Our friend Mark has this bumper sticker on his car. “Honk If You Love Dying And Being Dead,” it reads. It’s the kind of thing you either find deeply funny or not at all.

Here’s the thing about racing 10 days in the middle of the Chicago summer: It’s really hard. But not because it draws some of the better amateur racers in the country. (It does.) Not because most of the races are set on some of the most technical and challenging courses in the country. (They are.) Not because you have to race people who are good at racing bikes in oppressively hot and humid weather. (You do.)

What makes it so hard is to wake up, make breakfast, eat, take a dump, get your race bag ready, put the bikes on the car, figure out where the course is, drive to the course, take the bikes off the car, find a place to set up camp for the day, get changed, take a dump, hydrate, warm up, pee, hydrate some more, figure out how your race will play out by watching the other fields race, try to eat something, take another dump, roll over to staging, fight to stage somewhere near the front, fail to stage somewhere near the front, spend most of the race fighting to stay in contact, spend the final third of the race trying to justify whatever place you’re about to settle for, spend the next 20 minutes post race staring off into space trying to ingest as much liquid as possible, spend the next hour cramming as much food into your gut as possible, get changed, watch your friends race, pack up your stuff, throw away garbage, put the bikes back on the car, figure out what you’re going to do for dinner, get home, do laundry, try to unwind and go to sleep.