We're lucky that we slept

During the Tour Divide I always felt best in the morning, which is the opposite of my usual modus operandi. Regardless of the total hours of sleep I managed the night before, mornings always brought cool air and clear lungs. I indulged in deep gulps of sweet-tasting air and gazed up at the pink sky with renewed optimism. This would be the day the sun wouldn't scorch my skin, dust wouldn't fill my airways, and gunk wouldn't clog my lungs. This day, I'd be free.

A number of riders had trickled into the campground during the night, and it seemed I was the first to leave. Without realizing it, I'd ascended about half of the climb up Fleecer the previous evening, and was surprised when I reached the wall only a half hour into my day. I pushed my bike up an eroded track, skirted around a saddle, and dismounted again to hike downhill. Brave or reckless cyclists will ride their loaded bikes down Fleecer, but it looks like this:

It only gets steeper as you descend. Once you go over the horizon line, you've entered the no-brake zone and just have to hang on and hope for the best. No thank you. I prefer to have my bicycle endeavors kill me slowly, through gradual suffocation.

Even pushing downhill is more of a shoe-ski than a hike. Clumsiness caught me and I ended up on my butt, after which I inched downhill at an embarrassingly glacial pace. The reward following the downhill hike-a-bike is a screaming descent through Jerry Creek canyon, and I was grateful that morning lucidity let me enjoy every spark of exhilaration and joy.

I reached Wise River just before 9. Eleanor was sitting in front of the tiny town's general store, eating a breakfast sandwich.

"Did you stay in town last night?" I asked.

"No, I camped in the canyon," she answered.

"So you went over Fleecer in the dark?"

She nodded. "I crashed, pretty bad."

"That sucks; are you okay?"

She shrugged and looked the other way. "Yeah, I'm okay." She sounded dejected.

Whenever I meet someone clearly having a low point during these types of efforts, I'm always at a loss about what to say. I'm not a pep talker, and hate to be pep-talked — few conversations are more grating than those served with a heavy dose of artificial cheeriness. But shallow sympathies and small talk aren't exactly helpful either.

"Do you need anything?" I asked. She shook her head, and I wouldn't have been able to offer anything, anyway. Race rules stipulate that nothing can be shared among competitors, just to make everything fair. I purchased my own breakfast and sat down in the sunlight.

Brett Stepanik and Russ Kipp at the Montana High Country Lodge

The scenic byway over the Pioneer Mountains was steeper than I remembered, but I made relatively strong progress to Polaris, home of the Montana High Country Lodge. The proprietor, Russ Kipp, first entered the Tour Divide micro-community back in 2010, when cold and wet racers came stumbling up to his doorstep to inquire about rooms. The hunting and fishing lodge is more of a reservation-only establishment, but he welcomed them inside and has actively promoted his services to Tour Divide cyclists ever since.

I'd already indulged in a long breakfast stop in Wise River and considered passing by, but realized it would be a mistake not to visit a friendly place that's become so deeply embedded in Divide culture. I'm glad I did. I had a chance to chat with a few riders who I hadn't yet met. Russ's wife served a hot lunch of chicken marsala, and Russ prepared brown-bag dinners with a turkey sandwich, brownie, and an apple. The Montana High Country Lodge offered an experience similar to the daily support stations in the Freedom Challenge, where families set you up in their homes, stuff you with homemade meals, and generally dote on you to your heart's content. It was a bit of harsh reminder about how quiet and lonely of a place the Divide can be, but it is wonderful that these islands of kindness exist at all.

As I was leaving the lodge, Eleanor rolled in, looking much more upbeat. I was happy to see her, as her demeanor in Wise River left me wondering whether she was going to go on. She seemed so shattered then, but of course I should have realized that was only temporary. Out here, we get so caught up in our own struggles that it's easy to forget that everyone else is fighting a battle, everyone else is getting knocked down, and everyone else has to find the strength to keep going, every day. We all have to carry our own weight, but nobody is alone. This is what I value most about racing. Sharing difficult objectives with others lends depth and perspective to my own experiences.

I pedaled toward Ye Old Bannack Road — home to miles and miles of much-maligned death mud, — as dark clouds gathered overhead. Bile filed my stomach, because getting caught in thunderstorms on Bannack Road ranks near the top of my list of things on the Divide that scare me. Bannack Road was established in 1862 as a freight route between Corrine, Utah, and Bannack, Montana — two towns that don't really exist any more. As such, it's a dirt road from nowhere, to nowhere, through the middle of nowhere, and nobody uses it. The maps warn of fifty miles of nothing, and if you get caught in unrideable mud anywhere along that stretch, you could be in for a very long wallow.

Luckily the clouds continued rolling south, but they brought with them a gusting wind that renewed my lungs' daily battle with dust. My pace slowed considerably, and I could only nod and exhale a wheezy "hello" as others passed me like I was standing still. The road climbed gradually but persistently through the Carver Creek valley, which was populated by free-roaming cattle. As I neared the Medicine Lodge/Sheep Creek Divide, a young black bull looked up from a herd and charged toward me.

"Hey! Hey!" I screamed as the bull wheeled around, galloped up the road, and turned to charge me again. "Hey! Hey! Hey!" I screamed louder, with a high-pitched animal voice that I didn't recognize as my own. The bull came within six feet of me and reared up on his hind legs repeatedly in a taunting dance. He was just a bully bull, but I was extremely frightened, as I think anyone would be if a thousand-pound animal was messing with them. "Go away go away go away go away!" I yowled in a piercing scream that tore through my throat and ripped my lungs to frayed shreds. The bull continued to shadow my bike as I sprinted up the road, gasping and screaming "go away" until my lungs seemed to close up entirely. I gasped again and again, but it felt as though no air was getting through. I launched into a full panic of hyperventilating and crying, still awkwardly attempting to sprint away from the bull. A dark screen flickered across my field of vision, and I screeched to a stop. I couldn't breathe. I was on the verge of passing out. This was probably how I was going to die.

There's a gap in my memory at that point. I don't think I lost consciousness, but my mind flipped some kind of survival switch, and the next image I remember is walking my bike toward the final steep pitch of the divide and feeling a deep trepidation.

"The bull charged me and I panicked," I remember thinking. "That was all. I just panicked."

I pushed my bike up the pass in a daze — a thick and chilling mental fog that permeated not just my thoughts, but my emotions as well. My legs were Styrofoam that leaked out the last fumes of energy, and only hollowness and exhaustion remained. The adrenaline surge had drained me, and the mental fog obscured any perspective on what had happened. Some deep, primitive synapses in my brain understood that what I'd been doing before the whole debacle was turning pedals along this dirt road, so that's what I should continue doing.

Looking back on this experience of being sick on the Tour Divide — the worst part about it wasn't the physical weakness. No, it was the mental dullness. Each evening, as the congestion in my lungs deepened and my breathing became more rough, my oxygen-depleted brain conceded to lassitude. It robbed me of the awe and intensity of the experience, leaving me out here on this quiet nowhere road, beneath the vividly lit Big Sky of Montana, gazing at snow-capped peaks, including the mountain where I mourned for my grandfather when he died five years ago ... and all of my emotions were muted. I descended through the valley, amid this sweeping expanse of space, on a clear and gorgeous evening, lost in a fog.

For all of my mental inertia, I still had my plan. My plan said to keep going until I could eke out 135 miles from the day, which I did near the confluence of two creeks in a narrow gorge, about 18 miles from Lima. I set up my bivy near a fence and walked down to the creek to collect water. As I crossed the road, a strange wobbliness rippled through my Styrofoam legs, and I had to sit down.

"I am really weak right now," I thought, believing that the scare with the bull was what emptied me out. And then later, after I'd already crawled into my sleeping bag, the thought continued. "I came to the Divide to search for strength. I'm going to keep searching."