Injuries bring Barkley Marathons near-finisher Gary Robbins back to the bike
Injuries bring Barkley Marathons near-finisher back to the bike
Sometimes an injury is a blessing in disguise. After endurance runner Gary Robbins fractured his femur in April 2018, he rediscovered his passion for cycling, using his bike as a primary tool on his road to recovery.
“I could ride pain-free, but I could not walk,” recalled Robbins this past fall. Before his endurance-running career, he competed in adventure races in which mountain biking was a key component. “I’d been thinking about biking again for a few years now. This injury was the impetus to get back in the saddle again.”
One of Robbins’ main running challenges is the 160-km Barkley Marathons in Tennessee. He’s run the race the past three years. In 2017, he finished all five 32-km loops, but came across the line six seconds past the 60-hour time limit. Only 15 people have finished Barkley since the event started in 1986.
Last spring’s stress fracture was not properly diagnosed for six weeks.
“You could count the kilometres we had completed by the number of nuts and bolts that had fallen off.”
Doctors advised Robbins not to run, but cycling allowed him to recover without missing much training.
Robbins had so much fun training on two wheels that he decided to enter the Sp’akw’us 35-km race in June – a cross country marathon in Squamish, B.C. The professional runner had not owned a mountain bike in a decade and bought one just 10 days before the race. Robbins competed in the men’s 40–49 category and finished in 33rd place overall and ninth in his category.
“The race attracts a huge and competitive field,” he said. “I was quite proud of my result.”
Besides competing in Spa’akw’us, Robbins also completed his first-ever century ride, which included a ride up Mount Baker in Washington state with an Ironman triathlete friend. He rode his Cannondale Supersix. Later in the summer, Robbins took a vacation with his wife to the South Kootenays and got in some mountain biking.
Robbins grew up in Newfoundland, but has lived in the West for about half of his life. He moved to Banff in 1996 and got his first mountain bike, a classic hardtail, a few years later. In 2003, Robbins flew to Guatemala and spent 12 months riding throughout Central America. Prior to that trip, he had never ridden more than 40 km in a single session. “You could count the kilometres we had completed by the number of nuts and bolts that had fallen off,” he recalled.
Getting back in the saddle has made Robbins realize the need to find a better balance in his training regimen in order to take better care of his body. As he ran this past December, he found himself in a lot of pain. After Christmas Eve, he couldn’t run at all. He turned to the bike to train on Boxing Day. In January, Robbins was diagnosed with a sacral stress fracture. The injury on the large bone at the base of the spine will keep him from taking on his fourth Barkley Marathons this year.
“I’m 42, and I have a three and a half year old,” he said. “I had a really successful decade of high-mileage training and getting a lot out of my body, but I can’t load the same volume and recover like I did in my 30s. Mountain biking needs to be the complement to my training for the next decade of my running career.”