It started as a weeknight biking club. A decade and a half later, Mud Sweat & Beers (MSB) has morphed into a major event, drawing a thousand mountain biking enthusiasts to Mt. Holiday each May to race the trails of the Pere Marquette State Forest. It’s also a charitable mammoth, with nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in cumulative donations since the inaugural race in 2010. As MSB gears up for its 2024 race next month, The Ticker looks back at its origins – and glances toward the future.

Long before Mud Sweat & Beers was a race, it was an informal gathering of like-minded cycling fans. “A group of us would get together to ride on Wednesday nights,” explains Jim Kalajian, co-founder of the MSB race. “We’d ride out of our neighborhood, head into town, and then end up having dinner or beers after we rode. Eventually, one of the guys started calling it the ‘Mud Sweat & Beers Mountain Bike Team.’”

Not surprisingly, conversations among MSB bike team members often flitted to northern Michigan’s biggest bike race: the annual Iceman Cometh Challenge, a November tradition since 1990. Despite the race’s long history and huge popularity – it draws 5,000 racers every year – Iceman at the time was one of the few mountain bike races in northern Michigan.

“We looked at [Iceman] and had to ask, ‘Why isn’t anybody doing something in the spring in Traverse City?’” Kalajian says. “We had this great fall event, but there was no mountain bike race here in the spring. That seemed like an opportunity.”

Soon the idea for a springtime Iceman was percolating. According to Kalajian, the Iceman course used to end at Mt. Holiday, before moving its finish line to Timber Ridge. “We thought Mt. Holiday would be a real natural starting and ending place for a new race,” Kalajian says. “It’s got this cool amphitheater feel, and is just a great place to gather.”

Once Mt. Holiday came aboard as the venue, the MSB race was officially born – but not before the organizers took another cue from Iceman.

“We conceived the race as a fundraiser, and we borrowed the model that [Iceman race founder] Steve Brown used, which is to basically pay your volunteers,” Kalajian tells The Ticker. “We wanted to create an event where 100 percent of the proceeds would be donated back to the community.”

To this day, MSB is operated almost entirely through volunteer support. Local nonprofits and civic groups send teams to Holiday to assist with race functions, and in return, MSB donates money back to those groups – most of which, Kalajian says, have been with the event since day one.

“One of our first steps was to bring on groups that we knew needed money and also had responsible people who could help us put on this race,” Kalajian explains. “So, Grand Traverse Area Catholic Schools Music Boosters, they’ve been supporting us since we started by managing all our parking. The Down Syndrome Association of Northwest Michigan, they bring people out to assist with traffic management in the nearby neighborhoods. The North American Mountain Bike Association, they do a ton of work on the trails. And the VASA Ski Club, they help us by putting 400 arrows out across 25 miles of trail in the woods, and manage all our aid stations as well.”

The partnerships have proved fruitful on both sides. With the help of its army of volunteers, MSB has been able to grow, with four race distances and 950 participants every year. In return, MSB has kicked back $730,000 toward its volunteer partners. 

Much of the money has gone to Mt. Holiday – money that Executive Director Jim Pearson says makes an especially big difference for the ski area in years like this one, where ski season was virtually nonexistent.

“Not only does the money help improve and maintain our facility, but we of course also love having people come explore our little slice of heaven up here in Holiday Hills, Pearson say.

This year’s MSB, scheduled for Saturday, May 4, will mark a milestone: its 15th event. (MSB was cancelled in 2020 due to COVID-19, but held two events in 2021 to make up for it.) Taking stock of the race now that it’s well into its second decade, Kalajian is cognizant of the demand MSB generates: Like other local endurance events – including Iceman, the Bayshore Marathon, and the M22 Challenge – MSB sells out each year. The popularity begs the question: Could growth be in the cards for the race’s future?

“That’s one of the questions we get a lot: ‘Why don’t you let more people into the race?’ Because we’ve sold out 14 years in a row,” Kalajian says. “But we’re limited. We can’t go into the woods and widen the two-track, which means MSB would become really crowded [if we added more people]. I’ve been to those kinds of events, and I don’t like them. I want to ride my own race. I want to have a little room to breathe. I want to be able to park where the race starts, rather than have to get on a bus to go back to my car. The concept from the start was always to keep this event manageable in scale, because that affects the vibe of the race and affects the customer experience. And I think we’ve gotten to the point where, with 950 people, the size is just about right.”