Blast from the Past - the Foundation of the NIT

In case you live on the moon - long time Fitzy Team Rider and endurance racing nut Jay Petervary is writing the books on how to ride a bike without the support of a car (who thought that was a good idea in the first place?).

He has been winning races and crushing records for over a decade. Some of the most notable ones are the Alaska Ultra Sport (set new record in March), the Race Across America (set sub 13 day record in June as first self-supported racer), and the Tour Divide (held record - unfinished business slated for August).

What’s it all for? It’s for the No Idle Tour - aiming to educate people about the harmful affects of idling vehicles, while commemorating the life of the first athlete to start the campaign - Willie Neal.

Below is an article we dug up from 2007 after Jay won the Tour Divide in 15 days, 4 hours and 18 minutes.

THE WORLD’S TOUGHEST BIKE RACE IS NOT IN FRANCE

High Noon is when a proper western should start, but we’re still waiting for Floyd Landis, Lance Armstrong, and George W. Bush. The 2007 Great Divide Race kicks off in 18 minutes here on June 15 at the First and Last Chance Bar, in Roosville, Montana, and the border crossing is buzzing with the carnival vibe of a gumball rally: 24 mountain bikers in clean, bright kits, tinkering with gear straps and barrel adjusters as they wait to begin the 2,490-mile self-supported race from the Canadian border to Antelope Wells, New Mexico, on the Mexican line.

Everyone’s nerves are showing. MYSTERY RACER is listed on the Website roster, and various forums are speculating wildly about which celebrity will show. Mike Curiak, 39, is the GDR’s official race director and the course record holder—16 days, 57 minutes, in 2004. Curiak’s rivals, now the 2007 favorites, are trading greetings: Anchorage bike wrench Pete Basinger, 27, who holds the Iditasport record, and North Carolina maître d’ Matthew Lee, 37, the winner of the last two GDRs—best time, 17 days, 22 hours, 30 minutes, in 2006. The wild card, balding and goateed Jackson Hole drywall contractor and Iditasport runner-up Jay Petervary, 34, is fiddling with his XM satellite receiver, which is wired to a mini solar recharger and preset to perpetual reggae and NPR: “I’m gonna get the weather.”

The rest of the field consists of two dozen underemployed dreamers who may have gotten ourselves in over our heads. I haven’t felt anything like this since the day I got married; I haven’t eaten since last night, but Matt McFee, a thirty-something computer geek and mountain-bike guide from Durango, is putting down his second or third hot dog as if he might not see another before the Fourth of July…

…DAY 2, JUNE 16, 2007, 13:24:14 MDT: This is Dave Nice in Columbia Falls…. Good, feel good. Got chased by a bull moose for about a quarter-mile…. Yep, it’s all good. Weather’s nice, and moving a lot faster than I was last year. So it’s all good. Talk to you later.

It’s hard to argue that the GDR is not the toughest bike race in the world. Imagine a Tour de France run on the honor system, with no checkpoints, no officials, no drug testing. Now sprinkle the course with grizzly bears, goathead thorns, mosquitoes, and rattlesnakes, not to mention almost 200,000 feet of climbing over fire roads, dirt lanes, singletrack, and a smattering of pavement…

…As for Jay Petervary, the GDR winner is back in Jackson Hole, busy as a one-armed drywall hanger, which he sort of is if you consider his numbed left hand. Nah, he tells me—until someone breaks his record, there’s no need to tempt the GDR again anytime soon.

But the race dopes your blood, and life off the Divide can seem so banal, so comfortable. “My wife and I have talked about it,” Jay says. “We might do it on a tandem.”…

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE!