‘Dude’ on two wheels passes you on the right

By Jacob R. Wheeler
Sun Editor
Go ahead man, punch that alarm. Snooze another half hour. ‘Cause even if you jumped out of the sleeping bag now and took off pedaling down the road as fast as you could, you wouldn’t catch him.
Nope. Not until Derek Prechtl decides to pull over on the side of the road for a gulp of water and one of those multigrain granola bars that’s as hard as brick are you gonna catch a glimpse of him.

He may tell you he’s winded. He may even have sweat running down his face and drowning those goggles. But that’s because he just finished biking 60 miles. And the alarm clock only reads 8:30 a.m.!
Time to wake up, dude.
Prechtl’s day is just beginning. He will open Cherry Republic’s warehouse in Empire in half an hour, and pace the floors until 5 p.m. when he can go out and bike some more. Actually Prechtl is a busy man at work. The cherry empire that a local tyke named Bob Sutherland built from the ground up and turned into one of Northern Michigan’s most visible enterprises trusts this bikermensch to keep the shelves stocked though the merchandise is carried out, one truckload after another.
Chocolate covered cherry 12 ounce bags are getting low in aisle four; a heathen’s supply of Boom Chunka cookies were misplaced yesterday, and some Fortune 500 company on the West Coast spontaneously ordered hundreds of jars of cherry jam to be delivered to their shareholders to bail them out of an economic crisis.
Prechtl springs off the bike, tears off his helmet, and sprints around the warehouse with his cordless phone, trying to catch up. (Editor’s note: these situations didn’t actually happen. Derek keeps things here running as smooth as a German automobile engine).
And, are you ready for this? This is actually Prechtl’s chill time of the year. Yep, Northern Michigan is a backwater part of the country for competitive mountain bikers, so he’s in taper mode during the spring and summer, biking only 20 hours a week, which amounts to 400 miles of pavement in the proverbial rearview mirror. And, once again, all before you’ve had your first cup of coffee.
Prechtl spends his winters in Tucson, Arizona living with several other ardent bikers. There in the dry desert they indulge in their base training at least 30 hours a week. He told me about one training day in the Southwest last winter, albeit an aberration since it was so grueling:
“The craziest ride this year was when we biked Mount Lemmon, a 6,500 foot high climb near Tucson. We biked 10 miles from our home to the base and then ascended 25 miles up to the top, rode down, and then up again. That was 50 miles of climbing, 120 miles in all. Dude, I did NOT feel good!” Prechtl recalls. “
But two weeks later, on April 15, he finished a whopping third among all Americans present at the Sea Otter Classic – the largest mountain biking race in the United States, in front of some 70,000 spectators. “That was definitely the pinnacle of my career,” says the unassuming warehouse manager, who beat U.S. national champion Travis Brown and several national champions on that day.
It’s fair to say Prechtl came out of nowhere. He had finished 37th last year and 49th two years ago in the Sea Otter. Since then he has been ranked as high as 12th in the nation according to a point system that deems it necessary to participate in as many races as possible. “I couldn’t travel to California or Colorado (the meccas of mountain biking in this country) every other week because I’ve got a day job,” Prechtl says. “Still, I’m stoked to be ranked so high.”
Derek Prechtl admits the biker in him sacrifices quite a bit by remaining here in Leelanau County, where the slow pace of life defines us over all else. He’ll never become one of the select five guys in this country who make six-figure salaries as fulltime bikers because of the advertisements on their backs. “All five of those guys live out west, and I’m just a local boy who caught onto biking from the guys working at Brick Wheels in Traverse City,” he says.
Until the Sea Otter Classic last month, Prechtl would never have mentioned his name in the same breath with the top racers in the country. He biked a world cup, called the TISSOT UCI (basically the creme de la creme of the cycling world) in Napa Valley in 2001, and admittedly got his rear end kicked by a competition that drew every top mountain biker in the world.
Plus, the popularity of off-road biking appears to have come and gone here in the United States. Canada and Australia and the European nations have invested much more in their athletes since the days of U.S. dominance in the sport in the mid-1990s, Prechtl explains, and several famous American mountain bikers switched over to road biking as soon as the scene began to wane. Now they’re racing in the glamorous Tour de France.
“I’ve thought about that,” says our local biking bodynazi. “But it would be a great commitment. I’d have to give up living in Leelanau County and move away to join one of those teams. This may not be the hot spot for mountain biking, but the cool thing about living here is being able to bike the scenic roads and look down on the Glen Lakes,” Prechtl says.
Yet even this dude is able to find challenges in Northern Michigan. On the morning we decided to meet for a photo shoot in Glen Arbor, a wind of biblical proportions was turning things upside down all over the Midwest. Rumor has it that a hen in Indiana even laid the same egg twice. But that didn’t stop Derek Prechtl from braving M-22 and crossing the Glen Lakes to meet me at 7 a.m., his goggles nearly tattooed onto his face courtesy of a strong headwind.
“Dude, this is nothing,” he told me. “I was part of a night biking event once at Boyne Mountain where our team rode for 24 hours of straight pain. My shift was at 3 in the morning. That’s the last thing you wanna be doing at 3 in the morning!”
Amen to that, Derek.