LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 43 OVER NOT SO EASY Story by Olivia Dwyer & photography by Jamie McGiver How a Lake Placid restaurant owner craed a single-day odyssey through eastern Adirondack mountain bike communities—and kept it going through the coronavirus. Jamie McGiver pedals her mountain bike through the knee-high grass at Lake Placid's Heaven Hill Trails. It's 6 a.m. on July 22, 2020, and she has 95 miles to go in the Over Easy, a brand-new endurance mountain bike event designed to showcase three eastern Adirondack towns where the Barkeater Trails Alliance (BETA) has been building singletrack for the last 15 years. And 15 hours, 48 minutes, and 52 seconds later, McGiver spins downhill at Elizabethtown's Otis Mountain. Car headlights catch a finish line made from unspooled dog poop bags, each end held by a woman in a full-body animal costume. McGiver hits the tape and claims her sweet prize: fresh- picked raspberries delivered by a BETA board member. e scene isn't exactly what Keegan Kramer had in mind when she cooked up the Over Easy. Keegan, co-owner of Liquids and Solids restaurant and Kreature butcher shop in Lake Placid, imagined a race with a mass start, volunteer cheer squads that would pile into vans for mobile support, and a finish-line party with breakfast for dinner. "e main goal was to take you on a bizarre adventure through BETA communities," says Keegan. "I've seen how successful races could be for communities, and I thought this could be a little boost." en came the coronavirus pandemic. Mass starts became synonymous with super-spreader events. Long solo rides were the safest option and the Over Easy became a DIY ride. at continues in 2021, with a June 19 kick-off party at Otis. is time of year, if Keegan isn't behind the bar at Liquids and Solids, she's most likely ripping singletrack. When Keegan picked up mountain biking 14 years ago, off-road biking in Lake Placid meant the serpentine Logger's Loops off of Route 86 northeast of town and a few trails near the Wilmington Flume. anks to BETA, there are now enough trail miles in town for Keegan to get variety in the 50-plus miles she rides each week. "I don't know the concept of rest days," she says. "I'm just a casual rider, so I ride every day." Days off from the restaurant oen mean longer rides with her husband, Shane Kramer, who manages a lab that makes prosthetics and orthotics. He works one day a week at Placid Plant to maintain his streak as a 22-year employee. He's an endurance junkie, traveling the East Coast for 100-mile mountain bike races or lapping the road from Wilmington to the Whiteface Mountain Veterans Memorial Highway toll booth until he'd climbed 29,028 vertical feet. (It's called Everesting.) "Any of these big rides, it's just been for the challenge," he says. Like in 2018, when he and a pal set out to link BETA trails in Saranac Lake, Lake Placid, Wilmington, and Elizabethtown in a day. In hindsight, that backyard epic was a ragged test lap for the Over Easy. Keegan took the GPS file and got to work making an event. She made posters, kicked around menu ideas, got DEC approval for a field of 18 racers, and recruited fat-tire fanatics. at included Daniel Jordan, a Burlington engineer whose hobby of exploring dirt roads led him to create the Vermont Super 8, a 640- mile bikepacking route. "e Over Easy is like a breakfast buffet in that you're piling a lot on your plate and you feel like a glutton," he says. "You get everything from world-class, flowy singletrack to really burly backwoods trails. I wanted to experience it all in one day." Shane posted his GPS track for public use. (Look for "2020 Over Easy" on ridewithgps.com.) Keegan posted to the @over_easy_mtb_ route Instagram: Take a picture of yourself. Send it in. Bill Frazer—Shane's ride buddy from the 2018 test lap—went first, finishing in 12 hours, 53 minutes, and 33 seconds on June 7. More than 40 other cyclists followed, sending in mud-spattered selfies right up until Halloween. "I think it took over people's brains during COVID because it was a fascinating idea to latch onto," says Keegan. e Adirondacks are known for vast wilderness, a feature central to another homegrown event, the Adirondack Trail Ride, a 585- mile route around the Park. e Over Easy taps into another local asset. "Our communities are small compared to other places you go, where there's usually a lot more population," says Shane. "Around

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