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Chumba Bicycles and Wanderlust bikepacking gear (their house brand?) sponsored a talk last night at the Patagonia store on Congress Ave. They showed some Chumba videos and then Alexandera Houchin, the first woman finisher for the 2018 Tour Divide and a sponsored Chumba rider, gave a talk. I had a lot of assumptions about what she'd be like and how the talk would go and all that got turned upside down. She's a member of the Ojibwa tribe and that identity is strongly part of who she is. Her talk was a story teller simply telling the story of her life in the third person, and how she came to discover bikes and riding everywhere, slowly discovering her city, her county and expanding out from that. She weighed almost 300 pounds in high school, lost half her body weight at some point, was 20 years old the first time she rode a bike; she's 28 now. She's not a hard body. She doesn't do lycra shorts. She goes to college full time for nine months out of the year (double major in chemistry and Indian Studies) and is focused on getting into dental school. She does train in the winter, going to the gym, riding fat bikes and doing fat bike events. Some running. She was raised mostly by her grandmother. She lived out of her Honda Element for awhile relatively recently when the living situation with her grandmother was no longer viable. While going to school. In the winter. In Minnesota. She said that was kind of like bike packing. And her bike set up for the race is....minimal. This year she's taking an 18 degree sleeping bag and a tarp. Not a high tech Dyneema tarp. This is a brown 6' by 8' tarp that you can buy at Home Depot for about $8. I didn't see a sleeping pad on her set up. She said if it's raining she'll find a sheltered place to sleep...like under a bridge... and noted that when you've been riding for 150 miles, you just lie down and you're out. She carries a little speaker attached to the shoulder strap of her backpack and listens to music, podcasts and audio books as she pedals along. Her bike for this year's Tour Divide is a Chumba titanium hardtail Stella with a dropper seat post (!), with Industry 9 wheels, Crossmark 2.1 tires, flat handlebars. The front wheel has a generator hub to keep electronics charged up. She talked about how you resist the siren call of towns by stopping before you hit a town and eating up the last of your food and drinking lots of water. While you're wolfing down the potato salad you bought at the deli of the grocery store, you start making sandwiches out of the cheese, salami and bagels that you just bought, knock back a Mountain Dew and then just get the hell out of there STAT, because it's so easy to lose time in a town. I hope the ride goes well for her. Snowpack in the west is simply epic this year. It was still snowing in Telluride and other areas as recently as a week or two ago. I don't know how many streams riders will have to ford, but like the snowpack, the runoff will also be epic, so that might be a daunting challenge. During the question and answer session, someone asked her how one could train if they don't have mountains or time to do long distances. She suggested riding to the event -- that you'd be in pretty good shape after riding all day for four or five days. Anyway, I'm still pretty blown away by this woman and will be following her progress on the Tour Divide. A bit more about her: Local Duluth paper: Cloquet woman wins Tour Divide From the Chumba website, she's the first rider: chumbausa.com/riders Outside Online: She Learned to Bike at 20. Now She's a Champion Her blog: alexandherrastro.wordpress.com/ (She has a post up about her drive to Austin this week.) Edited to add: Her bike is rigid single speed for this year's Tour Divide -- no suspension, no gears.