Justice For Dildos

A story of brotherhood, and the night bikepack racing as we know it nearly ceased to exist.

I rolled around a corner to find Indiana Shulz just ahead. It was the sixth morning of our Arizona Trail Race and we were traversing a loose four-wheel drive road through the Goldfield Mountains. Indy and I had ridden together much of the previous day until I took an extra hour at Gold Canyon to drain some swelling out of my legs.

Our frequent encounters typically involved mutual hollering of some form of good-natured insult. This time was different. Per usual, I yelled something stupid, but Indy just waved me forward. I could tell he was in serious pain. As he turned towards me it became apparent why. There was a large gash across the bridge of his nose extending onto his right cheek. But that wasn’t what was making Indy wince. He had just finished super-gluing the wound shut. The fumes were melting his eyeballs out of their sockets.

He asked if his nose was broken. I said, “No. It looks straight,” and with the same breath, “Can you ride”? He said, “Yes.”

That’s about as much sympathy as you can earn or expect out there. Even so, we decided to ride together for a bit.

Dildo down!

Of course, everyone wants to know what caused Indy’s gruesome injury. A rogue jaguar? A rampaging herd of javalina? A lead-slinging meth head? All the above were plausible explanations given the places we’d passed through that morning. In his initial delirium, Indy hypothesized he’d simply fallen off his bike and been punched in the face by a fist-shaped rock.

Meh… We agreed to keep the investigation open.

Ask and the universe giveth… a dildo in the roadside ditch a mile North of Saguaro Lake Marina. (Does anyone care to articulate the name of that two-lane stretch of pavement? I’ve decided to crowdsource it so as not to fray the unquestionable credibility of the rest of this yarn.)

Truth be told, I never set eyes on the dildo. I learned of its existence when Indy, who was riding just behind me, suddenly sounded off like a donkey on whippets. It was described to me as an 8-incher adorned with a suction cup.

Why we didn’t turn around to fully document the dildo is one of life’s great mysteries. The list of missed opportunities is longer than this story. At minimum, we should have given it a helmet-mounted ride-along to a more appropriate resting place where all future Arizona Trail racers could share equally in its inspiration. That would have been more in line with the race ethic, but it was hot as hell so we just kept pedaling.

The Legend of Drive-by Dildo

Pretty much instantly, this poor ditch dildo was accused, tried, and convicted of culpability for Indy’s face wound. But how? Indy’s injury occurred many miles and a couple of hours earlier. Solving that riddle became the primary topic of conversation as we cooked our way up the interminable Four Peaks Road.

After “doing the calculations,” we determined the dildo must have been flung from the upper atmosphere with Indy’s face serving as an unlucky point of impact for a high-velocity ricochet that eventually bounded to a halt North of Saguaro Lake.

With the ballistics figured, our thoughts turned to who could have possibly been responsible for tossing a dildo from near space? There are only three people on the planet with the capacity for such a feat:

• Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic certainly have the names for it but take themselves way too seriously to toss a dildo from the upper atmosphere and appear to need all the dildos they can get.

• Dime-store space cowboy Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket is likely the largest precision dildo replica in the world. However, Bezos seemed an unlikely source, since his space-poker goes up and down so infrequently and without any kind of stamina or lateral range.

• Then there is Elon Musk who has already managed to spread his SpaceX seed all over the Thermosphere. As If that weren’t damning enough, some of us witnessed one of Elon’s Starlink space trains pass directly over our campout at Mile Marker 103 the night before the grand depart.

It was Elon.

Mystery solved, we turned our attention to an even more interesting topic – the possibility of changing our official race names on Trackleaders. I settled on Rootbeer Hero (that’s another story and not nearly as interesting) while Indy had an impossible decision to make: Roadside Dildo or Drive-by Dildo?

The topic didn’t come up again until we sat awaiting dual double burger orders at Jake’s Corner Bar the following afternoon. The previous day’s ridiculous conversation suddenly became very real. In a moment of pure form, rootbeer-fueled fuck-it, I logged into Trackleaders, changed my name to Rootbeer Hero, and told Indy it was his turn.

He laughed, incredulously, and said, “No way I am changing my name!?” The table fell silent for a good five minutes. Then, seemingly out of the blue, he erupted in laughter. It was one of those uncontrollable infectious laughs. I caught it too.

There we sat, two filthy beat-up bikepackers, laughing our asses off in the middle of a Hawg-bar like a couple of little kids. When I finally got ahold of myself, I asked Indy why he was laughing. He said he’d been thinking about what would happen if he changed his name – the consequences. Then just as suddenly, he pulled up Trackleaders and did it. The legend of Drive-by Dildo was born.

We got our burgers, packed up, and rolled on into the sunset, two bent (not broken!) warriors and our little rebellion against the Arizona Trail’s unrelenting ass-kicking.

I never asked Indy why he went through with his name change. I believe it was more for me than for himself; a powerful recognition of the brotherhood that had formed between us.

Let’s talk about dildos

The consequences of our name changes began to roll in later that evening. It started with a seriously unserious text from race director John Schilling that said, “This is a serious bike race.” Then there was the annoyed (complete with an audible eye roll) voicemail from my wife Susan that said, “Oooookaaaay… if that’s what you want to be called”, followed by a barrage of texts from friends and loved ones asking if I’d dropped out of the race because the MA dot had disappeared from the race tracker.

It got much more interesting for Indy. A Triple Crown challenger does not simply stab a dildo through their name without facing serious scrutiny from the bikepack racing community.

So, let’s talk about the giant dildo in the room. “Dildo” made its first appearance in the English language in the 1590s. It is not a curse, bad, or even a slang word. The dictionary defines a dildo as, “an artificial erect penis used for sexual stimulation.” In other words, it is an inanimate object whose intimate purpose makes it uniquely uncomfortable for most people to discuss in public. Bringing the word, “dildo” into a conversation is either going to be met with laughter, repulsion, or both.

Suffice it to say we both recognized Indy’s new trail name might push the limits of social acceptability, even within the bikepacking community, but ultimately decided the race would be better with a dildo in it.

And we were right. Our new names created only joy along the trail. We began to deploy them against each other. The next day, anyone closely following the race would have heard full-throated calls of ‘Rootbeeeeer’ and ‘Dildooooo’ echoing along the Highline Trail. We made a point of trading trail names with most of the thru-hikers we met along the way. There were many. Drive-by Dildo went undefeated in generating laughs. Never in history has a single dildo brought so much happiness to so many people.

By the time we approached the top of the Mogollon Rim, a full 24 hours after changing our names, any lingering concern over Indy’s new moniker had faded away with our last southern Arizona sunset.

Dildo v. Bikepacking Industrial Complex

Then it happened. My cell phone popped back into coverage at the top of the rim. An ominous text from John Schilling was awaiting my attention. It said, “Ask Indy to check his phone, sent him a text re: Trackleaders. Thanks.” 

“FUCK!!!”

I passed the message along to Indy. He didn’t have a signal. Our minds instantly jumped to the same conclusion, that John’s text was going to read something like this: “So, I got a complaint. You need to change your name back to Indiana Shulz, or Drive-by Bilbo, or anything minus the Dildo. The future of the race depends on it.”

This theory festered in our minds as we traversed the full length of Blue Ridge in the dark. Every hike-a-bike, lava-rock-laden pedal strike, and failed attempt to download John’s message made it exponentially worse.

It was obvious. Indy’s new dildo-infused name must have pissed off the wrong ‘Big Bike’ executive who forced an emergency gathering of the ‘Bikepacking Industrial Complex’ which subsequently concluded Drive-by Dildo was a name unbecoming of both an Arizona Trail Racer and Triple Crown Challenger. Indy would be required to change his name or accept immediate disqualification and a lifetime ban. That could be the only explanation for this bone-hammer of a text about to land in his DMs.

Much worse, the irreverent and freewheeling ultra-endurance bikepack racing community we’d grown to know and love, must have died inside because it was now about to devour us.

I felt terrible; for egging my friend Indy into the offense, and for dragging John Schilling and Trackleaders down into the mire with us.

Then things got even darker. We decided to fight it. By the time we reached Arizona 87, my battle blood was up: “If they are going to cancel Drive-by Dildo they’ll have to go through Rootbeer Hero. I’ll die for that dildo on this baby-head-infested shit heap. Long live DBD!”

Indy finally got a cell signal…

Shields up.

Nukes armed.

Finger hovering over the imploder…

Indy read John's text out loud. It said something about the name change messing up his time splits. There was nothing about the name itself.

“Wait, whaaaa? Time splits? No one complained? The soul of bikepack racing is alive and well? There is no Bikepacking Industrial Complex (yet)? Drive-by Dildo lives?”

Indy’s next words sliced through the smokey fog like a sub-orbital space phallus.

“STAND DOWN!”

All the dildos in Happy Jack rejoiced.