The Soloist
There’s no ‘I’ in team. There’s no ‘I’ in John Stamstad either…but try telling him that. As Australia prepares to host the 24-hour Solo Mountain Biking World Championships, Outer Edge spends 24 hours in Moab with MTB’s original loner – the man who put the solo into the sport. STORY: Pat Kinsella
When John Stamstad gets off and starts carrying his bike, I figure there’s no shame in dismounting my own steed. I’m riding, after all, with the archduke of endurance mountain biking.
Stamstad, already well known for his endurance cycling achievements on the road and off it, chiselled his face permanently onto the Mt Rushmore of mountain biking legend in 1996, when he famously signed himself up for the 24 Hours of Canaan MTB race using four variations of his own name.
Prior to that, event organiser and creator of the modern form of 24-hour circuit-based mountain biking racing, Laird Knight, would only allow team entries. But, with a scribble of a pen and by forking out for four entry fees, team Stamstad (John Stamstad, John Robert Stamstad, J. Robert Stamstad and J.R. Stamstad) began an entirely new tradition – 24-hour solo MTB racing – which quickly morphed into a category of its own.
Having set the wheel rolling, Stamstad remained undefeated in the solo class at the 24 Hours of Canaan (and later the 24 Hours of Snowshoe) until he retired in 2001.
WE’RE IN MOAB, Utah, a slickrock-paved desert playground made for fast, fat tyre– propelled fun. The terrain is unique and the location is iconic for mountain bikers the world over. Partly this is due to the slickrock itself, which gifts knobbly wheels uncanny traction and allows riders to roll over the most unlikely gradients without going arse over handlebars (much), and partly it’s due to the 24 Hours of Moab – another of Laird Knight’s creations and probably the most famous 24-hour race on the endurance mountain biker’s calendar. Bar one.
In 2010, the 24 Hours of Moab will be taking place on 9–10 October. This year, however, a few of the more famous faces from the 24-hour game will be missing in action, because that same weekend the pinnacle event of endurance mountain biking, the World Solo 24-hour Mountain Bike Championships, will kick off in the opposite hemisphere. Right in our backyard, in fact, in Canberra.
This will be the first time in the event’s 12-year history that 24 Hours of Adrenalin’s World Solo 24 Hour Championships will take place outside of North America. And Australian riders have earned it, with bells on, having produced three of the last four World Champions: Craig Gordon (2006), James ‘Willo’ Williamson (2008) and current king Jason English (2009).
As we roll over the red rock and I desperately try to hang on to John’s rear wheel, my mind spins off and I imagine how much this experience would have meant to Willo, who tragically passed away earlier this year.
I know he would have filled the desert hills with wild whoops of glee while riding with the founding father of the pursuit he became a world beater at, and I picture how his famous grin would have been as wide as these canyons as the event that he won in 2008 rolled into his old hometown, and his pedalling peers set off around a trail he knew so well. These World Champs will be laden with poignancy for Australian mountain biking, and Willo’s presence will be strong.
But the whole thing began with this man, who has just slung his dual-suspension Jamis Dakar XC bike across his shoulders and is now picking his way through the rubble. We’re at Nose Dive, a sudden drop-off on the 24 Hours of Moab circuit where even the slickrock won’t keep riders rubberside down and bits of broken bicycles often lay scattered in the sand at the bottom of the ravine – the bleached bones of the foolish few who tried staying in the saddle to ride the dive, or who reached this section during a dozy night-time lap, lost concentration and forgot where they were.
“I used to be able to pick a line and ride this,” reflects John ruefully. “But the Jeeps have destroyed it now. You can’t ride out of it anyway, so there’s no point killing yourself on the descent.”
Personally, I’m savouring the brief respite. Keeping up with a legend of endurance around a technical track that he has ridden thousands of times is a painful privilege.
JOHN STAMSTAD IS RECOVERING from a bout of pneumonia and he reckons he hasn’t been on a mountain bike for a whole year prior to our pilgrimage to Moab. Neither of these factors seemed to cause him the slightest pause for thought when I suggested we make the trip to the gnarly Nirvana in the desert.
“I haven’t ridden for a while,” he said in an email. “You’ll have to go easy on me.”
Yeah, right. At 47 years of age, Stamstad – a Mountain Bike Hall of Fame inductee, prominent ambassador for outdoor company Patagonia and now an ultra-respected endurance trail runner – looks like he could do this all day. And all night. And most of the next day. Which, of course, he could. Easily.
The last time he was here, Stamstad ran around Moab’s 103-mile (160km) White Rim Trail, non-stop and unsupported. Water is so scarce in the arid Canyonlands National Park that he had to carry it all with him. Undeterred he hot-rodded his child’s pushchair, replacing the wheels with big fat mountain bike wheels, loaded it up with 50lb (22kg) of sloshing H2O and pushed it around for the 27-hour trail run. It was June, in the midst of the desert’s snarling summer, and, just like today, temperatures were way over 100º Fahrenheit (38ºC).
When he last rode the iconic 24 Hours of Moab race, he did it on a singlespeed bike. Just in case that wasn’t hard enough, he raced entirely unsupported. No mechanic, no one to organise his food and no one to cheer him through those long lonely loops in the wee hours of the night when every remaining minute drags its heels through the dirt and the cold darkness stares lonely riders in the face like an unblinking void.
So the question has to be asked. What exactly is wrong with this bloke?
“I GOT CALLED A FREAK when I started,” he admits. “People wouldn’t return my calls. Everyone thought what I was doing was just stupid. Riding your mountain bike for 24 hours straight is a hard thing to sell to sponsors.”
You’d think it would be a hard thing to sell to riders too, but the sport has proven surprisingly popular. Stamstad, naturally, can see why.
“Anyone can finish a 20-mile race. They might come 100th out of 1000 riders, or they might come 800th, but they’ll finish. And yeah you can race against friends and try and improve your time in next year’s race – but that’s not super motivating for some people. Being able to tell your friends and co-workers that you rode your mountain bike for 24 hours non-stop – now that is a massive achievement. Doesn’t matter if you finish first or last.
“When you’re riding for that length of time, everyone wants to quit at some point. It’s the feeling you get when you’ve pushed through, when you’ve overcome the voices in your head…that’s what makes riding solo for 24 hours amazing.
“And sleep deprivation is the best drug I’ve ever found. Endurance riding has given me a glimpse of myself as a person that I never would have had any other way.”
But back in 1996, no one – besides John Stamstad – thought solo 24-hour mountain bike racing would catch on, not even the man with the grand 24-hour plan: Laird Knight.
“When I finally sat down to write the rules to define the new format, the team relay idea had been brewing for about three years,” says Laird. “I knew how much camaraderie there was in the sport and I knew that the night riding aspect would spark the imaginations of mountain bikers, everywhere. To me, 24-hour team relay racing embodies the essential hallmarks of the sport: camaraderie, sportsmanship and fun.
“I really wanted the focus to be on team. There were so many events that catered to ultra-endurance athletes. John Stamstad raced on pro-class teams at Canaan in ’93, ’94, and ’95 but his persistent and congenial pestering during the off-seasons and the receipt of his now famous ‘team’ entry in the spring of ’96 finally broke me.
“Watching John Stamstad climb down off the podium at the 24 Hours of Canaan in 1996 is one of the greatest ‘movie moments’ of my career. He had bested half the field of 360 teams as the first 24-hour soloist. He did it with no support, mechanical or otherwise. There was a standing ovation. Everyone had tears in their eyes. What a champion Stamstad is, in every sense of the word.”
HE’S COMMONLY REGARDED AS THE GODFATHER of modern day solo off-road 24-hour endurance riding, after pushing the agenda at Canaan, but being labelled as a pedalling pioneer is obviously something that Stamstad mentally fidgets with.
“The evolution in the sport was inevitable,” he says. “A lot of guys were heading in that direction. There were already races like Montezuma’s Revenge. I guess what I did at Canaan was just the tipping point. After that it became popular.
“Riding a bike for 24 hours straight isn’t hard – I’d been doing that for years on a road bike, and so had many others. Riding a bike for 24 hours straight on an off-road circuit that hasn’t been designed for it – now that is super hard. With most endurance events you can simply zone out. Riding a technical 24-hour mountain bike course, you can’t relax for a second. It’s mentally exhausting as well as physically tough. It’s hard just trying to eat on a course like that.
“When I first started, some guys would get off their bikes, sit down and have lunch by the side of the trail. Or have a sleep. I always tried to go as hard as possible for the entire time.”
This I do not doubt. Not coming from a man who once stated that his career goal was to: “Do the hardest races in the world and try to find the one that breaks me.”
THERE’S A HINT OF KURT COBAIN about John Stamstad, with his scarecrow blonde hair, the cornfield stubble that sticks out from his chin and his slight physique that hides a primed powder keg of pent-up energy waiting to explode.
The comparison could be extended beyond looks too; he gravitates towards events that are utterly brutal on the body and then he stretches the parameters to make them even more punishing. It seems as though he has made a career out of trying to destroy himself.
Once, during the 24 Hours of Canaan in the mid 90s, he crashed on the first lap and then continued to race for 23 hours with a compressed vertebrae. “I was competing with Floyd [Landis] that year though, so it wasn’t like I was racing solo,” he hastens to qualify, as if that makes it any saner. Other injuries have included broken collarbones and a separated shoulder at mile 15 of a100-mile mountain bike race, which he went on to win.
Stamstad isn’t your everyday masochist though. He has a good understanding of the science of endurance, and he knows how to manage his body when it’s working hard in extreme conditions. But then again, his might not be your everyday body.
Steve Bailey, an exercise physiologist from the University of South Carolina who conducted tests on Stamstad while he was riding the Iditabike – a savage 210-mile mountain bike event, labelled the hardest MTB race in the world, held during the Alaskan winter – told American Outside magazine in 1996 that: “Either John doesn’t experience pain like other people do, or he’s better able to deal with it…My guess is that it’s probably a little bit of both – part training effect and part genetics.”
Stamstad simply takes the opinion that you need to do things correctly. “I think that when he was resistant to individual entries in his 24-hour events, Laird [Knight] had images in his head of people like Julie Moss crawling across the finishline of the Ironman, in a complete mess. That stuff only happens when you do something wrong.”
Now a seasoned specialist in lightweight, unsupported expeditions and events, Stamstad is borderline obsessed with nutrition. During our 24 hours in Moab, he gives me some samples of a new drink supplement he’s thinking about taking on. “It was developed by NASA,” he explains. “Not by a company trying to make money out of it, which makes me trust it a bit more. I spend hours researching this stuff. Let me know what you think.”
I think that it tastes super salty, and it doesn’t help me keep up with the man I’m interviewing. Then again, I’d need a Kryptonite supplement to help me with that.
WE ROLL INTO MOAB AT HIGH NOON, with the sun blazing and the angry red cliffs glaring and daring us out. In Poison Spider Bicycles, everyone stops and stares as John walks in behind me. They all know his name and they all want to say hello.
While the shop sorts me out with a set of wheels, we seek respite from the heat and hunt down some sustenance in the local diner. The all-day ‘Mountain Biker’s Breakfast’ leaps out from the menu. I figure I’m going to need all the carbs I can shovel into myself.
Moab is a true MTB Mecca. World-famous trails creep out into the desert from the town centre hub like the spidery limbs of a giant arachnid. Billy, who sets up my bike – a Mach 429 Pivot with 29” wheels thank you very much – is disappointed to hear that we plan to ride the 24-hour race circuit, the Behind the Rocks Trail. He’s only ridden it once in 11 years and reckons it’s a sandy sufferfest, and he tries to point us towards Moab’s famed Slickrock Trail.
He’s missing the point, though. I’m not here to ride an eye candy tourist trail that’s painted onto the flanks of the rock, I’m here to experience the Moab that Stamstad and the other veterans of the 24-hour racing circuit know – the trail that is seared into the sinews of countless endurance riders’ brains and ingrained into the fabric of the sport.
First though, John introduces me to my first taste of slickrock with a spin around Amasa Back Trailhead. We climb around 1000 feet over kayenta sandstone to a mesa top with a retina-popping view out over the Colorado River and the Kane Creek Anticline.
It’s late July and the rock shimmers as we donate sweaty beads of moisture to the dry desert floor. On the way back from our afternoon ride, as fork lightening crackles on the horizon, John’s survival instinct kicks in and he fills a bottle with stagnant water from a puddle and adds some iodine that he magically produces from his backpack.
“We probably won’t need it,” he says in response to my unasked question. “But out here you never leave yourself low. One of us could break a leg, or we might get back and find the car has been stolen.”
His knowledge is hard-earned and his precautions are justified. Earlier John told me how he had first started wearing a helmet on every ride after being battered over the head by a rock-wielding bike thief in LA, who’d left him for dead on the trail, with a fractured skull and no wheels to get home. Man, mountain biking in America is rough. That wouldn’t happen in Australia, surely…
OVER A BEER, John recounts the bizarre story of his one and only trip Downunder, where he was mugged in a much weirder way.
He competed in the inaugural Race Across Australia in 1992, an event that was supposed to take place annually, but which was never run again. For the first half of the race he’d led the field, but when they got to Alice Springs he was booted off the tour after a bust up with the race director, Hans Tholstrup.
Tholstrup has a reputation for being something of an energetic eccentric. A few years after Evel Knievel attempted to jump 13 London buses on a motorbike in Wembley Stadium, Tholstrup went out and got a double-decker bus and jumped over 14 motorbikes in the Sydney Showground, with adventurous entrepreneur Dick Smith acting as the conductor in the back.
“‘Defamation of the race director’s character’ is what I was accused of,” grins John, swigging a bottle of Full Suspension Ale. “I got him to write it down for me. We were literally dumped in the middle of the desert, our bags were thrown off the bus and we were left stranded.
“All the other riders, bar two – complete opportunists – quit the race in protest at my treatment. You can’t kick the leader out of a race. But we weren’t ready to give up either. I rang my boss at Bridgestone and asked for some money to get a car – because you can’t carry on riding across Australia unsupported. He said, ‘John, just get me a good story.’ So we sorted out a support vehicle and carried on. We’d lost two full days by this stage, but we rode into Byron Bay just behind the two guys who had carried on racing.”
“DON’T MAKE ME MAD…” You wouldn’t like John Stamstad when he’s mad. He’s liable to do all kinds of crazy things. But more than likely, whatever he does will involve putting himself through a whole world of hurt to prove a point, win a race, set a record, or simply, it seems, to keep himself busy.
The subject of his ire in this instance is a woman who once had the audacity to claim she’d almost beaten one of his records – the most miles ridden off-road in a 24 hour period.
“I already held the record, which was set on a reasonably challenging, proper mountain bike course,” he explains. “And then this woman in Maine [Amy Regan] found a really easy course that still met the criteria: 20,000 feet of climbing, unsealed surface and so on. She basically claimed she could have beaten my distance, but someone told her the wrong information and she stopped too early. That really pissed me off, so I went and rode the course she’d found and smashed her distance by over 100 miles.
“Afterwards I proposed that both her distance and my new one be wiped from the slate and the old distance should remain as the record, because I didn’t think the new circuit was in the proper spirit of mountain biking. But my new World Record [354.5 miles / 567km] still stands.”
Stamstad is singleminded in his pursuit of purity in endurance pursuits – this is the foundation stone for his obsession with doing things solo and without assistance. “It’s a Zen thing I guess,” he shrugs.
When other athletes don’t apply the same strict principles of proper conduct, he gets mad. Particularly if those people make a lot of noise in the process, like ultrarunner / publicity machine Dean Karnazes.
“I know Dean, and he’s a nice enough guy, but his public image is complete bullshit,” John tells me. “Self-promotion is fine, but don’t make stuff up. World’s longest run? No it’s not. A five-minute Google search will tell you that. What about Yiannis Kouros? [A Melbourne-based ultra runner who holds every record from 200km to 1600km, and from one day to 10 days] “And saying he’s the first person to run to the North Pole in regular trail running shoes – what the hell is that?
“It annoys me that he shows no respect for people who have set real records and achieved really momentous things. Doing firsts is a two-sided thing. It can be great, but some people set ridiculous goals just for the sake of it – they do things that no one has done before, and the reason no one has done them before is because there’s absolutely no point in doing them. Dean Karnazes is a classic example of that.”
Some people, of course, might think that running 103 miles in a desert pushing a child’s chair full of water would fall into that category, but Stamstad is cut from an entirely different cloth. “All my adventures begin with a simple desire to explore,” he tells me with conviction.
Compared to the cacophony that surrounds Karnazes, Stamstad’s PR machine runs on mute – and yet his achievements on two wheels and on two feet are arguably far more impressive than his noisy compatriot’s. Indeed, he beat Karnazes in the very first 100-mile running race they both competed in, the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc.
And, despite his visceral reaction to Amy Regan’s attempt to pinch his off-road distance cycling record and his bloody-minded response to getting kicked off the Race Across Australia – he doesn’t appear to be motivated by a desire to be seen as a winner at all costs. Quite the opposite – he just wants things to be done properly and with respect.
“I’ve never actually won at the 24 hours of Moab,” he reflects as we ride the circuit. “The last time I raced, on the singlespeed, I came second by a margin of about six minutes. Didn’t get the victory, but I was the happiest I’ve ever been with my own performance and the way the ride went.”
He also once shared a Montezuma’s Revenge victory with a guy who had ridden a shorter distance than him, but whose shortcut appeared to be within the race rules, albeit marginally.
AS I PICK MYSELF UP FROM THE DUST and assess the damage to my body, my pride and my camera, John explains what I did wrong: “You went about two feet too far to the left. I always just try and stay close to that shrub.”
His intimate knowledge of every inch of the Behind the Rocks Trail is at once startling and completely understandable. Stamstad has ridden this circuit so many times he could do it blindfolded. Actually, I’m half surprised that he hasn’t given it a crack.
“You couldn’t ask for a better guide to the 24 Hours of Moab race course,” Laird Knight told me when I’d contacted him and explained my plan. He was right too, although a little forewarning about that shrub would have saved me a trip over the handlebars.
After we negotiate another series of technical drops, during which I even manage to stay upright, my über guide reflects some more about his experiences on this circuit. He points out a section of the track at the bottom of a steep gully, where he once passed the race leader, “concussed and laying on the floor. He’d taken the wrong line – a bit like you did. I did make sure he was OK before I rode off of course.”
As we round Prostitute Butte – “from the air it looks like a woman with her legs spread” – and roll over a beautiful section of slickrock towards the end of the race circuit, he talks about future challenges.
There appears to have been a mellowing in the soloist’s tune in recent years. Where once he seemed simply to be in perpetual race against himself, running and riding obsessively in search of a challenge that could beat him, now he seems to place as much importance on the terrain that he’s passing through as he does on the hurdles that he places in his own path.
“Increasingly I want to run through wilderness areas to highlight the area itself, instead of the actual trail run. For the focus to be on what we have and what we stand to lose if we don’t look after it.”
It’s a philosophy Patagonia would be proud to hear espoused by one of their ambassadors, but it seems heartfelt and has clearly been long pondered upon during those many long lonely hours of solo activity.
“YOU SHOULD HAVE TO BE ALONE WITH YOUR THOUGHTS,” Stamstad once railed, arguing that headphones should be banned in long-distance races – so it’s no surprise that he takes a dim view of the use of newfangled gadgets in solo adventure pursuits.
“Technology has ruined things to an extent – SPOT devices and Satellite phones…There’s a massive difference in your decision-making process when you’re genuinely on your own, compared to when you can hit the emergency button.
“In the Idita events I did in Alaska, I was usually out at the front and I might go two days without seeing anyone. In those conditions you have total responsibility for yourself. If you’re about to cross open water and it’s -20°C, and every decision you make could mean the difference between staying alive and dying…you think very carefully about what you’re doing. It’s a very rewarding experience – one that most humans don’t get to taste in the modern world.”
Even now, when he’s not out riding or running on trails, Stamstad puts in countless solo stints behind the wheel of the beaten up Honda van that we drove to Moab in. He travels around the US as an independent salesman, representing brands of adventure gear that he personally uses and endorses, such as Innov8, and the Australian company Skins. “Driving is like riding laps,” he tells me. “You just go into a zone.”
As you’d expect from a man who has made a career out of spending huge periods of time with himself while pushing his body to its limits, Stamstad is a man who seems completely comfortable alone in the zone. But I’m interested – did he ever find that race he was looking for, the one that was capable of breaking him?
“The race that breaks you is the one you are not prepared for mentally,” he says. “Courses just exist, they aren’t hard or easy. Suffering is all relative, which is a fascinating concept once you really learn it. But it takes a lot of suffering to learn that you actually don’t have to suffer if you have the right attitude.”
So that’s a ‘no’ then. Or perhaps he’s just not done yet.
“Well, the kids have got to a certain age now,” he tells me on the ride back to Salt Lake City. “I’ve been thinking about making a comeback to riding…”
LONE STAR
Besides his career in solo, unsupported, 24-hour mountain bike riding, and his 103-mile pushchair megamarathon around Moab’s White Rim Circuit, John Stamstad’s long lonely endurance feats have included running the 215-mile (344km) length of the John Muir track, non-stop and unsupported; competing in several ultra lditarod events (cycling, trail running and skiing across varying distances – up to 1600km – of the Arctic tundra in Alaska); pioneering the pursuit of Great Divide racing across America (4000km / 61,000 metres of climbing / 18 days and 5 hours), taking part in the 1996 Eco Challenge adventure race in British Columbia; and cycling the width of our own continent in the first – and last – Race Across Australia. He also holds the World Record for distance cycled off-road in a 24 hour period: 354.5 miles (567km).
GOING THE (FIRST) FULL MONTE
Arguably the first ever 24-hour solo mountain bike race to be held regularly was Montezuma’s Revenge, which began in 1986 and ran annually until 2006. John Stamstad won the revenge twice, but says the event was very different to competitive, circuit-based 24-hour MTB racing that Laird Knight launched in 1993. With many sections that were unrideable (including a mountain climb), the Revenge took place around a series of different loops and unmarked trails – the winner was the person who had ridden the furthest after 24 hours. Proud of being voted the ‘world’s worst race’, it was also known as the race no one ever finished.
HUNT FOR MOABY SLICK
Readers and riders keen on checking out what Moab has to offer the intrepid mountain biker, should check out discovermoab.com.
Before you hit the trails, be sure to call into Poison Spider Bicycles – poisonspiderbicycles.com – who will kit you out with everything from the perfect steed for your intended ride through to maps and expert advice about the local tracks and trails. When you’re there, say hi to Billy for me, and tell him to stop being a softcock and to get back out on Behind the Rocks.
