Day 4 - 2024 Mishigami Challenge
Wherein it rains all day through my favorite large section of the course.
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!
Missed a day’s recap? Find them here:
Day 4
Partly by strategy, partly by competitive necessity, I got less and less sleep each night of the race. On the third night, it was about four hours. There were a few immediate reasons for this. One, I wanted to ensure I didn’t cede the lead I’d managed over Sarah Rice on day 3 by letting her get the early jump like I had on day 3. Two, I’d seen the day before that rain was coming, and I wanted to get as far south as I could as quickly as I could to try to avoid it. This was one of the reasons I’d held out hope of making it all the way to Traverse City on day 3, but that didn’t end up being manageable.
The first few hours were fairly uneventful as I found some breakfast from a gas station somewhere around Elk Rapids and made my way into Traverse City. I still needed CO2s if I could find them, but I was coming through so early that the bike shops strategically placed right on the bike path through town weren’t open yet. Finally, the third or fourth I passed, on the west side of Traverse City…well, it wasn’t yet open yet either, but the manager was in and willing to sell me a pair of CO2s and let me borrow a pump to get my rear tire up to pressure. (I checked my front as well, but it was perfect, hadn’t lost a single PSI all race.)
My next target was the town of Cedar, where I knew there was a coffee shop on route where I could get a second breakfast and resupply. I also hoped to spend a few minutes charging my lights and power bank since I didn’t have access to electricity overnight.
Speaking of not having access to things, here’s maybe the grossest thing I did the entire race. The campground I stayed at the night before was a local township campground rather than a state park campground, and perhaps one more geared towards long term recreation than a quick stay. I can’t say for sure because it was dark when I got there and still dark when I left, but that’s the impression I got. At any rate, the bathrooms were not readily apparent, and I got in so late that I couldn’t really ask anyone. This meant I had nowhere to change out of the bibs I wore on day 3. A bivvy is nice and quick, but it does not afford the space to change clothes that a proper tent does. So, I slept in my dirty bibs.
In the morning, this problem had not gone away. The best I could do was simply apply plenty of fresh chamois cream and keep going. Honestly, it all turned out ok, but I definitely don’t recommend this course of action if you can avoid it. It’s pretty disgusting.
Anyways, I did make it to Cedar just fine, but not before the rain started to arrive. I was able to lock my bike under an overhanging roof to keep the rain (mostly) off of it, and took about half an hour to eat a couple breakfast sandwiches, drink some coffee, and recharge. I had some brief hope of waiting out any showers, but a look at the radar forecast erased that thought, so there was nothing to do but go out into the sometimes heavier, sometimes lighter rain shower and get on down the road.
Rain aside, this might be my favorite part of the whole course. The Tunnel of Trees is exceptional, but it’s also relatively short in the scheme of things. Between Traverse City and Ludington is a succession of often steep, somewhat long hills with ripping fast descents in between. The longest and most fun of these actually comes just after Traverse City on the way in to Cedar, but half of day 4 was characterized by these sharp uphills followed by fast downhills, all on pretty bike-friendly roads. The rain certainly made this section less pleasant, but couldn’t erase my enjoyment altogether, especially after so many flat miles through the upper peninsula the day before.
It’s also true that while I still enjoyed this section in 2024, I was a lot more prepared for it in 2022. That year, I was just over a year removed from my time in Austria, and my legs hadn’t yet been completely corrupted by the unending Chicago flats. To say it more directly: I could still climb. In 2024, I have been away from the mountains too long. Yes, I still know how to measure my effort in order to get through a long and/or steep climb, but I don’t presently have the ability to climb at speed.
A brief but related aside: It is stunning how different it can feel to ride flats versus ride mountains. In flat areas, you’re basically locked into your position on the bike, putting out consistent and constant power. You better like your saddle, and you better have a good bike fit. In the mountains, you are always moving around on your bike. You sit for a while; you stand for a while. You hammer up a short, steep ramp; you cruise down the backside. They are so very different ways of riding a bike, and there’s a lot of rider blindness being used to where you live and what you ride regularly.
Anyways, the roads stayed wet, usually with at least a little rain falling, all the way into Ludington, where I arrived early evening.
Ludington was a frustrating stop for me this year. I’d been targeting it as my next big pause for a few hours with the intent to resupply, get some dinner, and figure out where I planned to stop that night. However: Ludginton is a bit of a tourist town, and there aren’t a lot of food options right on route. There are a handful of brewpub-type places just a block or two off route, but I was coming in at the dinner rush and the one that I tried to get a table at had a 45 minute wait. That wouldn’t do, so I backtracked to a convenience store just off route to resupply and get some pizza. But of course, after a dry hour it was at this moment that another rain cell came through, so instead of sitting outside the store I had to chuck everything into my bags and go back through town a few blocks to a roofed pavilion overlooking the port.
None of this put me in a particularly good mood, and combined with the overall tiredness I had near the end of the fourth day of racing, I struggled to make any clear decision about where to stop. I was bouncing back and forth between the race route (to judge distances and check where I’d be passing), google maps (to find hotel options on or near the route), my route notecard (to consider camping options I’d marked for myself pre-race), and the weather forecast (to determine whether the risk of rain was enough to totally rule out camping as a comfortable option). Instead of making one decision, I made about four, but roughly settled on either a motel on the north side of Muskegon - which I did call to check availability - or Hoffmaster State Park, which was maybe another 20k past Muskegon. I knew Hoffmaster, having stayed there on my final night of the 2022 race, but I ultimately chose the motel to avoid any chance of being rained on while sleeping.
During the last hour or two on the way in to Muskegon, I began experiencing a problem that would absolutely plague my day 5 ride: Shermer’s Neck. For those unfamiliar (as I was prior to this year’s race), this is an ultradistance cycling ailment in which your neck and shoulder muscles become fatigued and start to have difficulty holding up your head. I didn’t have a bad case on the night of day 4, but I was having some pain trying to get into my aero bars. As a result I went a little slower over those hours than I maybe could have and stayed on the hoods. I had noticed while sleeping the previous night that my neck felt particularly stiff while resting on my pillow, but at the time I didn’t think too much of it.
When I did get to my motel, which was easily the smallest motel room I’ve ever stayed in, I got a shower, started charging my electronics, and checked the race tracker. I could see that I’d put distance into Sarah, who was still in second place, but that Sarah had stopped quite early in the evening…and at 11pm central, was moving again. Manistee, just a little ways north of Ludington, is just a hair over 300 miles from the finish. While it wouldn’t be my preferred strategy to one-shot the last 300 miles of Mishigami (or any race), itäs also not outside the realm of feasibility for an experienced long-distance rider.
Sarah Rice is absolutely an experienced long distance rider.
I could see that I still had about 80 miles of cushion on her as I went to bed, so even though I wasn’t sure if she might stop again that night, I set my alarm to get up earlier than I’d originally planned, with the intention that I’d have at least a 20 mile buffer by the time Ì got rolling if she did indeed ride through the night. That gave me just a few hours to sleep, so I got to it the best I could.
