MATT & ANDY’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE
I HAVE A BAD HABIT OF SAYING YES WITHOUT THINKING WHEN an editor asks if I will take an adventure assignment. I love to write, I love finding the edge between comfort and calamity, and aside from occasional purple bruising (paragliding), sliced finger (bow and arrow), and cut nose (we’ll get to that soon), I usually come back in one piece. And so it was that I agreed to enter the Fat Bike World Championships in Crested Butte as part of a trip to Colorado that I called “A Weeklong Adventure in Snow and Ice.”
Why was this a bad idea? Let me count the ways. I had never ridden a fat-tire bike, the temperature that morning dipped to a windy negative 11, organizers called the loose snow on the course the worst conditions they had ever seen, and the last time I rode a bike in Colorado, I flew over the handlebars and landed on my face.
I arrived at the starting line with modest goals: Don’t get hurt and don’t come in last. I had concerns about both… but they washed away when I looked at the fat-tire-bike fanatics gathered around me. This was not a super serious race. Or even a remotely serious one. One grown man was dressed
