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Cycling along Fall Creek Road is a cruise in the park compard with the 2,745-mile trip Jay and Tracey Petervary recently completed along the Great Divide route from Banff, Alberta, Canada, to Antelope Wells, N.M., on their tandem mountain bike. NEWS&GUIDE PHOTO / BRADLY J. BONER

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They’re called Divorce Bikes.

They’re designed to break couples apart, not bring them together.

You’ll want to kill one another.

That’s what the naysayers told Jay and Tracey Petervary. Friends, colleagues and fellow bikers said there was no way a married couple could bike 2,745 miles down the Continental Divide and not want to strangle one another when it was over.

“I never took kindly to those comments,” Jay Petervary said. “It was sort of odd. But that’s why most people thought we’d fail – because of the dynamics of the tandem.”

Instead, this endurance mountain biking couple debunked all of those myths last month by becoming the first to complete The Tour Divide on a tandem mountain bike. The Petervarys not only completed the race, they blew away the pack, finishing third out of 42 racers. Their final time of 18 days, 13 hours and 50 minutes is a tandem record that will certainly last for years, maybe decades on the Tour Divide.

“People are always like, ‘I’d kill my wife,’ or, ‘We’d kill each other,’ ” Tracey Petervary said. “Instead, we kept each other company. We were singing and making up lyrics.”

Instead of pulling them apart, the experience brought them closer. Call them Team Tandem.

Jay hopes their success story will change the perception of tandem bikes.

“I’ve heard stories of people riding around town and they fight,” Jay Petervary said. “I think we’ve changed people’s minds about riding a tandem. They think, ‘Oh, wow. Husband and wife, they just rode 3,000 miles. No problem. Let’s try it.’ I think it’s pretty cool that way.”

Tracey Petervary and her husband don’t take traditional vacations. Instead, they go on adventures.

So, when the couple was considering a vacation this summer, the Tour Divide naturally came up. Jay Petervary competed in the event before. He set the course record in 2007 when he completed the race in 15 days, 4 hours, 18 minutes, shattering the 2004 record of 16 days, 57 minutes held by Mike Curiak.

Interestingly, his feat was mentioned in the July 2007 edition of Outside magazine. The last sentence of the article reads, “Jay says he’ll be back one day on a tandem.”

“I was just being sarcastic,” he said. “But two years later, here we are.”

The couple ordered their custom bike in September. It didn’t arrive until May, just one month before the couple were to leave for the race.

“We thought we’d have time to learn,” he said.

But they didn’t.

“It wasn’t until a week into the race that we actually learned how to ride it right.

On the road

The race began June 12 in Banff, Canada, just west of Calgary.

Jay Petervary, the captain, rode at the front of the bike while Tracey, the stoker, rode in the back.

“At first, I kept yelling at Jay, ‘I can’t see where we’re going. I can’t see where we’re going,’ ” she said. “Sometimes, I wanted to tell him to slow down, but I couldn’t because it would just make him nervous.”

The Petervarys, though, would quickly learn an important dynamic of the tandem. The bike flew downhill, sometimes as fast as 56 mph. However, it went uphill at a much slower rate than a traditional bike.

Since they’d never raced on a tandem, the couple weren’t sure what to expect going into the race.

“We were going in trying to be as efficient as possible,” Jay Petervary said. “We didn’t now what the handicap of the tandem would be.

“I thought third was reasonable. There were times I thought winning wasn’t out of the question. But third was awesome. It was great. But I think we learned [the dynamics of the tandem] was a big handicap.”

Stopping for bathroom breaks, for instance, slowed the couple because they rarely had to go at the same time. Then, there was this obstacle: Riding a bike with nearly twice the gear on it.

Their custom bike was relatively light at 40 pounds, considering it measures more than 8 feet long. But the couple carried with them close to 50 pounds of gear, water and food.

The Petervarys endured light rain for most of the trip, and would ride from 15 to 20 hours per day, sometimes sleeping as little as four hours a night.

The camped wherever they could. They spent one night in the back of a U-Haul, and another in a small, toy house on a playground.

“You were in and out of places so quickly,” Tracey Petervary said. “It felt kind of sneaky.”

The couple preferred to sleep near 24-hour gas stations, which allowed them to wake up early, use restrooms, and refuel with food and coffee.

Their course brought them through western Montana into Idaho. They then crossed north of Jackson Lake, over Togwotee Pass and south into Colorado. The course meandered through central Colorado and into New Mexico, west of Albuquerque until it ended at Antelope Flats, N.M., near the Mexican border.

The couple saw bear, a mountain lion and antelope. Sometimes, they had to maneuver around cattle and other animals on their route.

“You’d be out there for hours, days, you wouldn’t see any cars or people,” Tracey Petervary said. “It’s solitude really.”

Not total solitude, though, since the couple had each other.

“That was a plus,” Jay Petervary said. “We would keep each other company. We could pull each other out of a bad moment. There’s definitely a lot to be said about having company.”

The Petervarys said they could not have done the race separately.

“This keeps us riding together,” Jay Petervary said. “That’s pretty cool. There’s no waiting around, or pressure for someone thinking they need to keep up.”

“It would be worse to do it on a single bike together,” Tracey Petervary said. “And it’s a great way to stay together, because Jay is so much faster than me. If we were on two separate bikes, there would be no way to stay together.”

The aftermath

There were only 43 racers in The Great Divide. Racers’ progress is monitored by a Global Positioning System device they carry.

Therefore, when the Petervarys arrived at the finish line in southern New Mexico about midnight, there was no one waiting there for them.

By a stroke of fortune, the Petervarys ran into the second-place finisher on the course, Kurt Refsnider, of Boulder, Colo., who had finished the race two hours before them.

Refsnider and his girlfriend helped the Petervarys load up their tandem onto their car in the middle of the night and drove them to Deming, N.M., about 100 miles away where they stayed in a hotel.

The Petervarys then booked a $200 shuttle to the El Paso, Texas, airport and planned to fly home from there. Before leaving Deming, Jay Petervary purchased cardboard at Deming Electronics to ship their bike home via UPS. As he boarded up the 100-inch-long bike, a curious employee inquired about what he was doing.

The employee then offered to drive the Petervarys to the airport for free.

“They just wanted to help for nothing in exchange,” he said.

Days later, their tandem bike arrived at their home in Wilson. The Petervarys said they plan to ride it again at the Laramie Enduro, a 70-mile endurance mountain bike race Aug. 1.

This time, they’ll know what to expect.