Ride Report - Bikepack the Ten Thousand

Take one of the hardest single-day events around, and throw on an extra 200 miles. Cuz why not?

Last year, an idea popped into my head: What if you bikepacked to and from the Ten Thousand Ride, sandwiching that hilly monster in the middle of a long weekend entirely filled with bikes?

It’s a great idea, if I do say so myself. Or a terrible one. Or maybe just a very silly one.

While my schedule didn’t allow me to act on this notion last year, this year my Memorial Day weekend was wide open.

What the Heck is the Ten Thousand Ride?

If you are not in the greater Chicago/northern Illinois area, you may be unfamiliar with this annual event. But it’s a very special one.

The Ten Thousand Ride has a 10+ year history as a free event in the Driftless region of northwestern Illinois, the premise of which is articulated in its name: climb 10,000 vertical feet (roughly 3000 meters) over the course of a single ride.

The Driftless, which extends not only through Illinois but also Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, is a perfect backdrop to this excursion, a counterpoint to the relentless pancake flatness of Chicago. As you head towards the Mississippi River, hills start to slowly undulate. Then they become sharper, bigger, craggier. And in this sparsely populated region, dirt and gravel backroads connect the contours of these rocky ridges.

While the course changes every year, the challenge remains consistent, especially for cyclists who are used to powering through the flats. The Ten Thousand Ride isn’t a race, at least technically. There’s no timing, no winners. It’s a personal challenge. An adventure. Although it can get a little race-y at times…

I first took on the Ten Thousand Ride in 2022. At the time, it was my longest day on the bike, ever, both in terms of total distance and time in the saddle. I also did not know how to fuel myself for a ride like that, so there was a lot of semi-bonking and aid station rest and recovery. (In fact, I absolutely would have quit at the last aid station that year if there had been a way for me to get back to the start line. As it was, the ride route was nearly as fast as any other way back to the start/finish, so after a long break, a couple of cokes, and some snacks I eventually saddled up and did finish the ride.)

A year later, I came back with a lot more experience, and although it was only a week after racing Gravel Locos and my legs were still a teeny bit tired, it went quite a bit better.

All of which is to say that this ride is a special kind of challenge, and one that you get to share with hundreds of other cyclists. This year there were nearly 300 registered riders across the three offered distances (74, 138, and 189km). And while this year’s long route didn’t rack up the bonus elevation of 2022 or 2023, it still hit the 10k mark with a bunch of sharp climbs throughout the route. More on how that went below.

But first…

Pack It Up, Camp It Out

This year, my Ten Thousand Ride adventure started a day early, as I was not driving out to the Driftless, but riding my bike there.

Or rather, a combination of the Metra train and my bike. Arguably the purest form of this challenge would be to do the entire thing by bike, rolling out my front door under my own power and returning the same way.

The problem is that this would have made my ride to the Ten Thousand 275 kilometers long rather than a “mere” 154km. While I’ve ridden 275km in a day plenty of times, doing it before and after a race-intensity effort (the Ten Thousand itself) sounded like a bit more than I cared to take on. Did I weenie out? Who can say.

At any rate, Saturday began with a long Metra ride from Chicago to the end of the line in Harvard, Illinois, and then I was rolling by about 10:20 am.

The first ~50km of this ride, from the start through Roscoe and Rockton (which happen to be just north of Rockford, all of which are on the Rock River) was an absolutely lovely stretch predominantly on gorgeous cycle paths. It’s always fun to travel long-distance cycling routes like these, and with the weather also beautiful on Saturday they were in heavy use. In addition to many people, I saw an endless supply of chipmunks, rabbits, and birds as well as some deer and even a turkey!

After a resupply at a bakery in Rockton, I was off for the longest stretch of Saturday’s ride, rolling through until Stockton, where I planned to get some dinner and some groceries for campground breakfasts. I was quickly into hills upon leaving Rockton, and these became larger and more frequent the further I went. Gravel roads also started to feature as I passed out of urbanized area and fully into farmland.

Although the hills certainly made me work a little, it was a delightfully relaxed ride out to Vel Terra campground near Elizabeth, IL, punctuated by what I imagine was a funny sight of me carrying a grocery sack over my hydration pack (plus a sandwich in my jersey pocket) for the last 20km from Stockton to the campsite.

It’s Not A Race, But…

The Ten Thousand Ride is not a race; we established that above.

All the same, it can get a little spicy, and that’s precisely what I was after. I wanted to push hard and see what the day would bring. Unlike my first year, it was never a question of finishing, but rather how quickly and efficiently I could get myself to the line.

From the jump, there was one group that was decidedly faster than me. I have no idea how many of those 15-ish riders that went up the road were doing the full route versus one of the shorter ones, but they were pretty quickly pulling away.

Thankfully, I immediately fell in with a second group, and for about the first 40 or 50km we had a group of 5-10 riding together, though definitely not trying to put in an organized chase. The hills through this section were smaller, but they stretched the elastic, and I think it was one of the first of the slightly longer climbs (in this context meaning one mayyyyybe two kilometers of constant uphill) that the elastic finally snapped. I went ahead of the rest of the group with a couple of other riders who I’d spend most of the next 30-40km with.

On a course like this, though, individuals are forever being separated. Someone will feel great on one pitch, only to be crawling on the next. With my current fitness, I found myself strong on the long, low-grade (up to 3%) climbs where I could apply some power, but had to ratchet things back more than I would have liked when things got to 6-7% or more.

This meant that while our reduced group mostly stayed together for this next stretch, we did eventually separate, and I spent the rest of the way to the ride’s midpoint alone.

At about the 100km mark I was caught by another rider who was rolling strong, so I hitched myself to his wheel and we traded pulls through a (relatively) flatter section for the next 20-30km. It was good to have someone to ride with after an hour or so alone, but on a steep pitch he distanced me and I figured that would be the last I’d see of him.

The next 30km was another solo stretch, although I was occasionally passing riders who either started the route early or were on on the medium distance route. In fact, there was one rider who I think I passed three separate times over the course of the ride as the long route overlapped with then veered away from the medium distance.

My goal at this point was just to keep things steady, regardless of how the route went up, down, or any other direction. And in fact, for a little while I started feeling really good on the climbs. It was almost like my legs finally understood what I was asking from them and were finally agreeable to turning a heavier gear at a decent cadence.

This actually brought me back to the rider I’d traded pulls with earlier, who seemed to have cracked pretty hard with 30-40km to go. Going up a climb very similar to the one he’d ridden away from me on just a couple hours earlier, he was unable to keep my wheel.

Although the Ten Thousand Ride isn’t a race (let’s say it again!), I do feel proud of my comparative performance to the other riders. After that lead group formed and rolled away within 20km of the start, there were only two riders who passed me and went up the road the rest of the day; however, I eventually caught and re-passed each of them. I don’t mean that in any sort of disparaging way to others, but I do think it means I paced myself well. I went out hard because I wanted to test myself on this course, and was able to hold that relative effort all the way to the finish.

Where I did - unexpectedly - mess up was in my resupply. When I got to the aid station at the halfway point, I still had a little bit of water in one of my two large bottles, and I had about half of my hydration pack left. Now as a rule, it’s always a good idea to top off everything when you get a chance on any kind of longer ride. However, since I was approaching this very hilly course as a race, I decided to try to limit the extra weight I was carrying and only filled my hydration pack up to about 2/3 capacity (in addition to refilling my bottles). I suppose the reasoning was sound - I was giving myself more water for the second half of the ride than I’d consumed during the first half - but the actual weight savings was pretty minimal, and I would have been better served carrying as much water as I could given that this was my only planned stop of the day. I actually ran out of water with about 25km left on the route, which wasn’t fun but was a manageable problem.

All told, I came home in 7 hours, 32 minutes, a time I’m extremely happy with.

I Still Have To Ride Back?

First up, I want to give a big shout-out to the Turbo Tuesday crew who were at most of the sites around me at the campground. They were a fun and friendly bunch who very generously invited me to share some food and fire with them post-ride on Sunday. It was a good way to celebrate a day of hard riding all around.

Feeling very crampy all over though, I was not particularly looking forward to the ride back to the Harvard Metra Station on Monday. However, as is frequently the case on multi-day adventures, things feel better when you swing your leg over the bike the next morning.

It was slow going for sure. Tired legs and hills are a tricky mixture, but very quickly there was wind - a LOT of wind - to be added to that equation.

Although things were still when I rolled out at about 7:30am Monday morning, by 8:30 a ripping wind had started coming straight out of the east-northeast. Or said differently, exactly the direction I was headed all day. It was strong enough that momentum in the flats - or really, even down the backs of hills - was nearly stymied. Halfway back to the train, I was averaging just 20.1 kph.

It was also obvious that my heart rate was badly disconnected from my perceived effort, a sure sign of fatigue. I very intentionally gave myself extra time to make it back to the station before the train’s scheduled departure, and even with only a few minutes of stops along the way, I needed some of that bonus time.

But let’s choose to look at the upside! It was another beautiful day out, I didn’t get hammered by wind before or during the Ten Thousand Ride, and the further I made it along my route to the train, the flatter and often more sheltered it became. The wind didn’t let up one bit all day, but it proved to be simply a part of the day, not a superseding concern.

My New Bags Are Awesome!

Bikepacking to and from the Ten Thousand was also the maiden voyage for my new custom frame bag. Or frame bags, I should say, since they’re a “split bag” design, meaning I can use just the top section as a half-frame bag or both pieces as a full frame bag.

The bags, from Wompy Bike, are not only custom measured to my frame, but also custom printed with a watercolor…explosion?…that I selected. They’re also waterproof, or near about to it, made from waterproof fabric with taped seams and neoprene guarded zippers. I am VERY excited to put more time in on these.

It’s actually my first time with a lace up bag system rather than one that uses Velcro straps, which has taken a minor learning curve but I’m already appreciating for the way it helps the bag hug the frame better.

Nice work, Wompy, big thumbs up!

Next Up

The adventures continue next weekend with Chicago Randonneurs’ Aurora City of Lights 400k Brevet. Be sure you’re subscribed to see more from that (and many future) rides!