Brantley Tyndall during the Trans Am Bike Race (Photo courtesy Charles Merritt)
Brantley Tyndall has seen America up close and personal over the past few weeks.
In the first three weeks of June, he:
- watched the sun rising along the Oregon Coast, a mysterious, magical place;
- enjoyed the stark, high-country scenery of the Front Range in the Arapaho National Forest in Colorado;
- experienced a snowstorm in Yellowstone National Park, and thunderstorms and flooding in the Midwest; and
- dodged assorted rabbits and deer and dogs, and logged wildlife encounters with critters ranging from antelopes and armadillos to bears and beavers.
Tyndall’s journey across the country was done by bicycle. He was a rider in the Trans Am Bike Race, a 4,191-or-so-mile trek that began June 3 in Astoria, Oregon, and that he completed June 24, when he arrived at the Yorktown Victory Monument. Tyndall finished 12th out of a field of 75.
His initial racing strategy was to get with some of the leaders and mirror what they did. That helped, and he was in fifth place on the race’s second day. “It was motivating to be around faster people,” he says.
A snowstorm in Yellowstone National Park led him to lose a day awaiting a change in the weather. He talked with locals, who warned of drivers who would lose control in the snow and drive off the road, and he had visions of sliding out on ice on a fast mountain descent and freezing to death.
“That got into my head,” he says.
When he finally traveled the route, conditions proved the dire warnings wrong.
“I kicked myself for two weeks after that,” he says.
Rains, storms and floods plagued his travels through the Midwest. The eventual race winner, Australian Abdullah Zeinab, got out ahead of the weather and set a race record, completing the course in 16 days, 9 hours and 56 minutes, 10 hours better than the previous record.
The course took him through the Rockies and the Appalachians, but the Ozarks, a range of seemingly gentle mountains, were particularly brutal and unrelentingly steep. “You get drained; it just wears you out,” Tyndall says.
Most of the trip was completed solo, but toward the end of the trek in Virginia, he was caught by another rider. They rode together, and Tyndall, with a bit of a home-field advantage, served as a local tour guide.
They also had some company, though the hour was late. At 2 a.m., boosters came out to encourage Tyndall around Ashland, and he had a local rider join in for a bit at 4 a.m. in Cold Harbor.
“You go from feeling terrible to feeling great,” he says of his local boosters.
You’re on your own in this kind of race, so Tyndall packed up his world onto his bike. The bicycle itself weighs about 20 pounds, and he toted another 20 pounds or so of gear for the cross-country excursion.
Tyndall had a grapefruit-sized dry bag to keep the essentials. He slept in motels much of the time but was under the stars some nights and logged sleep time in the lobbies of remote post offices other nights. “You are literally just a machine on a bike,” he says.
A long-distance race such as this burns mass quantities of calories, about 9,000 or so per day, says Tyndall. “The caloric needs are out of this world,” he says. “You can’t eat enough.”
Yet it’s not as grueling as you’d expect: He lost 7 pounds of weight over the course of the trek. Unlike shorter races, where you pedal hard and fast and speed is the key to success, a long route like this rewards consistency and persistence. “Mostly, you’re riding kind of easy,” he says. You don’t hurt as much as you feel depleted.
Tyndall sees himself more as being made for ultra-endurance events than as a sprinter. He’s competed in shorter races before, but says he’s built physically for the longer rides, and this competition seemed a good one to take on. He wanted to do something adventurous, but he also wanted to raise awareness regarding traffic safety and to see how other states are making travel by bike easier and safer, particularly relevant in his job as outreach director for Sports Backers’ Bike Walk RVA, a program that seeks to make Richmond more bike- and pedestrian-friendly.
In Kansas, he noted, the state had undertaken a public service campaign to make motorists aware that the race participants were in the state, and had encouraged Kansans to be welcoming to the 100 riders. Tyndall says the only two rider deaths in previous races had occurred in Kansas and that he was initially apprehensive about riding there.
But his fears proved unfounded. He said he never felt unsafe during that portion of the course, as drivers were “especially gracious.” It wasn’t just the motorists: In Newton, Kansas, about halfway along the course, he was greeted by four “trail angels,” who came out in support with dinner and to hear his stories.
The public service effort in Kansas could serve as a model for other states. “I have to believe that made a major difference,” he says. “Virginia should be doing the exact thing.”
Tyndall loves riding around Virginia, in the mountains and Piedmont, and along the Virginia Capital Trail, but, he says, commonwealth drivers are aggressive, impatient and leave minimal space between cars and bike riders.
“The drivers in Virginia were absolutely the worst,” he says. “It was in Virginia where I felt the most danger and threat. … It was a wild wake-up call.”
That's where Bike Walk RVA comes in. The group is in its sixth year advocating for projects including bike lanes and paved trails, and it is taking the lead in creating a bike trail from Ashland to Petersburg, a complement to the Capital Trail, which extends from Richmond to Williamsburg.
Tyndall would like the commonwealth to adapt a feature he found in several Western states: expansive dedicated bike lanes, even along long rural stretches of roadway. It was especially helpful, he says, when riding in the wake of semis traveling 70 mph that could otherwise blow you off the road.
“It really helps keep people safe,” he says.
