Arkansaw High Country Race Day 10 / Ponca to Eureka Springs / 85 miles

I put on clean, dry cycling clothes (thank you, Centerpoint Horsecamp), downed some coffee and leftover pasta and zoomed back down the hill through Ponca, rejoining the course at Boxley Valley. The road is flat and the scenery beautiful for a few miles. 

It had stopped raining and the entire day was forecasted to be rain-free. I was not exactly doing cartwheels with happiness, though, because I knew a fearsome climb awaited me where the gravel road departed the southern end of the valley. The hill there is so steep I walked down it when I came from the other direction in June of 2020. My friend, Kate Geisen, wrote in her race report in 2019 that riding down that hill was the most afraid she had ever been on a bike. The hill showcases a climb of over 1,000 feet in three miles of slick gravel, and I didn’t even attempt to ride it. Just pushing the bike was enough of a chore, and the task tempted me with another opportunity to demoralize myself with “misery algebra.” One doesn’t have to be skilled at equations to quickly work out the sobering math of traveling one mph on a 1,000-mile course, but I convinced myself that what I was working on in that moment was not horizontal as much as it was vertical distance. Each foot I climbed was one less of the roughly 84,000 I would do to finish. 

The relatively level ground at the top of the climb offered a different kind of challenge, though. The extremely muddy section of about ten miles to Red Star included sticky red and gumbo mud that adhered to my tires, chain, and brakes. This was more than an annoyance. It was a nightmare situation, especially so early in the day. I kept telling myself that since it was not raining, the roads would improve with each passing minute. “Don’t panic,” I told myself. “It will just get better and better through the day.” I retrieved the paint stick from my bag and scraped the mud from the sidewalls of my tires. The only place my wheels threatened to seize up was at the front fork where I had zip-tied a short plastic fender. Somehow, mud had even gotten between the fender and the fork, making the clearance even smaller and causing the mud-caked tire to rub the fender. I crossed a small, running stream at Red Star where I cleaned the bike and reluctantly cut off the plastic fender, giving me the clearance necessary to avoid the tire rubbing. The going was slow and laborious for the rest of the morning until I reached a lush, broad valley at Loy that let to a hard-surfaced road that continued to Kingston. I didn’t expect to see a convenience store open until the end of the day at Eureka Springs, but the Kingston Station was open and doing brisk Saturday business. I bought an assortment of snacks, water, and a hamburger and ranch quesadilla and went out to the picnic table in front of the store. A couple of local guys sat conversing in wooden chairs nearby. “How y’all doin’?” I asked. “All right,” one of them responded. “Do you think it’s done rainin’?” I asked. “I don’t know,” one of them said. There were to be no further pleasantries exchanged with these ol’ boys. My opportunity to make a friend for life in Kingston would just have to be put on hold. I ate some of my food, stored the rest away, topped off my camelback with ice and watered-down Mountain Dew and continued riding toward Eureka Springs. My rear tire flatted with about 30 miles to go. As the tire was still somewhat mud-caked, I had a hard time finding the puncture. I eventually removed the rear wheel and searched until I found the spot where sealant was oozing out of a small hole. I plugged the hole and reinflated the tire with a small hand pump. Now there was sealant coming out of a spot where the tire sidewall disappeared down into the rim. I was puzzled by this but eventually figured out that I also had a small cut in the sidewall. The road was so rocky where I had flatted that as one puncture let the tire go mostly flat, the rim pinched and cut the sidewall on another rock. I inserted a smaller plug (bacon strip) into that hole and rotated the tire around to allow the sealant to sit on top of my two punctures. When I inflated the tire again, the plugs held. With a sigh of relief I put the rear wheel on the bike, cautiously mounted, and rode on to Eureka Springs, keeping a sharp eye out for big rocks or anything else that may unnecessarily stress the rear tire. This was Anxiety Disneyland, of course, but I kept telling myself, "No big deal. If the plugs don't hold we just put a tube in it. Tranquilo."  I arrived at Eureka Springs just before 7 pm, checked into the Country Mountain Inn, got cleaned up, remounted the bike and rode over to the nearest restaurant about a half-mile down Highway 62. It was a Mexican restaurant, which is normally my jam. In spite of my profound hunger, I was unable to eat very much of the food, the worst I’ve ever had in my expansive Mexican food experience (even worse than a place called “Los Chingones” in Iquitos, Perú, where the Master Sergeant who ate with me became gravely ill). Nonplussed, I returned to my room and happily prepared for what I fantasized would be an easy ride to the finish line the next day.