This past June, Tracey Petervary, a 37-year-old accountant and endurance mountain biker for Fitzgerald’s Bicycles living in Victor, Idaho, was half of the first-ever tandem team to start and finish the Tour Divide, a self-supported race following dirt roads and jeep trails the 2,745-mile length of the Continental Divide from Banff, Alberta to Antelope Wells, New Mexico. Tackling snow covered mountain passes and dry desert expanses with goatheads, rattlesnakes, grizzly bears and mosquitoes thrown in, it’s been called the world’s toughest bike race.

First held in 2004 – there were seven riders and four finishers – the Tour Divide is based on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route (GDMBR) mapped by Michael McCoy, the author of Cycling the Great Divide: From Canada to Mexico on America’s Premier Long-Distance Mountain Bike Route, in the 1990s.

Perhaps more impressive than Tracey finishing the race however, is who she did it with. Her husband, Jay. “As soon as we started planning this, people were telling us it was a bad idea,” Tracey says. “They said we’d want to kill each other and that tandems are called ‘divorce bikes.’” Tracey reports that not only did they both finish the race alive and still very much married, but also that they only had the mildest of disagreements along the way. And those were only because they got their custom, 100-inch long tandem mountain bike just weeks before the start of the race. “We were still learning how to ride it the first few days of the race,” Tracey says. “We were both just a little short with each other because we were figuring out communication and the coordination of pedaling, shifting, standing and coasting together.” By the time they were halfway through Montana, Tracey and Jay had the bike down.

Even though only 16 of the 42 people (from five foreign countries) who started the race finished – Tracey and Jay placed 3rd overall – Tracey says the riding was the easy part. “Planning the ride was much harder,” she says. “Life’s easy on the bike. All you have to worry about is going forward, eating, drinking and pedaling.”

Not surprisingly, Tracey grew up playing sports. She was an all-star basketball and softball player in high school and won the first mountain bike race she entered (at age 21). Tracey quickly graduated to the expert category in mountain biking and continued to race for several years before looking for her next challenge. The next challenge turned out to be adventure racing. She competed in several Eco-Challenges, multi-day, multi-sport races on unknown courses covering hundreds of miles of varying terrain. (You might have watched them on MTV or the Discovery Channel.) And now she does endurance mountain bike events.

Tracey and Jay carried about 40 pounds of gear and food on their 40-pound bike. As tandem mountain biking is even more niche than snow biking (something both Tracey and Jay also do), nearly everything about the bike had to be custom-made or special ordered. The pink and blue custom frame was supposed to be finished in September, nine months before the race, but that didn’t happen. They got the frame in May. The race started June 12. “We were getting pretty stressed about that,” Tracey says. And once the frame arrived, all the parts – the drive train, the fork, the handlebars, the stems, the seats — still needed to be put together. “It was a total team effort between all of our sponsors,” Tracey says. “We had incredible support.”

Tracey and Jay first talked about doing the Tour Divide on a tandem mountain bike after Jay did the race solo in 2007, finishing first and shattering the previous course record. (He finished in 15 days, four hours and 18 minutes). “We don’t do traditional vacations,” Tracey explains. “This was just our kind of vacation though. We’d spend time together, get to ride and do something no one had ever done.”

Despite raining each of the 18 days they were out, Tracey says she never wished she were anywhere else. “There wasn’t ever a day where it sucked,” Tracey says. “I knew how fortunate I was to be able to do this race and to see the country in such a unique way.” The first to tell you she’s not a morning person, Tracey does confess to suggesting to Jay several times that they sleep another hour. They never did though. “That first hour was tough though. We’d get on the bike and it would be like sitting on glass. I’d be moaning, waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in.”

Most nights the duo camped. Their preferred campsites? Anywhere close to 24-hour gas stations. That made getting up early slightly easier. “There were restrooms and food and coffee right there,” Tracey says. They also spent a night in the back of a U-Haul, in a toy house on a playground and in recesses in front of stores. “We’d get in so late and be out so early in the morning, hardly anyone would ever see us,” Tracey says. They splurged on hotel/motel rooms perhaps four times.

Race rules don’t say much about sleeping and eating other than to require that racers only use facilities that are commercially available to all competitors and are not prearranged. In fact, race rules don’t say much about anything. It all comes down to one guiding principle: “Complete the entire Great Divide Mountain Bike Route as fast as possible under your own pedal power in a self-supported fashion.” Racers police their own conduct and are responsible for their own safety. There are no race officials along the course. There are no checkpoints. There is no pre-race meeting. There’s no one waiting at the finish line for you. As the race’s website explains, “There is nothing to win or lose but honor.”

The hardest part of the race? “Finishing,” says Tracey. But not for the reason you’d expect. “I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to keep riding.”

The 2010 Tour Divide, which Tracey will do if she can find someone to cover her at work, starts June 11. (She would like to go after the women’s solo record some day though. Currently it’s 24 days and change.) Follow the race and racers via called-in dispatches and GPS Spots on the race’s homepage. Cyclists can bike the GDMBR at times other than during the Tour Divide. McCoy’s book is still available. “I’d highly recommend it as a ride,” Tracey says. “You see and experience some amazing things and people.”

Tracey’s next adventure is biking 350 or 1150 miles across Alaska in the Iditarod Trail Invitational. The race starts in Anchorage February 28. You can follow her in that at AlaskaUltraSport.com and on her blog.

DINA MISHEV is a randonee skier, cyclist and hiker who, in February 2009, set the world record for the most vertical feet skied uphill by a woman in 24 hours. She is a category-3 road cyclist who consistently places top 5 in the longest single-day road race in the country… {more »}

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