Arkansaw High Country Race Day 9 / Witts Springs to Ponca / 75 miles

 

Richland Creek was up and running fast

After a few hours of hearing rain steadily drumming on the roof of the community center, I woke, made coffee and tentatively started packing up my gear. I was very uncertain about what high water adventures awaited me. Rain was forecast for much of the day, contributing to my dread. Did it make any sense to get out there and ride ten miles down the road and have to turn around and ride back? I recalled an exploratory road bike ride I did a few years ago in Tuscany where I stopped near a home next to a road under construction. The most Italian-looking man in Italy stood near the road like a sentinel. He asked me if something was wrong. I responded that I didn't know if I could ride down that road. He gestured with a thick hand and said, "Prova, prova" (Try, try). That "prova, prova" phrase was on my mind as I rolled out from Witts Springs. Was I thinking a carrier pigeon would come drop me a note about the creek crossings? Was I hoping my phone would suddenly have cell service and that there would be someone I could call to tell me exactly what those creeks were going to look like? I needed to get going, see for myself, and try to get through if at all possible. 

This ride to Ponca was to be the last of what I estimated to be the three most difficult days of the race. Initially, I was most worried about the Richland Creek bridge about ten downhill miles into my day. I grit my teeth as soon as I started to hear the creek loudly rushing through the trees but was overjoyed to see that the bridge was dry.  

I like to listen to music, audiobooks and podcasts on long events like this, but my earbuds were ruined during the long, rainy day from Mount Ida to Thornburg. Being earbud-less gave me more time than usual to marinate in my own thoughts, which seems like an obvious and simple thing. Nine or ten days is a long time to be in your own head, though, and discomfort (even occasional misery) can prompt you to entertain anxious and negative thoughts that can devastate your desire to keep riding[1]. Last summer I let my concern about making it to a store before they closed absolutely ruin my mentality for about six hours even though I knew I had plenty of time.

Meditation practitioners often refer to the “emptying” of one’s mind, usually achieved by focusing on breathing. This “empty mind” state is difficult to maintain for more than a few seconds. Mindfulness, which incorporates meditation into its practice, uncritically examines the thoughts that come into our minds at a given moment. Mental health counselors will tell you that there are no “good” or “bad” thoughts, only “helpful” and “unhelpful” ones, and by paying attention to what thoughts go galloping through our minds, we can swap out unhelpful thoughts with helpful ones like changing a channel. In some moments during the race, I would catch myself ruminating on some negative experience, what I should have done or said, why some person wronged me, and I got better at recognizing these as unhelpful thoughts, changing them to more helpful ones that related to what I needed to do to keep the bike moving forward[2]. In addition to celebrating the beauty of the course and cataloguing the things I was grateful for, I’d set myself a short-term goal, like getting over the hill I was climbing. The route from Witts Springs to Ponca, with three big climbs and two smaller ones, lent itself to being divided into several intermediate goals during the day. I’d also give myself very doable timeframes to reach those goals, too, which gave me “wins” every few hours. I started out telling myself, “We’re not riding 1,000 miles today. We’re not even riding to Fayetteville or Ponca right now; we’re just riding over this hill. That’s it. That’s all. Once we get over that, we can see what’s next.” I’d get over the first big hill and tell myself, “Look at that. You gave yourself four hours to get over that hill and you did it in 3:15. Great job! On to the next one.” I’d then reset the process for next manageable intermediate goal. This attempt to limit thought to the immediate task squares with the well-known "live in the moment" advice. I recently read a book titled Men of Salt written by Michael Benanav, who crossed the Sahara Desert with a camel caravan. He addresses the mental stress of dealing with boredom, hunger, discomfort and uncertainty, writing, "In order to slip from beneath the crushing weight of future thoughts, I adopted a technique of focusing solely on the moment I was living. In itself, removed from the timeline that stretched forward and backward from the present, no single moment was that bad." 

Today’s ratio of elevation change (>100 feet/mile) was just as demanding as yesterday’s ride from Mountain View to Witts Springs, but today’s big climbs and longer downhills were easier to get into a rhythm and gain free downhill speed on. I eventually hit Mt. Judea (pronounced Mt. Judy by the locals) and then Vendor before finally rolling into Jasper at about 2 pm. I stopped at the Ozark Café for my first serious meal since breakfast the day before. 

While I finished lunch I called the Newton County Sherriff’s office to see if Erbie Road was transitable with the heavy rains of the previous four days. The dispatcher told me that the bridge was washed out and recommended I take the road through Mt. Sherman to reach Ponca. That meant another big hill, this one paved and with little shoulder. Chuck Campbell warned me to be careful. I have two blinking taillights high up on my seat stays about even with the top of my rear rim. I use two so that if one runs out of battery, I can recharge it while I’m still protected by the other. I also have a small reflective triangle hanging off my seatbag, so I’m very visible from behind, day or night. I have found that Arkansas drivers are generally kinder, more patient, and safer around cyclists than Texas drivers are. We Texans, quick to loudly insist on our rights and freedoms and prone to get belligerent with anyone who may get in our way or slow us down, waste a lot of energy just being Texans. When I lived in Arkansas for six years and regularly drove Interstate 30, I observed that if you saw a passenger vehicle in your rearview mirror coming up behind you at 20+ mph over the speed limit, if you checked the license plate when it blew past, you could count on the driver to be from Texas.

On my ride over Mt. Sherman on Highway 74, drivers had to pass fairly close by me, but there was no honking or impatient “punishment passes” except for one fool who “rolled coal” on me (he was probably originally from Texas). Rolling coal is the practice of modifying a diesel engine to allow the emission of huge amounts of black exhaust fumes. The coal-rolling must look spectacular from the point of view of the losers who do it and see it in the rear-view mirror, but in fact it has little effect on the intended targets since the driver, innately afraid of his own shadow, speeds away to hurry back to his mom’s basement and pulls most of the black cloud along with him.    

Because of the uncertainty about my schedule near the back half of the race, I neglected to make any reservations for either camping or lodging in Ponca. I went into a couple of places to get the bad news that there was nothing available.

I was soaking wet from being rained on most of the day and dejected at the thought of having to continue up the road and try to sleep in the rain at some improvised campsite with little or no food. The lady working behind the counter at Lost Valley Canoe and Lodging made a phone call and confirmed that there was availability “up the hill” three or four miles off the course and out of town at the Centerpoint Horse Camp. I knew that road well and dreaded it, having climbed it on a couple of other occasions to reach Compton. I cursed my poor planning with every slow, granny-geared pedal stroke. I had gotten a break not having to go through Erbie Road but was paying part of it back by having to ride up out of the Buffalo River Canyon (again) to reach a place to stay for the night.

I had low expectations for something called a horse camp, but the arrangement in the main cabin was excellent, a comfortable room with a very nice shared bathroom and use of a large, clean kitchen. Steve Morse, the owner, was kind and accommodating. Soon after I checked in and got cleaned up, two different guys arrived from Louisiana. Brian works with Ochsner’s Hospital in New Orleans. Ian had recently moved to Houma. I told Ian that I was familiar with Houma because I had traveled there with my father when I was a teenager. My dad was the zoo veterinarian in our hometown of Alexandria, and he was dispatched to Houma to purchase some otters for the zoo. That sounds like something your goofy uncle would tell someone upon meeting them just to mess with them but in my case is completely true. Brian solved my supper problem by cooking up and sharing a pot of pasta and an extra camping meal. My lodging and dinner dilemma was spectacularly solved at the end of the day, but in the future, I think I’ll try to do a better job of planning.

 

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[1] A tangential point: our brains account for only 2% of our body weight but require about 20% of our daily calorie expenditure. Could we economize on energy by calming the mind? Would entering a kind of meditative flow state enable us to ride farther? According to a 2005 study by the National Science Foundation, about 80% of the 12,000 to 16,000 thoughts we have per day are negative.

[2] For a long time, I was frustrated with the way some preachers would take Philippians 4:6 “Do not be anxious about anything” as a license to admonish people with anxiety. I recently figured out that if you pull back and contextualize that phrase with the two verses that follow it, we are in fact exhorted to accomplish this channel-changing from “unhelpful” to “helpful” thoughts by swapping out anxious thoughts with thoughts of whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, or praiseworthy. In this way, Mindfulness practice and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) are in line with the scripture that predates them by a couple thousand years.