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BADGER!
When I woke up two hours later, everyone was gone.

Worse yet, my throat was sore, I had burn like blisters all over my tongue and mouth, and a cough producing something I’d never seen come out of my body before… little white gelatin projectiles. "FUCK! I’M SICK!," I thought. “I can’t be sick. This race is way too hard to do sick. What if I get sicker? Will I even be able to get myself out of here?”

A thousand feet of climbing up Tank Seven Creek to Sargents Mesa lay directly ahead. Sargents Mesa is a notoriously awful 20-mile-long moto-torn section of the Colorado Trail. It is riddled with loose rock, nasty climbs, and a dead forest that mocks your every misstep. Pack bikers typically must hike most of it. That can be very tedious and exhausting on a good day, and this did not feel like a good day.

I quickly determined it didn’t matter if I was sick or not. I needed to at least get myself to a road where someone could reach me if my condition got worse. The best way to do that was to continue forward over Sargents Mesa.

I downed some Vitamin-C and Zinc, packed up, and started pushing my bike up Tank Seven. It was chilly. My bike computer said 30 degrees. The lack of power in my legs matched the terrible feeling in my throat. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”

I passed through a herd of cattle around sunrise. Each gave me the same stony, “dead man walking,” look.

After 90-minutes, I finally made the mesa top and took out my trail guide. I’d been thinking the 20-miles of Sargents hell started at the base of the climb I’d just come up. I was hoping to get a little positive affirmation of progress made. Nope. The festering shit-hole started right where my feet were planted. “Bartender, please add another FUCK to my tab!”

I dropped into the first rocky descent and subsequent climb. Suddenly, I heard a noise behind me. It was Marco, the first racer I’d seen on course since Karin at Twin Lakes two days before. He seemed to have come straight out of the forest. I was glad to see him. His knee was hurting. I told him I was having a rough morning but didn’t get into the details. We talked about the coming weather and the need to hit Coney-Cataract early the next morning. He made a quip about leapfrogging. It hit my funny bone. Then he was gone… out-gimping me up the next hill.

Marco’s irreverent visit had slapped some life back into me. There was now direct evidence that I was not the only racer suffering out here, and his wise crack had given me something less defeatist to think about. Our short conversation occupied my mind for much of the next six-hours.

It got hot. I had a big break to drink and eat before the last two hike-a-bikes. I struggled mightily to get over them, but Sargents Mesa was finally behind me.

A zoomy descent dropped me into the Lujan Creek drainage where I was looking forward to a water resupply and cleaning up my rapidly worsening trench foot. When I got there, reality did not quite match the shady mountain oasis that had been growing in my mind. The creek was a light trickle running through a sun-blasted sage meadow with cattle wandering all over it.

I met some thru hikers at the stream who happened to have a keen interest in the CTR. We chatted for a bit. They were encouraging. It helped. I cleaned up my feet, dried out my socks, chugged a bunch of filtered cow-shit water, and climbed back on my bike feeling like burnt toast.

I still thought my race was over at this point. It was already early afternoon. My throat still hurt. My legs still sucked. Sargents had taken forever. I still had another 14-mile section of trail plus the 55-mile LaGarita Wilderness detour to get through to be in position for making a run at the high elevation Coney-Cataract section before certain death-by-lightning arrived tomorrow afternoon. I figured I’d need to reach the top of Slumgullion Pass by midnight to have any realistic chance of safely moving forward. That was clearly not going to happen at the pace I’d been moving.

Slowly, but surely, the worm began to turn. 

The next 14 miles of trail were smooth and fast – the quickest riding since the Upper Arkansas Valley. I knocked it out in rapid fashion and without a whole lot of effort. A revelation. 

Next up detour. The first 10-15 miles were slightly downhill. Barely pedaling got me to Dome Lakes in well under an hour.

After trading up(?) water at the lake outflow, I turned west onto Los Pinos Pass and found myself in a slight tailwind reevaluating my symptoms. They were all still present, but none were worse. The cough only happened when I stopped for a while and my pedaling power had rebounded a little way back.

I started to wonder if my scorched orifice might have come from breathing hard through my mouth-hole for 20-plus hours a day for the past 4 days... or if it was some kind of caustic effect from all the electrolytes and salty food I’d been cramming down my gullet. I didn't have any explanation for the white projectiles, but I hadn't seen more of those since waking up that morning.

All these ideas began adding up to the notion that maybe I wasn't sick, just burnt. I could deal with burnt. 

It was also beginning to seem likely I would reach the top of Slumgullion Pass by midnight after all. Recalculating… I determined my plan would be to camp at the top of the pass, wake up at 2am, and decide then, based on how I felt, whether I would turn left towards Spring Creek Pass (continuing with the race), or turn right, descending to Lake City and scratch.

Somehow, someway, I was still in a position to keep going - and I still wanted to - badly. I hadn’t failed, or quit, YET. My body had not shut down, and my mind hadn’t given up… but I’d burned so many matches. Were there any left?

And what about tomorrow? I was rationally terrified of all the unknowns the next day would hold. The prospect of getting caught out on a hyper-exposed 33-mile high alpine traverse, with a failing body, and severe weather on the way, is hard to ignore. The “Fuck-it, let’s go,” mantra clearly wasn’t going to help here… 

Then… BADGER!!!

It ran out of the willows into the road; for a moment lowering its head and squaring off with my handlebars; then turned 180 degrees and ran right down the center of the road for a good 100 yards before peeling off into the brush.

Now, you may need to know something about the Annabel family to understand what I'll say next about this encounter. I’ve long referred to my father as a, “crusty old badger.” I frequently call my young son a baby badger – “Badgy,” to be more precise. I’d never seen a badger in the wild before this encounter - but, just a week before the race, remarked to my loved ones how much I hoped to one day.

For me to meet a badger, at this pivotal moment - i’m still struggling to put the complexity of that feeling into words. 

It landed like lighting in a single soul-searing second - as if Earth and Time held me in the warmest of blankets for the briefest of moments. The message was primal and ancestral and instantly understood by every cell of my being.

“PERSIST.”

I cried the rest of the way up Los Pinos.

For the gift.

For my family.

For my fear.

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Matt Annabel

CTR: Day 4, Part 1 (Tank Seven Creek to Cathedral Ranch Cabins)

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Hike with the kids

Afternoon Mountain Bike Ride

Lunch Mountain Bike Ride

Afternoon Mountain Bike Ride

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