And a barefoot running story to boot! Check out the great Tail Winds cover shot by Brad Jones at RB Jones Photography, and the articles on pages 10 and 11 about Max and my 109 mile ride of El Tour de Tucson and my record barefoot running of the Dean Karnazes Rock n Roll 50k.
(For the record, we don’t know any circus songs and Vibram Five Fingers are not “just like running barefoot”)
The race report from November’s El Tour de Tucson is in the works, but I can’t resist passing along some photos from the event taken by Brad Jones at RB Jones Photography. Expect to see his work documenting our ride in an upcoming issue of Tailwinds magazine!
http://rbjonesphotography.zenfolio.com/unigallery
A ride report from my distance unicycle riding partner, Max Taint, about our 24 October training ride for El Tour de Tucson. He sent it to me way back on 28 October:
Leif is one of my few Unicycle Bastard friends (www.unicyclebastards.com) interested in distance unicycling and we have been training for and riding in centuries for a couple of years now. Our next long ride is the Tour De Tucson 109 mile century - and I for one am not feeling ready.
We both wanted to and intended to do more training rides than we have, but we have both been distracted by new athletic obsessions: I’ve been riding nothing but my new tall tandem bike 
and Zeke, well, as this new blog demonstrates, he’s gone batshit nuts for barefoot running. We both agreed that we had time for a 50-mile training ride on our 36” unicycles. The route we chose was relatively flat and we established that there would be no particular time or speed goal, but it was just to get some much needed saddle time.
If we were normal, sensible and conservative distance unicycle riders, we would have left it at that, but we felt the need to tinker with reality to design a flatland 50 mile ride that “feels” more like the last 50 miles of a brutal 109 mile ride in the desert sun. This altered state ride became known as the Tequila 50:
The Tequila 50 recipe:
1. Meet other Unicycle Bastards downtown to see the movie Zombieland.
2. Bring a wide-mouth water bottle of Tequila to share. Fact: Tequila in a water bottle gets consumed nearly as quickly as water!
3. Visit two bars afterwards and then Leif and I part ways:
4. Leif wisely decides to leave his car downtown and get a taxi home. I take another route to further prepare myself for the Tequila 50: I take part in a late night eight-mile off road unicycle ride in the Forest Park, I insist on riding a particularly steep ivy covered ravine again and again until I make it down without crashing. I only give up when I cut my leg open, bruise an ankle and fall into a huge pile of dog shit pretty much in one fluid motion of drunkenness. As I sit on the Max train, bleeding into my shoe on the way home, I wonder why people won’t sit next to me??
Now that the important pre ride preparations were completed at 1:30 AM, both of us dropped into a night of poor sleep with little restorative benefit.
The Tequila 50 started at 7:00 AM with our route taking us from the Hollywood area in NE Portland to the Willamette River along the Esplanade and out to rural Gresham along the Springwater Corridor and back again. The ride began with no smiles, none of the usual sophomoric humor about taints, chamois butter, or the effects of distance unicycling on male anatomy. We just got our hydration packs on and start riding. We started off this ride looking and feeling like the zombies in the movie we watched the night before. And when we heard that dreaded bit of tired humor that any unicycle rider gets from others: “Where is your other wheel?” I wasn’t surprised that our response was more of a zombie growl than any other recognizable reply.
At mile 20, we start to feel more alive and this confirms one of my theories that the best cure for a hangover is to get the blood pumping and go for a ride. The trip to Gresham took a little longer than usual and Leif started noticing some knee pain on the return trip, which slowed us down a bit more. By design, the Tequila 50 was supposed to provide a rough start where you don’t feel great and the miles would come slowly at first at the end of the ride, you felt like you just finished a century. I think these meager objectives were achieved. Next: Tour De Tucson 109 miles in November.
Note: Under no circumstances should readers interpret this blog post as an endorsement of the mixing of alcohol or Tequila with any distance athletic event. The authors use of performance reducing substances was an experiment, a lark, and others might say … a half-baked idea, hatched by individuals looking to make the most efficient use of the time invested in training rides and ultimately … just having a good time.
Happy trails, Maxwell Taint
I’ve recovered from my “feats of the feet” back to back minimalist/barefoot adventures in late September and early October. I still have my final reflections on those runs as a pair that I’m working on, part 4 in my 4 part series, but it’s a hard one for me.
Fall is here in earnest. My wife suggested doing the Run Like Hell event here in Portland. It seemed like a good chance to do a barefoot half marathon, and why not do it pulling my girls in a rickshaw? We made it a family affair, with my son in the stroller that my wife pushed. With her in her Vibrams and I with bare feet, we were quite a presence. Last week we did the Catalyst Challenge 10K by Reason to Run, so we had our whole family race day routine down.
(photo by Reason to Run)
I look forward to finding some pictures from today. The Run Like Hell event is halloween themed, and I asked myself what a barefoot guy pulling a rickshaw should go as? Deciding to stay clearly in the bounds of political correctness, most people suggesting an ethnic costume, I opted for Fred Flintstone. It went over great.
Now, you might say that pulling a ~100lb cart on a hilly half marathon makes for a pretty tough day, and I’m not going to disagree with you there. But why not go for a 50 mile unicycle ride the day before? And why not do that the morning after an evening of perhaps too exuberant celebration? It was not the most restful of weekends in our home.
Despite all of that the run went great. I had no point of reference for how I would do. I’d never raced a half marathon. I’d never gone that far with the rickshaw. I’d never unicycled to exhaustion after an equal portion of exuberant celebration before my main event of the weekend. And in the end I exceeded my highest expectations about how I would do. I was not reduced to walking over the big hill in the second half, I did not face mutiny from the girls I had in tow (although one did try to rally the other into rebellion). I finished in 2:10. It was a reinforcement of the message that crosses my mind somewhere in the course of each activity that Distance Minimally is about. We can do more than we think we can.
A shout out to my friend Ben who gave support on those successes. We spotted each other at the start of the race and spontaneously ran together for the event. He befriended my daughters and helped to entertain them when they grew restless. He gave encouragement when the large hills began to wear me down. By the end he was jumping invisible hurdles to keep the girls occupied. Top notch.
And now, I’m less than a month away from my next Big Event. The 109 mile El Tour de Tucson, which I will be completing with riding partner (and fellow Bastard [PG-13]) Max. Then the Rock n Roll Arizona Marathon in January will kick off my 2010 calendar. After this unique and successful year, and with some unique opportunities (such as automatic entry into Western States) and date changes next year (such as Angeles Crest more or less conflicting with Where’s Waldo), 2010 will have some big changes in my schedule and goals compared to recent years. I might try some new races, and look forward to growing as a barefoot runner.
But the greatest additions to my race routine are the family races we’ve been doing. I look forward to more of these fun-for-all events!
