In 2021, I came to the CDA Fondo ready for a hard day. What I got instead was one of the most dangerous experiences I have ever had on a bike. At first it just felt like bad weather. Eventually it became clear it was something else.
I had trained hard for that ride. I put in the miles and showed up ready to suffer in the usual ways cyclists like to romanticize: distance, climbing, fatigue, and the vague idea of proving something to yourself. What I had not prepared for was a long, wet slide into hypothermia.
The weather was awful in a way that sounds manageable until you are deep into it. Cold rain. Steady wind. Temperatures low enough to keep draining you hour after hour. For a while I did what most cyclists do and convinced myself I could push through it. You assume that if you just keep pedaling, eventually your body will sort things out. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it very much does not.
The first real sign things were going sideways was my hands. They stopped working properly. I could barely shift. Braking became questionable. What had been a hard ride was turning into something a lot more serious, and I was still doing the usual internal negotiation people do when they do not want to admit they are in trouble.
By mile 94, the negotiation was over.
I was shaking uncontrollably, my breathing had gone shallow, and my speech was slurred. When I tried to call my wife, I could barely work my phone. My hands were not cooperating, the screen was wet, and even something simple had suddenly become difficult.
I know now I was deep in hypothermia. At the time I just knew that my body was shutting down in ways that were hard to ignore. Thankfully, one of the race support vehicles spotted me on the side of the road before things got worse. They loaded my bike into the truck and got me to a nearby casino where I could warm up by a fire.
Even after I got inside, I kept shaking for another three hours.
The hardest part was not the cold. It was quitting. I had trained hard for the ride, and it was brutal to admit that the smart decision was to stop. It was also hard watching other riders finish, especially the ones who had come better prepared for the conditions, whether in gear, experience, or grit. There is always someone tougher than you, no matter how hard you try, and that day made the point pretty clearly. I was happy for them and what they had pushed through, but it still stung knowing I would not be among them.
Instead, I ended up sitting by a fire in a casino, surrounded by a herd of lumpy casino regulars staring at me like I had wandered in from another planet. I was drenched, shaking violently, dressed in lycra, and showing no interest in either gambling or the buffet, which only seemed to deepen their suspicion. It was not the ending I had in mind.
More than anything, the day exposed a gap between being fit for the ride and being prepared for the conditions. I had trained for distance and climbing. I had not trained for five and a half hours of cold rain and wind with inadequate gear. Fitness mattered, but dry layers, insulation, and basic judgment mattered too. I was lucky I still had enough sense left to stop when I did, because from what I later learned, I was not far from losing the ability to make that decision at all.
That ride stuck with me for a long time. Not in some grand, mythic way. More in the way an unfinished argument sticks with you. I did not like that the ride had ended there. I did not like that weather, more than fitness, had decided the day. Mostly, I did not like the feeling that the route had gotten the last word.
So in 2023, I came back.
I would love to say this was driven by wisdom and maturity, but if I am being honest, a lot of it was probably stubbornness. I wanted another shot at the same ride, ideally under circumstances that did not involve my hands turning into wet props at the end of my arms.
This time I got the finish.
I rode 122 miles, climbed nearly 7,000 feet, and set a personal record for the longest distance I had ever done in one go. More importantly, I came back to the same route that had shut me down two years earlier and finished it. That was enough. I did not need a dramatic redemption moment. I just needed the day to end differently.
By 2025, it felt less like revisiting old business and more like showing up as a stronger rider. That is one of the things cycling gives back if you stay with it: you put in the miles, the long days, the bad weather, and the ordinary training weeks no one sees, and over time you get better at handling the variables. It was just a really good day on the bike with friends from the Coeur d’Alene Cycling Club, which is a much better use of the Fondo than nearly freezing to death.
That is probably what I appreciate most now. The 2021 ride became a story whether I wanted it to or not. The 2023 ride let me finish what I had started. The 2025 ride let the whole thing loosen its grip a little. At some point the Fondo stopped being the ride that nearly took me out and became just a ride again, which may be the best outcome of all.
Cycling does this sometimes. It gives you a day so bad it becomes a permanent reference point. If you are lucky, and stubborn, and slightly unreasonable, you get to come back later and rewrite the ending.
Preferably with better gloves.
