Day 2 - 2024 Mishigami Challenge
Mechanical blunders and misfortune put me behind target pace.
The Mishigami Challenge is an 1100+ mile (nearly 1800km) race on a set route around Lake Michigan. I competed in the first edition of the race in 2022, coming in second, and won the 2024 race while setting a course FKT.
Over the next several days, I’ll be publishing my day-by-day account of the 2024 race. I’ve also linked my GPS file at the bottom of each recap.
You can find more about the Mishigami Challenge on their website, Instagram, and Facebook pages. You - yes you! - should think about signing up for the 2025 edition of the challenge. It really is a special event!
If you missed the Day 1 recap, you can find it here.
Day 2
About an hour after I lay down the first night, a bike passed me where I set up camp trailside; turns out it was David Sowden, who rode through the night. While this isn’t my preferred way to go, it’s plenty common in ultradistance races for riders to ride straight through for the first two days. I wondered how long David was going to sleep once he did stop, or if that was the move that was going to put him out front for the duration of the race.
Although my Wahoo claims that day 2 had less total elevation gain than day 1, day 2 certainly felt hillier. Some of that may have been the shifting wind, which was no longer the straight tailwind that we’d enjoyed all day 1, but a lot of it was also probably fatigue and my body working into the race. In my admittedly limited experience, adventures like this one take your body three or four days to agree to. Over the first few days you get progressively more tired and sore, but then at some point your body just starts to agree that what you’re going to do all day is ride. It’s not exactly that you’re less sore or tired, just that the tiredness doesn’t feel so immediate anymore.
Day 2 is also where my tire misfortune from day 1 turned into my biggest blunder of the race.
After coming through one of the only two gravel sections on the course, this one in northern Wisconsin, I could feel that my rear tire was soft. Plenty rideable, but soft. Just before Harris, WI, I decided to pull over in a shady spot off the road and try once again to fill the tire with my mini pump. I figured that if, at worst, the valve core came out again, I could screw on my presta/schraeder valve adapter and use the schraeder side of the pump to get everything nice and full again.
Now, if I had been thinking clearly, I would have done all this just two miles further down the road where there was a gas station. But I did not look at my notes to verify that this gas station existed. Mistake.
Despite my efforts to the contrary, the valve core did indeed unscrew. Then it did it again with the schraeder adapter. Left seemingly without options, I decided to put in a tube so that the valve core couldn’t unscrew. This is when I discovered that my mini-pump, which had been getting hot to the touch and harder to pump, was well and truly broken. It started oozing oil and refused to inflate anything. My suspicion is that after carrying this pump on my frame for the last couple years, sand and other grit worked its way deep into the pump and roundly destroyed the internals. Ugh.
The silver lining was that I was on a road with seemingly regular traffic. I flagged down an ATV, but they didn’t have an air compressor on the vehicle. Then I noticed a house just across the street that had a lot of vehicles and farm equipment. Surely they would have a compressor. And they probably did, but they weren’t home.
Then, as I turned around and started walking back to my bike, I saw a car with two bikes on a rear rack. But they were too far away! Surely I couldn’t flag them down. I ran after them yelling and waving my arms as they turned off towards a small residential subdivision. Then - miracle of miracles! - they stopped. Turned around! Came back to me!
And it was the race director Jack Peck’s car. The one person I could not in any circumstance receive assistance from. He was on course getting footage for an upcoming video recap of the race, and I had to tell him to shoo so that I could flag down another car.
Thankfully after a few more minutes I was able to flag down a pickup truck with a very friendly driver who did not have an air compressor, but would carry me down the road to the gas station so I could use their air compressor. The saga did not end at this point, because it was here that I discovered my tube’s valve stem was leaky and the tube would not hold air either. However, since I did bring a small bottle of tubeless sealant (one of the very last additions to my toolkit for the race) I was able to re-set my wheel as tubeless with the gas station air compressor, backtrack the couple miles to where I’d been picked up, and continue my race.
I still had a problem to solve, though. I now had no way to re-inflate a tire. It was Sunday and getting to be late in the afternoon, so even if there was a bike shop open during the day, it was unlikely to still be open. The next day would send me across the most rural parts of Michigan’s upper peninsula. My only option was a Walmart in Escanaba, and the Mishigami route circles to the northwest of Escanaba to avoid major roads. The closest point I could leave the route meant just over five miles each way. But it was my only option. The Walmart didn’t have any CO2s, but I was able to grab a new mini-pump and an additional spare tube.
All this meant about two hours wasted that I really shouldn’t have wasted, but there was one major upside to this whole ordeal that I’ve been able to take a philosophical view on in retrospect. If I had gone straight to the gas station before re-airing my tire, there’s a good chance that I wouldn’t have figured out my mini-pump was broken. As it happened, I made it through the UP just fine, but no working pump meant I could have been stranded on tiny backroads where I saw a car maybe every 30 minutes, miles from any town (and certainly not a town with a bike shop). The mistakes I made could, in fact, have turned out to ensure I was safe for the next day and change of riding, since I wasn’t able to get more CO2s until the far side of Traverse City.
The wasted time and extra riding did mean that I wasn’t able to get to my pre-race goal campsite. Instead, I stopped just shy of Manistique, but was able to get a shower and an electric hookup at Indian Lake State Park Campground, right on the Mishigami route. Also: bless the Michigan DNR for allowing same-day online campsite reservations. Illinois and Wisconsin could learn a thing or two. I could roll straight into my site late at night without worrying about disturbing a camp host or trying to figure out a pay-by-dropbox system.
