Let Joy Propel You

I am in the back of the shuttle. A group of six from Golden, CO has spread themselves out between the three rows of the van and our two groups’ conversations mash together. I catch whiffs that this is a few folks’ first ride down the Whole Enchilada.

As the van climbs up La Sal Loop Road, I watch the colors shift from warm desert sienna browns to crisp fall reds and yellows. Someone says the riders in the earlier shuttle hit snow this morning. Late in the morning it’s just wind and sunshine now, but I’m wondering if I should have packed one more layer.

Someone in the van is over-explaining every aspect of the ride, from the hard climb up Burro Pass straight out the gate, to the first descent which is steep and loose and riddled with tree roots. “Then it’s slow and chunky for a while until you pop out on the rim,” they say.

And then it’s slow and chunky for another 15 miles, but with better views, I think.

It’s only my second time down the entire trail, third doing a vast portion of it, and I know now there’s very little I can’t physically ride—it’s just a mental game of endurance to keep going over rough terrain for 27 miles.

I do love the people fresh to this long, demanding ride though. I can feel their nervous and excited energy as we pull up to the Burro Pass Trailhead and the shuttle driver hands down bikes from the roof of the van.

“It’s all downhill from here!” I say, jokingly. We still have to climb another thousand feet to the actual top of Burro Pass which sits around 11,200 feet.

We take off through the yellow aspens and as soon as the trail tilts upward, the anemia that has plagued me all summer wraps around me like a lead bodysuit. I push my bike through the fog of black creeping in at the edge of my vision as the rest of my group plows ahead.

A few hundred feet from the top, a 9-year-old in a full racing kit on an $8,000+ bike passes me and says, “Don’t worry! You’re almost there!” And I muster just enough iron in my blood to scowl and say, “Yeah I know buddy, I do this all the time.”

By which I don’t mean that I do this particular ride all the time, but that I do things like this all the time. And I do it anemic. I do it sick. I do it tired. I do it with a 32-year-old body. I do it after a crushing work week. And I do it when everyone is faster than me.

He zips past me with an ease I want to tell him he should worship, or at the very least, be grateful for everyday of his youth—but then, I’m not grateful everyday for most things either.

I see our first-timers at the top looking nervously over the edge of the descent and then our group drops in and we don’t see them for the rest of the 6-hour ride.

In 2022, professional cyclist Hannah Otto set the fastest known time (FKT) of the Whole Enchilada (including biking UP to Burro Pass). That’s 55.27 miles of riding, 8,011 feet of climbing, and she finished in 5 hours 50 minutes and 38 seconds, cutting nearly an hour off the previous FKT.

There’s a video of the attempt here, and while I normally don’t feel all that emotionally compelled by athletes doing athlete things, as she comes through the tunnel under 128 at the end of the ride absolutely destroying the previous FKT, she slumps over the handlebars as someone hands her a bottle of champagne and her big mud-splattered smile downturns ever so slightly and her voice cracks a little.

“That was so hard,” she says. “Way harder than I thought it was going to be.”

She gets off her bike, swigs the champagne, sits down in the gravel path, and puts her head between her legs. The scene cuts and I promptly burst into tears.

As our group of five closed out the last few miles of the Whole Enchilada, I felt some relief as my friend lamented that the ride felt so much harder than the last time we’d attempted it in our 20s.

“I’m feeling really mad about how hard this feels today,” she said as we rocketed over the last few obstacles before emerging from the tunnel next to the Colorado River.

“Okay, yes,” I said, huffing and puffing. “Me too.”

There were no major mishaps on this ride. I took one digger in a sandy corner leaving me with a moderately bruised shin and then realized a couple miles later that my front suspension had been locked out for 70% of the ride. (The ride got significantly easier after that—and what skill to ride with very little front suspension for nearly the entire trail!). Another friend went over the handlebars once but landed safely and hopped right back on the bike. Another took a tumble and mashed their derailleur but we made it out just fine.

While Hannah Otto had finished the climb AND the descent of the Whole Enchilada 10 minutes faster than we’d finished merely the descent, I had a similar feeling of something being way harder than you thought it was going to be.

It’s been an entire summer of things feeling harder than I thought they were going to be. And I’m sure I can chalk a lot of that up to anemia (we’ll find out after my upcoming blood transfusions), but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t noticing my body undergoing a solid transition of being in my 20s to being in my 30s. And while research is showing women’s peak endurance hits much later than we previously thought (around age 35) and that we are quite athletically capable well through our 70s and beyond so long as we keep up with strength training, something is definitely changing.

Mainly, I can’t off-the-couch quite as much as I could in my 20s. Also I need an actual recovery plan after big athletic weeks. Ligaments are a little stiffer and need more stretching. A few days of semi-poor nutrition and one bad night of sleep can ruin me. A little dehydration puts me on the brink of death.

Me and 22-year-old Anja are not the same.

We finished the ride at Milt’s with the obligatory burger, fries, and a chocolate shake where we saw at least a dozen others who had been leapfrogging us down the trail all day.

We carried our greasy bags of recovery fuel back to our table and happily munched as the violet sky plunged into an early night. I contemplated driving the hour and a half home, but by some magic (government shutdown most likely), the three of us staying in Moab for the night found a campsite within five minutes of searching.

It was only 8pm but we were fading within minutes of setting up camp. Even my toenails were tired.

“If you’re unsure, if you can attack this, if you can really go for a fast time—focus on the experience,” Hannah Otto says about the Whole Enchilada. “Because I think there’s something to be said for letting joy propel you. And I think that gives you a little extra superpower.”

I may not have felt as vigorous as I had in my 20s, but I did feel something else. A contentedness. Joy even. A little sigh as I let go of speed and competition for the pure enjoyment of the adventure. I sprawled on the climbing pad mattress in the back of the Jeep, curled up tight beneath my unzipped sleeping bag. A nearly full moon blazed white above us. I chugged water and propped my head up on my cozy pillows from home for a good night of sleep. My aching sit bones and a wheezy high altitude cough the tradeoff for a body that most gratefully keeps going. A little extra superpower.