket access will be a challenge. Arm warmers, Camelbak, double check that things are charged. A spooky lamplit roll through town to the park, picking up other randoms on the way. We’re mostly quiet, but I have a nice conversation with a guy named Mark. He’s also doing the 360 for the first time, and we share some playful trepidations. “See ya out there” and I peel off to do something resembling a warmup. I pee under a bridge. Do some random 10 second sprints, more of a gesture than anything as I know we’ll all be standing around at the line for a good 15 minutes of good old gravel hoopla. I slot in next to Sami and she’s so happy and I’m happy too and we hug and talk a little shit. Feels like everyone I’ve met in the last month is on one side of the tape or the other and we all share secret little smiles of encouragement. I’m so fucking excited to be here.
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instead of a playlist this week I’m letting you in on one of my big secrets to appearing like I’m in the know with this music stuff, and it’s a website I’ve been using since 2009. Scary. It’s evolved a bit since, but the core method is the same— it’s an agglomeration of other blogs, and the music they all mention. Every Friday they release something called Stack which selects a handful of the most interesting tracks to pop up in the last week, across a range of genres. I dutifully listen to this and it’s put me on to stuff months before it reaches wide popularity, and also given me artists that somehow haven’t had that popular success but possess that je-ne-sais-quoi that I search for in my listening. Anyways I can’t believe I’m not gatekeeping this but here you go. I pay the $5 per month because I love them! but the core of it is all free.
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may as well do similar with the food section. For some reason, my family does a lot of Swedish things, despite having zero provable Swedish heritage, and I find a lot of my palate is in tune with Swedish food, especially when it comes to baked goods. They often incorporate whole grains and are less sweet. I was deep in a recipe research internet hole many years ago and found Swedishfood.com. It’s a website that looks straight out of the early two-thousands but it is chock full of knowledge and more recipes than I can wrap my head around. Everything I’ve made has been good. Some favorites:
Rye Pancakes (I use 100% whole rye)
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pt 2 recap arriving shortly ◡̈
ttfn <3
congratulations, and thanks for taking us on the real and figurative journey!
never a wasted moment reading your prose.