He biked across Minnesota. In one day.
An ambitious athletic goal set pre-COVID kept him sane through quarantine.
dis·trac·tion
/dəˈstrakSH(ə)n/
noun
a thing that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else.
Is that what we need to get through this?
Or, do we need a goal? A project? A plan?
Something concrete? Something tangible?
Control.
Ed Kohler needed a race, two wheels and an empty road.
What do you need?
— Erin
Name: Ed Kohler
Hometown: St. Paul, Minnesota
Current Residence: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Living Situation: House with wife, Carly, and two kids, ages 5 and 8
Age: 46
Occupation: Retailer on Amazon
Photo caption: Here I am competing in the 24 hour bike race across the state of Minnesota.
Let me get this straight. You biked across Minnesota in one day over gravel roads. 242 miles starting at midnight. Is that right?
The race is called “The Day Across Minnesota.” It’s a local race organized by some gravel bike enthusiasts here in Minnesota. It starts in Gary, South Dakota, which is just across the Minnesota border, then you bike on the windswept prairies. It starts at midnight, and you have all day to finish. I finished just before 6pm, so I was out there for 17 hours and 48 minutes. It's a long day! It’s a long enough race that I needed to train for it, so it kept me motivated to log some serious miles over the past months. Something like 400 people signed up for this race last fall, but only about half made it to the starting line.
Like a lot of places around the country, gravel bike riding has become kind of a thing here. I think it’s popular with people like myself who are not really interested in formal road racing because that just seems really fast and dangerous. The nice thing about gravel is that things get spread out really quickly, you’re not riding in huge packs in a dangerous situation, and it's more about persistence than speed.
How did the race feel and what was it like to see your home state in this way?
It’s quite a test. The western part of Minnesota is quite flat and windswept and just corn as far as you can see. So the first six hours was just me alone through cornfields in the dark. It was really cool watching a sliver of a moon come up over the horizon, and then after about six hours the sun finally starts to come up. That's probably the darkest emotional part of the race, that wait for that sun to come up. It's really a beautiful way to cross the state. The Minnesota River goes through western Minnesota, and you descend into the Minnesota River Valley early in the race, then have to climb back in and out of it a couple of times, so you really get a sense of where you are on the land.
I also got a totally different view of the state. Because it was on gravel, the route runs parallel to primary roads across the state on roads that are more like service roads to farms. The only time we went through towns was when we had to cross a bridge, so I really got a sense of what farm country is like. One thing that was surprising to me out there is that I was expecting that I would see a lot of animals over 240 miles of biking, but actually there were basically no animals because it’s all just corn. I didn't see a single deer. I didn't see a single turtle or frog. And some of the water I’d see, like these drainage ditches next to farms, none of it is potable at all. It's not a romantic version of farming.
I didn't see a single sign that wasn't a Trump sign along the road. Minnesota is very divided; the urban areas are very blue, and outside of urban areas it changes to red pretty quickly. Sometimes I think people who are in rural areas forget that the land doesn't vote. When you look at a distribution of red versus blue votes on the map, the state looks predominantly red, but where more people actually are tends to be a lot more blue.
Has riding your bike meant something different to you during the pandemic?
I think having this significant goal definitely helped me to get through the early phase of quarantine because it involved a ton of thinking to get prepared for it. There are so many little things about biking that normally wouldn’t matter that become important when you’re planning to ride for 240 miles straight. Like choosing the exact right tire with the exact right pressure, and what to eat at drink. Looking into all of these different things helped me keep my mind active.
Another thing that came out of this that was pretty valuable to me was just figuring out where to ride for training rides from my house. I use Strava, which is a really popular app for tracking biking and running and stuff like that. You have it on your bike computer or phone, and it uses GPS to monitor all your rides. One of the features is called the Explore feature, and basically the app will build new routes for you based on distance and type of ride you want, like hilly or flat, pavement or dirt roads. I could create a new unique route in just a couple of clicks, so I was able to keep things fresh and discover new things around town while logging miles through nearby suburbs and exurbs. For example, I found a really cool beach that wasn't very far away, one that wasn't busy compared to the ones in Minneapolis, that I could take my kids to, and that was awesome. There are certain athletes who will do the exact same run or the exact same bike route every single day, but I need variety.
I also discovered that there are a lot more earth-toned, three-car garage, suburban houses to the south of Minneapolis than I realized were there.
Have you felt at all trapped during this quarantine?
Yeah, I think my normal routine pre-quarantine would be to bike with my kids to their school, and then I would stop at a local coffee shop to get some work done on my computer. I just like to work around other people. I normally learn a lot about what’s happening in my neighborhood just from overhearing conversations between neighbors. You kind of glean things about what's going on by just being around other people, bumping into other friends, and from those kinds of just serendipitous conversations. That's something that I definitely miss, being able to have that part of my day.
We tried a few Zoom happy hours early in this and eventually just gave up on that; it felt exhausting. I have had better luck with phone calls than Zoom conversations with people. And the same thing happened with my daughters too, where they had some kids from their daycare that they would meet up with over Zoom, but eventually they decided they didn’t want to see their friends through a screen.
You have an eight year-old and almost six year-old. Was your training impacted by your kids being home all of the time?
If they were at school it would definitely be easier for me to get out for long rides during the day, but my wife and I have been shifting our schedules to make things work. We do a lot of adventures on our dummy bike, so we’ll bike to parks, donut shops, the beach, those kinds of things. I have noticed that if I try to do a weight workout in the house, like with kettlebells or something, and they are in the room with me it zaps all of my concentration.
Photo caption: Riding the “Big Dummy” bike with my daughters.
What do you want to take to the other side of this?
I think we learned that we could deal with a lot of adversity, and that we are very adaptable. We try to reinforce to our kids over and over again that they're dealing with a lot of stuff that's not normal right now. We tell them that they’re doing a great job getting through it, and it’s going to be a lot better and a lot easier soon. Hopefully, we can get there.