18 Days to Go

I’m going into this bike trip with a “How hard can it be?” attitude, knowing full well that it can be, indeed, very hard. Knowing that people much fitter than I regularly don’t do things like this. Knowing that I’ve basically not trained, but instead count my spirited hikes, spin classes, and lately-lots-of-yoga as “fully equipped” to cycle six hundred miles through the Rocky Mountains.

I’m about to be humbled, to eat shit, to possibly get killed according to my boyfriend, and to learn everything the hard way. I’m about to ache and lie in a tent with a body so full of pain, it’ll feel like death. I’ll be alone — without my dog, who’s been there through every ridiculous thing I’ve ever done.

But as I read the blogs of zealots and I go to the bike shop and I listen to friends much wiser than me, I’m turned off. An adventure in the wild shouldn’t cost you everything you have in your bank account. It shouldn’t require this piece of gear and that piece of technology. You shouldn’t have an answer for every possible scenario, and do I really need a bike computer when my iPhone and various apps can do all the same things, and be powered by my already-owned solar charger?

Naiveté, naiveté, naiveté think all my bike friends as they shudder but can’t stop reading. Yes, I’ll learn the hard way, and yes, maybe I won’t complete my trip. Maybe I won’t make it even the first day, or maybe I’ll make it to the second to last day and throw the towel in. I won’t know til I know.

But the woman who inspired me to do this trip wasn’t prepared, and didn’t have the tools she knew she’d need. She couldn’t afford them, and she couldn’t find them. Finding the right sized thing when you’re exceptionally short is difficult — I know from experience. Finally she agreed on a horse she couldn’t get on unless she had something nearby resembling a stool. Finally she couldn’t wait any longer for “perfect weather” because it would soon be blizzarding. Finally she left her guides and went her own way because it felt instinctually right.

She rode alone in the Rocky Mountains for nearly three months, awestruck by the beauty, brought to her knees by the land, terrified by the dangers and exhilarated by all of it all of the time. Her diaries leave me breathless and the I envy her talent and gall.

So I’m leaving in 18 days, open to everything I’m about to be taught, pushing the fear of challenge way far away where it’s always been, and rejoicing in the fact that riding a bike doesn’t require much more than a body.