**Note - This fundraiser race has been indefinitely cancelled as the race director moved out of state and can’t run the event anymore and is looking for someone to take over the duties**
I learned of the Saints to Sinners Bike Relay event the day that the 2021 race started and we were obviously too late to make it, so I immediately added it to the 2022 cycling calendar. This was the perfect opportunity to keep my yearly tradition of fundraising via a really hard bike ride alive, while bringing four of my favorite people along for the journey.
The event is a 500+ mile relay race that starts in Salt Lake City, Utah and finishes in Lake Las Vegas, Nevada. Teams typically compete with 5-10 or more cyclists and the relay legs are broken up to allow for ample recovery time between your stints in the saddle. Teams also usually have 2-3 support vehicles and a whole gaggle of people helping out to make sure everyone is on track with their fueling, navigation, etc. If you know me, I never make anything easy for myself. I decided that all we would need to complete this task would be me and my brother-in-laws Kevin and Seth riding the bikes along with my father-in-law Eric and one of my best friends Clint driving some sort of vehicle for support. 516 miles in just over a day with 19,000 feet of climbing through farmland, canyons, high meadows, jagged mountains, and scorching desert. What could go wrong?
I spent about 10 months obsessing over every fine detail of the route and how we would break up the relay legs. I came to the conclusion that each of us would do 2 legs in a row then switch off. Kevin would start us off, I would take over after him, and then Seth would relieve me. Over and over again until we reached Vegas. We rented a 25 foot Class-C RV (Thor Majestic) that would do double duty as the support and recovery vehicle. Neither Eric nor Clint had ever driven something this size but whatever, do or die! No other option really.
In the months leading up to the race, I was mainly training for an Ironman 70.3 that I had a deferred entry to since I wasn’t able to make the 2021 race. And most of that training was running and swimming focused since there wasn’t much I needed to figure out for the bike portion. The unfortunate part was the Ironman was scheduled for a week before the Saints to Sinners relay. For some reason it didn’t dawn on me until about a month out that doing an Ironman event, having about 5 days to recover and regroup, and then flying across the country for a 500+ mile bike race probably wasn’t the best idea. I ended up bailing on the Ironman again as the S2S ride was way more important and we had a lot of money tied up in it. The other epiphany that I had was I really wasn’t training much on the bike for the Ironman since it was a 56 mile completely flat ride that I could do in my sleep. The upcoming bike relay was about the complete opposite…190 miles worth of personal relay legs and 6,000+ feet of climbing with minimal sleep and recovery. I went into crash course prep for 3 weeks, riding 5 days a week and doing 2-3 rides per day. This usually looked something like; hill climb repeats for 30-40 minutes in the morning before work, a 30 minute fast paced ride on my lunch break, and then either a smooth recovery ride in the evening or another climbing session. I also mixed in my own DIY half ironman to keep things fresh and lessen the blow of missing it 2 years in a row. Once that 3 week training block was up, it was the best I’ve ever felt leading up to a major bike trip. I was ready to rock.
I will spare you all of the intricate and painful details of our travel from Pittsburgh to Salt Lake City, but just know what was supposed to be a 2 flight, 6 hour trip ended up being an overnight sufferfest where we saw 5 different airports over 20 hours with almost zero sleep and all I had to eat were some hardboiled eggs out of vending machine in Chicago. A recipe for success two days before a huge event! The next day and a half consisted of picking up the RV, getting acquainted to our home on wheels, packing everything up, going over the race debrief documents, and heading to bed for some rest before driving to the start line around 3:30am. Mentally, I’ve broken the event and our experiences up into three different segments that get worse and worse as they go. Let’s begin….
Segment 1 - A Fast But Wet Start
Kevin was up first and shook out some pre-race jitters before launching off the start line at 5:15am. He kept up a great pace for the first two legs from SLC to Elberta. The vibes were high at the first exchange, where I took over and rode 33 miles through Mona and Nephi, finishing in Levan. The route meandered through some open farmland and boulder areas and I had a great view of the mountains over the 2 hours on this stretch, averaging 17mph. I handed off to Seth and he ripped off the longest relay leg of the ride, 54 miles from Levan to Aurora. The sun was fully overhead for his stint on the bike and it was getting HOT. The good news was that we were about to start gaining some elevation in the late afternoon and into the evening. The bad news was there was a mega-storm passing through a huge chunk of the route and we were going to have to ride through it.
Kevin took over in Aurora and halfway through his leg, it started dumping buckets of rain. We lost comms with him on the walkies as we waited at the Big Rock Candy Exchange. It turned out that he had to get off the bike and hunker down for a bit since there was lightning and the bike trail the route was on was starting to flood a little. We anxiously awaited his arrival under the checkpoint tent as flash flooding started happening. The water was nearly midway up our shins on the side of the road and we were all soaked. The show must go on, though! Kevin finally rolled in and everyone breathed a sigh of relief except for me, who had to now face the storm in the tail end of the canyon. Kevin handed me the GPS race tracker and I was on my way with just a thin windbreaker to hopefully keep me as dry and warm as possible. About 30 seconds on the road and I was soaked the whole way through. Things were going alright for the first handful of miles until the canyon opened up. There were landslides and rockslides in a few places and I was actively dodging falling rock and debris while zipping down the road.
Once I made it out of the canyon and the road debris disappeared, I started getting dragged along by a very strong tailwind courtesy of the passing storm. For once in my cycling career, I had a legitimate tail wind. I flew across the course, at some points maintaining 34+ mph while peddling at regular effort. It was a good thing I had that tailwind to make up some time, because all good things must come to an end. I hit a small pothole in the road outside of Marysvale and in that pothole was a tiny, twisted up piece of metal that went right into my tire and tube. I blew a big flat immediately and radio’d to the RV for help. They were a decent bit away and had to unfortunately backtrack. By the time they got to me, I had the wheel and tire off and Seth got me hooked up with a new tube and air (the hole in the tire was tiny so I didn’t change it out….). Back into the saddle and I pushed as hard as I could to make up for lost time, eventually losing that tailwind as I got into Junction. 32 miles of gradual uphill brought me into the checkpoint in Panguitch, and I was absolutely cooked. 52 miles in 2hrs 39min averaging almost 20mph took it out of me. I popped my Wahoo GPS off of the handlebars and sat down in a fold out camp chair to recover as Seth mounted his bike, ready to take on the first big climbing sections of the race.
Segment 2 - Up and Down Through the Night
I don’t remember much of Seth’s next section other than looking out the window in a daze. I do remember getting out at the first checkpoint after a big climbing section and filming him while he took a quick break. I comically told him that he “just climbed 1500 feet but you have 800 more to go” while he was looking at me like “thanks a lot for the reminder, man”. We departed as he got back on his bike and met him at the top of the final climb for his set of legs. That was a brutal stretch from Panguitch to the Panguitch Lake Resort area, barely seeing any flat road with not a lot of visibility out in front of you. Seth knocked it out, though, and handed off to Kevin to complete the next set of legs in the Dixie National Forest. Kevin got a nice jump on the support RV, turning left onto Mammoth Creek Road and bombing down the mountain into Black Rock Valley. We finally caught up with him as he hit the bottom of the downhill segment and was greeted with some brutal climbing to Duck Creek Village. He made it to that checkpoint as the darkness fell on us, turning an already taxing and wild ride into a whole other beast to deal with.
Kevin put on the reflective vest, took a few minutes to regain composure, and headed off into the night. The good news is the rest of his leg was relatively chill from an elevation perspective, but the bad news is it was pitch black out with barely any berm on the road to shelter you from vehicles that were going WAY too fast. We had a couple of tense moments waiting for him in the RV at check-in stops, but always ended up seeing his front blinker crest the horizon. We leap frogged him and pulled off at the Route 14 / Route 148 junction as I prepared to take over. I was having a really hard recovering and my stomach did not want any food or water. I was exhausted, having not slept at all so I didn’t miss a single second of documenting and experiencing the race. I was definitely in a daze / slight stupor at this point and moving in slow motion. Kevin rolled up and I was nowhere near being ready to take the handoff. I finally got my act together and bike out of the RV storage compartment but could not for the life of me find my Wahoo GPS. This was a big issue because it had the route loaded on it and gave me vital information on navigation along with being able to monitor my heart rate and speed. I spent entirely too long searching for it before finally throwing in the towel and mounting the bike. The GPS had to be in the RV somewhere, buried under all of our trash and clothes. Kevin tried to give me a fist bump that I did not even see, and I took off over the crest of Zion Overlook and down into Cedar Canyon.
Cedar Canyon is a beautiful, 18 miles descent down into the city. Here’s what it’s not: it is not fun in the pitch black with barely any visibility. It is not fun in the freezing cold. It is not fun after a giant storm comes through and washes out sections of road, spewing gravel and loose debris all over the place, especially around switchbacks. And it is not fun having to deal with all of that while bombing 35-45mph down the mountain in a bike race, feeling like you’re half dead! I was white-knuckling my rim breaks the better portion of that descent, having to bunny hop rocks and taking one foot off to literally powerslide across gravel in the turns. This was probably the most stressed I had been on the bike in a long while. The guys finally caught up me me a little over halfway down, and they said it was a miserable ride down the mountain in the darkness for them too. I had an epiphany that I could record the ride on my GPS watch and get some data, so I turned that on to capture the rest of my ride. I finally made it off the mountain and to the checkpoint by Main Street Park. I needed some extra time here to regain composure and refuel, which was probably annoying to make everyone wait but it was the right thing to do. Now all I had was about 20 miles of steady uphill before handing off to Seth a little ways short of Newcastle. Thankfully, traffic was light in Cedar City with it being nearly midnight, so I didn’t encounter anything crazy. Unfortunately, that punctured tire from earlier in the day crept back into the picture. I started going flat just outside of the city and popped off the bike to air up. I made it another couple of miles before I felt it getting squishy again, so I got off and did a full tube change. Another couple miles and I was flat again! The guys caught up to me with the RV and Seth did a full tire and tube change out that I should have handled ages ago. This proved to be what I needed to continue on and I waved them off to meet me at the next checkpoint.
15 miles of nothingness later and I handed the tracker to Seth and he jetted off into the night. He had a pretty quick and uninspiring 27 miles to the next handoff. His experience with the night time riding in the middle of nowhere was about the same as mine, which consisted of not being able to see anything other than your headlight beam 20 feet out in front of you and hearing cows mooing the night. He rode through Beryl Junction and turned onto Route 18 for the final stretch into Enterprise. I had finally fallen asleep at some point toward the end of his leg and awoke later to the RV twisting and turning down through a dark canyon. I drifted back to sleep momentarily and then rose again as we came out of Snow Canyon. I can’t comment on how that riding or stretch was but I’m sure Kevin had a good time. He took off for the final part of his leg into Ivins while I suited up for my turn. As we were getting into town, Clint, who had been driving the last 8+ hours, started hallucinating and thought Kevin was pulled over on the side of the road in someone’s front yard in need of help. It was just some uplighting near the street, but we could tell he was cooked and we woke Eric up to man the RV for the last part of Day 2.
Segment 3 - No Mercy in the Desert
Kevin handed the tracker off to me in Ivins and I was on my way. I had about 6 miles ahead of me on rolling terrain before starting up Utah Hill, a 7 mile / 1,420ft Category 2 climb that pushes toward the Arizona border. On very tired legs and zero fuel in my body, it took me nearly 57 minutes to make it to the top, but I did it. Slow and steady was all I could ask for right now as my engine was running on fumes. However, this was my favorite set of legs for the whole race! It was so awesome getting the sunrise coming up while in the mountains and it gave me a little bit of life for the last push ahead. Once I got to the top of Utah Hill, I was blessed with 10 miles of all downhill which I quickly pumped out in about 19 minutes. I crossed over into Arizona, which was another special moment for me as AZ holds a special place in my heart. The tracker was handed off to Seth just over the border and he once again mounted his steed.
It was heating up. When I started the climb on Utah Hill at 5:17am it was already 77 degrees in the darkness. It was 86 degrees at Seth’s handoff a mere two hours later and we were entering the true desert. Time to buckle up! Seth made some pretty phenomenal time on his two legs here even though it was scorching out. At one point we pulled over in a school parking lot and he rolled through and got off to cool himself down in their lawn sprinklers. Anything we could do to stay cool, we were doing it. Kevin got the next set of legs and nobody envied him for what he had to work with, which was a crappy stint on a Highway 15 from Bunkerville to Moapa Valley Road, with a pretty big uphill section in the mix for good measure. We got him staged under the highway overpass and my stomach was doing back flips from the lack of food and water. I tried to choke down a bottle of blue Liquid IV and ended up puking as Kevin took of onto the highway. To this day I still cannot drink that stuff. Kevin knocked out his highway stint and we met back up with him at the Logandale checkpoint for some refuel. His second leg wound through some small towns and then entered into the Valley of Fire State Park & Lake Mead Recreation Area. Kevin came rolling into Rogers Spring to cap off his final set of legs for the entire race and now it was my time to shine.
The only problem was there was no shine from me. I had 35 miles and 2400 feet of climbing ahead of me, it was nearing 95 degrees / 100 degrees real feel, and my mind + body were in serious disarray. I’ve only been truly nervous for a ride a few times in my cycling career, and these next two legs made it onto the list. I put on a brave face and hit the pedals, giving Clint a reassuring nod as I left the parking lot checkpoint. Internally I was spiraling out of control, praying that I could make it through these next 2-3 hours and get within reach of the finish line. If I couldn’t make it and we had to DNF after coming all this way, I would be incredibly crushed. I made it up the first climb in decent shape, then had some nice downhill and rollers before looking at nothing but uphill for nearly 5 miles. I had to dismount once and walk a portion going up the Class 4 climb to Redstone, and while I was off bike, a nice couple in a car slowed down beside me to check in. They kept asking if I needed food or water or a ride and I was trying to explain to them that I was in the middle of a bike race and had full support with an RV and I would be ok. What actually came out of my mouth was probably something like “bike race…..im good….RV ahead…..good on help.” They weren’t sold with that answer and asked me a few more times if they could assist but I waved them off and got back on my bike and they eventually drove off.
I reached the top of the longest climb on this section and pulled over in the parking lot where the team was waiting. I tried my best to sell that I was ok but I think everyone was starting to catch on that I was nearing the end of my capacity to stay upright. I took a short break here while they dumped water all over me and got me an ice cold compress to put around my neck and tried to feed me snacks but I could barely eat. The show must go on. Back onto the bike and down a nice roller I went. The next 6 miles (the Strava segement is named “Redstone to Mount Doom”) were completely miserable for me. My vision was getting blurry and every single pedal turn was painful. Halfway up the next climb, the RV came ripping by me and Seth was hanging out of the door, hooting and hollering and cheering me on while wearing a Bob Ross wig. All I could do was stare at him as the RV faded away and wonder if any of that was even real, or a desert mirage. I made it through some rolling hills and then had the final climb to the summit of Mt Doom (Northshore Road Summit). When I reached the top I was ready to pass out and my heartrate was off the charts. I got off of the bike and laid down underneath the RV, claiming it was nice and cool under there but the blacktop was easily in the 100s of degrees and the RV engine was running right above me. The guys begged me to get out from underneath there and go sit on a curb so they could get me water and food. I truly don’t even remember all of what happened next other than two things. 1). I ate half of an orange and drank some water while contemplating my life, and 2) Clint told me it was all downhill from here. There is a picture of me sitting with my head in my hands, an orange and gel on the ground in front of me, and Kevin standing behind me wringing ice water from a dishcloth as proof to myself this happened. This picture was my Tom Brady moment from the Super Bowl comeback against the Falcons.I remember opening my eyes every so often and the world spinning while ice water splashed down into my sun glasses and eyes and shook me out of it. I was probably pretty close to heat stroking out, but I told myself I had to finish. Begrudgingly, back on the bike I went and it was a glorious downhill descent for about 4.5 miles.
Clint lied. Or maybe Clint misspoke (I love you Clint). Clint said it was all downhill from here. Someone read the elevation map wrong for my final leg and somehow missed these three “little” rollers before the true downhill finish. They were short but very punchy and getting up and over each felt like what I assume climbing Everest would feel like. Each one I made it up was worse than the last as the elevation built up and I came to a screeching halt each time to get off the bike and sit down and collect myself while trying to drink water and eat snacks. I very honestly don’t remember anything else between midway through those rollers and finishing the leg. When I got to the end, I got inside the RV and crashed. Seth had the last leg to the end, but me and Kevin were going to ride with him to the end and finish unified. Kevin ended up going with him but I couldn’t get up. I decided I would try to get myself together and get dropped off somewhere along the route before the finish to ride with them, which ended up being bout a couple hundred yards from the finish with the hotel in sight. I popped out of the RV, we all changed into our original team jerseys, and rode into the front entrance parking lot of the Hilton Lake Las Vegas. The remaining S2S crew were ringing cowbells and cheering us on as we crossed the finish line, and then it was over. $2450 raised for ALS, 519 miles, and 34 hours later, we did it! The race crew had a lovely kid pool filled with cold water for our feet and we got handed some beers (I think). I remember being elated that I didn’t have to sit on the bike again, and being so very proud of our whole team for what each person contributed to getting us all across the finish line in one piece.
My race stats: 182.2 Miles | 7,692 Vert | 11hrs 37 Minutes | 15.8mph Avg
Epilogue
We checked into the The next hour or so was spent trying to straighten up inside of the RV, which was an absolute disaster. You can see the carnage towards the end of the Youtube mini-doc that’s at the top of this blog. Once we got that squared away, we checked into the hotel, got cleaned up, and all met down in their restaurant for dinner and celebratory whisky pours. It felt really good to finally get some food in me and be stationary and in air conditioning while doing it. One of the biggest things I was looking forward to when we finished was cannonballing into the pool at the resort, but it was closed for the evening! Who closes their pool down at 7pm? We made some calls back home and then turned in early for the night. The next morning we had a nice breakfast at the resort and hit the road. We made a pitstop in Las Vegas for a few hours to sight see and get some pizza at Giordano’s, which Clint highly recommended and it ended up being pretty good. Getting the RV out of the parking lot and through Vegas was a chore but we were back onto the open road, driving up Highway 15 and on some of the route we just rode on 24 hours earlier. We stayed at Cedar Canyon RV Park for the night and Seth made some steak and scallops for the gang. Eric had cigars for everyone and I was still so depleted that the cigar made me sick. I had to excuse myself to “go to the bathroom” which was really me just sitting on the toilet with my pants still on trying not to pass out. I recovered and we ended up having a nice evening there and made the rest of the drive back to Salt Lake City the next morning. The boys played some disc golf and then we went up to the top of Snowbird Resort for some sightseeing. We hiked down a bit to one of the peaks where Kevin had stashed food and water a year prior for our WURL attempt and we recovered some of it. The next day, we said goodbye to Seth, Kevin, and the great state of Utah and flew back home to PA.
Looking back on the ride, it was an absolutely killer experience. I am so proud of our misfit gang of cyclists and support crew and I think we really impressed a lot of people out there doing it with three riders. I obviously wish that my health was better the second half of the race and I was able to push harder, but hardships and experiences like that are what builds character, and pushing through the pain builds up good resilience. Sometimes slow and steady is what wins the race, or at least allows you to finish, and that’s what we did. I spent some time pouting over the maps, our strava activities, and looking at our time chart, seeing where we could shave off time and where things went sideways for us and how fast we could do it if we were to enter again. I concluded that at the same level of fitness we were at and doing it with three rider again, we could shave 5 hours off if we got hyper efficient and wasted less time. This ride was a learning experience and something to be proud of, the next ride would be a true race now that we’re dialed and knew what to expect. The sad thing is, the race director ended up moving out of state and the race has been indefinitely shut down. If it ever gets brought back to life, we will be there, better than before!
