Thursday 29 August 2013

lessons

i’m well over halfway to LA on my cycling adventure. i somehow made it through san francisco yesterday without getting lost... more evidence to add to the ‘God is real’ file... but every day is hard. really hard. like harder than the hardest thing i’d ever done before this trip hard. crawling out of my tent every morning, popping on some lycra and getting on my bike day after day has nearly broken my spirit on more than one occasion. 2 nights ago, at midnight, a tree fell down in the state park i was staying in. the sound it made was truly terrifying and then for 2 hours the melodic buzzing of chainsaws filled the air as workers cut up the tree to clear the road. i spent the whole night frozen in my tent wondering if a 55 tonne redwood was about to fall on my head. the question still remains... why on earth am i doing this? i haven’t reached cycling nirvana, where my body loves being on the bike and i feel strong and invincible. it’s quite the opposite. i know i’m strong because i keep cycling mile after mile after mile, but i feel anything but. i feel small and vulnerable and confused most of the time.


conquering the golden gate bridge in all its foggy goodness
sometimes i go to bed at night and don’t lock my bike up. i make it look really pretty and accessible, hoping that someone will steal it and i won’t have to ride anymore. i could have given up about 10 days ago when a case of bike-short chafing got a little out-of-control. but something inside me wasn’t willing to quit over what was essentially just a nasty adult nappy-rash. so i’ve diligently powdered and moisturised and prayed that my bike would be stolen instead. but that doesn’t seem to be my destiny. maybe i’ll tape some money to it tonight and see what happens.

surely there is stuff to be learned in this undertaking. i’m racking my brains every day and not coming up with a lot, but here is one thing i’ve been thinking about this past week or so.

when i’m riding on flat ground or going downhill, it doesn’t really matter that i’m carrying about 20kg of extra gear strapped to the back of my bike. but when the day gets tough – when i’m faced with a series of 1000ft climbs – the extra baggage matters a lot. the extra baggage mocks me and makes it impossible for me to enjoy the scenery.  i hate the extra baggage in those moments... those moments where i’m forced to deal with every painful consequence of its existence. dragging the baggage up a hill for hours on end is hard. really hard. like harder than stopping myself from eating a fifth donut was yesterday.

the load i carry
sometimes we don’t know what garbage we’re carrying around with us until life gets a bit hard... until life goes uphill for a period of time. i’m wondering if maybe we all need to do challenging things a little more often to get a feel for our garbage, to see more clearly what it feels like to carry it in the hard times. maybe being forced to deal with the consequences of our excess baggage (emotional, physical or spiritual) is what makes it easier to put it down and choose some peace instead. if we just keep rolling along the flats and downhills of life making ‘easy’ choices, perhaps we’ll never realise the things we are needlessly carrying that will inevitably hold us back one day.


i’d like to think i could have learned this lesson wearing less lycra and spending much less money on baby powder and vaseline... but apparently not.

Thursday 8 August 2013

cycling

so i am three days into a month-long experiment called ‘is kt fit enough to cycle from seattle to LA?’ at this stage it feels as though the answer is ‘no, she most definitely is not fit enough and should stop the lunacy immediately'. but i don’t have a good history of stopping silly things until i have had a really good crack at them. so i’m going to persist until my legs... or my bottom... or my slightly/hugely unstable emotions get the best of me.

i’ve cycled a little over two hundred kilometres in the last three days. aside from a three-week frenzy of cycling in may when i got home from africa (mostly because i’d lost lots of weight and wanted as many people as possible to see me in lycra before i chunked up again) this is probably more than i have cycled in the last five years combined... and i’ve only covered ten per cent of my total journey. people should really train a bit more than i have to undertake this type of adventure. i guess.

the last twenty-four hours sums up pretty well how i feel about the whole situation. after a massive eighty kilometres yesterday of unrelenting hills and head-winds, i pitched my one-woman tent which looks and feels a lot like a coffin. 

me and my tent/coffin... fake smile
i went to bed on a pile of rocks, as has become my custom in the grass-free washington state parks. i got my usual few hours of sleep and spent the rest of the night trying to get comfortable on the rocks... ‘yep, if i get that rock just under my hip and that other one just above it, it’s almost like a form fitting mattress... almost.’

my feet standing on my 'mattress'

then it started raining and i discovered my one-woman tent isn’t completely water-proof, or water-proof in any way at all. the night was awful. i began to look forward to the pain of being back on my bike because then at least the rocks wouldn’t be severing my spinal cord anymore.

i got up early and packed my mountain of gear onto the back of my bike, leaving all my wet stuff hanging off the back to dry... ambitious... it was still raining. then ten kilometres down the road i got a flat tyre... it was still raining.

flat tyre... rain... gear on the side of the highway 

i pretty much hated my life and wondered why on earth i do these things to myself. the truth is, i just really love to challenge myself and i find that i learn the most extraordinary things when i do... things like... sometimes big interesting pieces of bark in the middle of the road look like squashed possums. i never would have learned that if not for this trip. the glass is most definitely half full.