Benefield: Photo finish after 13 hours is Petaluma man’s greatest win

Yuri Hauswald was riding for second place.

He had pulled out of the last aid station of the Dirty Kanza 200 in second place with 50 miles to go in one of the nastiest, most grueling “gravel grinders” on earth. Two hundred miles of cycling through glue-like mud and dagger sharp bits of flint rock spread over 200 miles of rolling hills and grass lands in eastern Kansas.

Hauswald, the former school teacher from Petaluma who turned 45 Monday, figured he would pull away from the third-place rider who was just behind him at the aid station; that he’d distance himself from that rider with his penchant for steady, grinding progress.

“Old man strength,” he calls it.

For a guy with a top 10 and a 34th-place finish in two other tries at Dirty Kanza, second place would be mighty fine, especially in those conditions.

It had rained so hard in the days and weeks before the May 30 race, organizers had to reroute stretches not because of impenetrable mud, but high water. No one needs to drown in a bike race, even a bike race in which the rule book repeatedly and ominously (and in all caps) states that organizers “ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE for your safety or well being.”

Riders are sent on their way with cue cards on the route and GPS coordinates, but race markers can be few and are often missed. Pit stops to pick up food, water and mechanical supplies are not a luxury, they are crucial to both strategy and safety. Of the 764 brave souls who started the 200-mile race, only 427 finished.

That’s all good in Hauswald’s book.

“The gnarlier the conditions, the better for me,” he said. “I don’t know what it is in my DNA but I don’t mind if it’s cold and gnarly. I’m a bigger guy so those conditions don’t mess with me as much as a skinnier guy.”

Hauswald said he’s got something inside, perhaps something different than your average joe, something that lets him keep pushing on when it seems like every fiber of his being begs for the agony to end.

“I kind of like being comfortable in an uncomfortable place,” he said. “In 24-hour solos, I’ve just been able to turn off that part of my brain that’s (focused) on how bad you’re hurting.”

The Dirty Kanza 200 was no different.

“I settled into my diesel mode, chipping away at the miles,” Hauswald said.

So he’s chipping, grinding, whatever you want to call it, on empty gravel roads with layers of mud weighing down his feet, sticking to his face. There’s not a soul in sight, not a farmhouse on the horizon - he’s just trying to put some time into the guy behind him.

Then he sees an event photographer who tells him that the first-place rider is 10 minutes up the road.

“I didn’t have any context for that,” he said. “I’m still like … I’m not going to bring that back in 20 miles.”

Nearly impossible.

More impossible? Making up 22 minutes over the course of 50 miles - on that course. Hauswald didn’t know it, but that’s exactly what he was doing. When the race was over and clearer minds were breaking it down, they realized that Hauswald was an unheard of 22 minutes behind the race leader when he left the last aid station.

In retrospect, Hauswald says he’s glad he didn’t know just how far back he was, calling that kind of deficit “soul crushing.” But that also means he didn’t realize just what he had done when he spotted the leader a few miles from the finish line, on the cusp of downtown Emporia, Kan.

The next sequence serves to illustrate just how exhausted Hauswald was.

He pulled up next to the leader and tried to weigh his options. Do they ride in together, link arms like he had done two years earlier to claim a share of sixth seventh, eighth and ninth place? A quick assessment of the situation with the other rider made it clear to Hauswald that there would be no sharing.

And that presented yet another hurdle to overcome.

“I had to totally readjust my mindset and thinking and be more calculated,” he said. “How am I going to beat him in a sprint, because I’m not a sprinter.”

The prospect of a win - the biggest win of his career - dangled tantalizingly in front of Hauswald. But he was also a man who had drained everything from himself to just catch this guy. He thought he had nothing to give in any kind of sprint.

“Instead of riding along contentedly in second place, I’m now going to have to flick on the killer instinct,” he said.

He tried to drop the guy with a surge of speed on the edge of town, but was reeled back in.

“I figured I was screwed, like I’d burnt my last match,” he said.

Turns out he had one more.

“I don’t know what came over me,” he said. “It was a drag race for three blocks.”

Hauswald sprinted again. This time he would not be caught.

Hauswald’s time? Thirteen hours, one minute, seventeen hundredths of a second. Second place? Thirteen hours, one minute, eighteen hundredths of a second.

No one, in 10 years of the Dirty Kanza’s existence, had ever seen a finish so close. A hundredth of a second - after 13 hours of hell.

“The crowd went nuts,” said Jim Cummins, race founder and executive director of Dirty Kanza Promotions. “It’s quite an emotional experience at the Dirty Kanza.”

Hauswald, who when he’s not on his bike is marketing manger for GU Energy Labs, said that in addition to a preternatural tolerance of pain, he knows well that there are things out there that are harder than riding a bike in the mud. His wife, Vanessa, is four and a half years removed from her battle with stage four colon cancer. Eleven years ago he watched his dad die of fast-moving melanoma.

“I’m reminded when I’m out there that no pain I have can compete with anything he or my wife dealt with,” he said. “I try to tap into that well.”

The guy who called on his “old man strength” to gut out a win on one of the toughest races out there, the guy who has raced 24-hour solo rides to near delirium, understands the cruelty an extreme sporting event can dish out. But he also knows there are things in life far crueler still, which makes this win pretty sweet, and plenty dirty.

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield.