The Argonaut Midsummer Challenge
An Epic in Two Wheels
Act I: The Reckoning
Thursday. Noon. The Oracle Speaks.
The screen glows with betrayal. McKenzie Pass: 36 degrees. Sleet. The mountains have turned their backs on us, ancient and indifferent, wearing winter's crown in the heart of summer's reign.
"Hey, so it's looking more like Midwinter out there. What do you think we should do?"
Ryan's voice carries the weight of every rider who has ever stared at a weather forecast and felt the universe laugh. The phone screen reflects in his eyes—numbers and icons that spell doom for our planned pilgrimage over the pass.
"We listen to the mountains," I say, surprised by my own certainty. "They don't want us up there, so we'll adjust and head to Smith Rock instead."
There's wisdom in surrender. Sometimes the ride chooses you.
Friday Night. The Vigil.
Sleep comes in fragments. Dreams of wheels turning, of endless ribbon roads unfurling like prayers. The RM3 waits in the garage, holding tomorrow's promise in its carbon fiber frame. I wake at 3 AM, then 4, then 5. The body knows. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget: that we are about to ask everything of ourselves.
Saturday. Dawn. The Solstice Calls.
"I guess the weather forecast still scared most folks off."
"Yeah, must be. Well. You ready?"
"Psyched. Let's do it."
The words hang in the pre-dawn air like incantations. We are two, where there should have been eight, ten, twelve. But perhaps this is how it was always meant to be. The true believers. The ones who show up when the mountains say no and the forecast promises suffering.
7:33 AM. Thirty-seven degrees. The longest day of the year begins.
Act II: The Departure
The Argonaut Midsummer Challenge rolls out of HQ not with fanfare, but with the quiet certainty of pilgrims beginning a sacred journey. Two riders. Two hundred kilometers. One impossible day stretching before us like a question mark drawn in asphalt and gravel.
The RM3 beneath me feels alive, awakening to the rhythm of my pedal strokes. Every revolution speaks a language older than words—singing carbon, rubber gripping earth, the eternal conversation between rider and machine. Ryan's Schwalbe Pro Ones whisper their own poetry to the pavement while my Panaracer Gravelkings hum with anticipation for the dirt to come.
Past Shevlin Park we roll, through the classic Bend exodus route that every cyclist knows by heart. The familiar becomes sacred when you're moving fast enough, far enough, deep enough into the ritual of distance. Sisemore Road appears like a doorway—thirty minutes in, and we're already crossing the threshold from pavement to gravel, from civilization to something wilder.
"Holy smokes, I thought we were out for a huge endurance ride. We're cruising along north of 20mph average! Oh well, the legs are there for now, we'll see how long this lasts."
The speedometer doesn't lie, but the body does. We feel invincible in these early miles, blessed by the particular madness that makes ordinary humans think they can ride 200 kilometers in a day. The legs are liquid fire, the lungs are bellows, the heart is a war drum beating time to our wheels' revolution.
Act III: The Rhythm
Tumalo Dam. The Gravel Speaks.
The mail truck driver waves as we pass—a local recognition, a nod to the mad efficiency of these back roads. We're faster than government-sanctioned transportation, powered by nothing but determination and the sublime engineering of these machines beneath us. The gravel crunches its applause, a percussion section keeping time to our accelerating symphony.
Then—left turn, sharp and sudden—and we're transported. This isn't Central Oregon anymore. This is the Hell of Heberline, that notorious bastard child of loose rock and punishment from the Gorge Gravel race. The conversation dies. Language becomes inadequate. We speak now only in grunts and the grinding of teeth, the universal dialect of cyclists pushing beyond their comfort zone.
The rocks rise up like teeth. The surface shifts and slides, testing every micro-movement, every decision about line choice and weight distribution. My Gravelkings search for purchase, finding traction in the spaces between certainty and disaster. This is why we underbike it—not from laziness, but from faith. Faith in the machine, faith in the tires, faith in our ability to dance with terrain that wants to throw us to the ground.
Mile 30. The Invitation.
"Over here is the best coffee in Central Oregon, wanna stop?"
The café sits like a mirage, promising warmth and caffeine salvation. But we're in the flow now, caught in the current of something larger than comfort, deeper than convenience.
"Nah, let's keep rolling. Next stop, the gateway to Smith Rock, Terrebonne!"
Act IV: The Trance
Left. Right.
The mantra begins innocently enough, but like all mantras, it grows into something beyond its simple words. Left pedal down, right pedal down. The rhythm of existence reduced to its purest form. No past, no future, only the eternal present of the next pedal stroke.
Look over shoulder for traffic.
The world beyond our immediate sphere fades to background noise. We are the foreground now, the main characters in a story being written in tire tracks and sweat stains. The hawk appears like a messenger—"Hawk!" "Whoa!"—reminding us that we're not alone in this landscape, that we're part of something larger, wilder, more ancient than our small human ambitions.
Bottle, water. Gel. More water.
Fuel is prayer. Hydration is communion. Every calorie consumed is an offering to the altar of endurance. The body is a temple, but today it's also a machine, and machines need constant feeding to maintain their impossible output.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
And deeper into the rhythm of the bike we fall. A trance-like experience over distances as large as this. The RM3 becomes an extension of thought, a carbon fiber meditation on the nature of movement through space. Every corner carved with precision, every pedal stroke transferring directly into forward momentum, as if the laws of physics have been rewritten in our favor.
The route weaves north like a snake, stairstepping across the map with the cunning of long-distance route planners who know that the best roads hide from highways, that the sweetest miles are earned through navigation as much as pedaling. We're not just riding anymore—we're celebrating. This is solstice worship, pagan and pure, conducted at twenty miles per hour across the high desert of Central Oregon.
Act V: The Revelation
Mile 70. The Checkpoint.
Seventy miles down. Twenty mile per hour average. Two bottles. Three and a half hours.
The numbers don't capture the magic, but they hint at it. We're defying something—physics, common sense, the reasonable expectations of middle-aged men on bicycles. At the "Not Your Average Market" Oliver Lemon's in Terrebonne, I become suddenly aware of how we must look to the outside world.
"Is there a key?"
"Huh?"
"For the bathroom."
The cashier sizes me up—salt crystals already forming on my jersey, lycra tight in a place where anything slimmer than boot-cut jeans draws suspicious glances. I'm a visitor from another planet, the planet of people who think 200 kilometers is a reasonable Saturday activity.
"Oh yeah, here ya go."
"Thanks!"
The Machine Awakens
Hydrated, fed, rejuvenated, we roll back into the rhythm. But something has changed. The RM3 has awakened to its full potential, and I'm beginning to understand what the engineers meant when they spoke of harmony between rider and machine.
It's been present with us the entire day, this indescribable quality of the ride. The way it tracks the apex of corners like it's reading my mind, how every pedal stroke doesn't just intensify the effort but actually, directly, impossibly makes the bike go faster. When the road dips slightly downhill or even just flattens out, it's like we've unlocked the answer to the free energy problem.
The crank returns for the next push with less effort every revolution. Left. Right. The more miles we cover, the more the bike gives back to us. It's encouraging us to go further, explore deeper, ride without limitations. This is the covenant between rider and machine, mutual transformation through shared suffering and shared joy.
Act VI: The Transformation
When you remove all the barriers, when it's just you and the ride, just you and the miles, something truly transformative happens.
You simply are.
No more emails. No more project deadlines. No more dishes to do. No more worries about mortgage payments or career advancement or whether you remembered to lock the front door. You become a part of the landscape you're traversing, a moving piece of the high desert ecosystem, as natural and necessary as the hawks circling overhead or the sagebrush holding the soil together with its ancient roots.
You reach a deeper aspect of reality, somewhere you can only access on two wheels. Somewhere that exists in the space between pedal strokes, in the silence between heartbeats, in the moment when effort becomes effortless and the bike beneath you transforms from machine to wings.
Somewhere inside you, something stirs. Awakened by the sublime ride of the RM3, something that has been sleeping for too long snaps its eyes open and proclaims with absolute certainty: "This is the way."
But you already knew that.
Left. Right.
All you have to do is remember.
Act VII: The Trial
Mile 100. The Gods Laugh.
"I don't know if I should put my jacket on."
The words come out as the skies turn on us, revealing the cruel humor of weather forecasters who are occasionally, devastatingly correct. The morning's sunshine has been a lie, a beautiful deception that made the mid-40s feel like spring. Now the clouds return, and they bring friends.
A headwind possessed by some vindictive deity descends upon us, combined with a chilling rain that promises to ruin our day if we don't show it proper respect. We've crossed the 100-mile mark with our average pace still north of 20mph—a small miracle that's about to be tested by the full fury of Oregon weather.
"Jacket on it is."
The legs are tired now. Not the fresh tiredness of early miles, but the deep, bone-level fatigue that comes from asking your body to perform at its limits for hours on end. But we're committed to the Challenge now, bound by invisible chains forged from pride and stubbornness and the peculiar masochism that makes people sign up for 200-kilometer rides in the first place.
The Final Rhythm
Left. Right.
The mantra returns, but it's different now. Harder-earned. Each repetition is a small victory against the wind, against the cold, against the voice in your head that suggests maybe, just maybe, this wasn't such a good idea after all.
Gel? No, trash.
The body's demands become simpler, more urgent. Fuel or suffer. Hydrate or fade. The choices are binary now, stripped of complexity by the brutal mathematics of endurance.
Bottle. Cupcake (a delicacy saved from our earlier stop).
The cupcake is a small miracle, a burst of sugar and joy that reminds us why we love this suffering. It's celebration and fuel combined, a perfect metaphor for the entire enterprise of long-distance cycling.
Left. Right. Water, almost out. Left. Gel. Right. Left. Right.
In the drops now, aerodynamics becoming crucial as the wind tries to push us backward through time and space. The body position speaks fluency in the language of speed—head down, elbows bent, every angle optimized for cutting through the resistance.
Left. Settle in. Right. Nearly there. Left.
Act VIII: The Return
After six and a half hours of moving time—six and a half hours of existing in the liminal space between human and machine, between effort and transcendence, between the ordinary world and the secret universe that opens up only to those willing to pedal far enough into it—we finally return to Lolo Drive.
Where it all began. Two hundred kilometers further. Two hundred kilometers deeper into the mystery of what it means to be alive and moving under your own power across the face of the earth.
The Argonaut Midsummer Challenge is complete.
But completion isn't the right word. Completion suggests an ending, and this isn't an ending. It's a beginning. A reminder. A rekindling of the ancient flame that burns in the hearts of all who choose to measure their days not in hours or minutes, but in revolutions of the wheel, in miles covered, in the impossible made routine through the simple act of not stopping.
The RM3 settles into its final silence, carbon fiber and steel geometry holding not just the memory of today's miles, but the promise of all the miles yet to come. Because once you've tasted this—once you've dissolved into the rhythm of Left. Right. Left. Right.—you can never fully return to the world of people who think two hundred kilometers is impossible.
You become, instead, one of the ones who know it's just the beginning.
The longest day of the year ends in darkness. But the light it kindled burns on, carried forward on two wheels, one revolution at a time.