The hardest part is getting out of the door. South and south some more. As I stand in the dusty triangle that is the United States and Mexico border monument 103, a small collection of people rise from the grass and strap the last remaining items to their bikes before the 7am start of the Arizona Trail Race. I’m fully packed and the thought of eating my egg sandwich makes me nauseous. I stare at my bike one last time for no reason. It’s not like I had forgotten what I packed. Sleeping bag, pad, fleece shirt, tools, lights, satellite messenger, water, many thousands of calories and one human experiencing an unpleasant level of anxiety. I need to leave. Quietly now, it’s just riding a bike. Pedaling away felt so right and so wrong. Snippets of life passed like the wind, but for days I sat on the edge of blacking out. This is an attempt to empty my head, remember the good and carry on the excitement I still feel about riding my bike. From the start, the need to get away from those watching was urgent. Whether the feeling of their eyes was a delusion, was and is irrelevant. It caused me to fail to see the beauty of place and become monomaniacal in escaping. I was constantly reminding myself to lift my damn head up and look, just look at anything other the passing dirt in front of my tire. My shadow extended far to my left as the sun crept over the hills. The light gold of the grass was soothing. Off of the two track and on to the main dirt road. The weight of my anxiousness made itself known on the smallest of inclines, causing my breathing to be short and labored. My lungs felt unable to expand. A masochistic laugh intervened with the panic and I again reminded myself that I’m just riding a bike. A dead coyote lay flat in the middle of the dirt. I didn’t have it so bad. The blackout commenced when the single track did. I thought I would see a rattlesnake at every turn, to put me out of my mental misery. I walked a lot. The trail was difficult. Record amounts of rain earlier in the year caused the plant life to grow unhindered. Grasses and thorns of every type distorted lines of sight and kept the speed very low. Atop one of the significant hills, I waited for someone to catch me. I needed to talk about anything. I could count the hours since starting on one hand and I already didn’t want to be alone anymore. A women named Kait came around the corner. She’s somebody I look up to in this niche ultra endurance world. I told her to go in front. I felt I was able to breath again. My incessant worrying dissolved in gentle conversation and I began remarking at the loveliness of it all. I took a mental note of how quickly my state of being altered. The physical effort began as the mental one was recovering. Kait slowly left my sight on a long, technical climb and my low became lower. A frozen bean burrito sat patiently in the trail, slowly thawing in the sun. I hope someone behind me took it and savored every bite. Hours and hours of memory became blurred by my dry mouth and bleeding legs. More of the same, more of the same, more of the same. I lubed my chain upon touching pavement, dumped crushed potato chips in my mouth and rode to the next place with a selection of cold beverages. It was a small detour from the official route, though I needed to snap back into a place of attention. One of many small reminders to try to enjoy myself. The micro breaks seemed to work. The next few hours of punchy hills, tall grass and big expanses bordered on fun. Then I crashed. Trying to avoid a rock that would have sent me over the handlebars, I veered slightly off trail and hit a rock that provided the same consequence. A quarter sized gash in my palm and blunt force trauma to my already broken (but healing, I hope) wrist left me moving less confidently, though for a shorter period than I imagined during the second of air time between bike and impact. Injuries seem to bore me these days. They occur so frequently when moving outside that they become a moment to sit on the ground, take a look around and proceed like nothing happened. The sun began to work it’s way up the Rincon Mountains, seemingly so far off in the distance. I’d be there early tomorrow morning to see the sun come sliding back down. I pull off to the side of the trail to let a young girl walk by on horseback. I wished in that moment that I was moving slower. The place was begging me to watch the show and I continued to move. Why must I feel the need to get away from such goodness? What’s the rush? Up again and back down. I stop to open a gate and say a quick hello to Mark and Emily, siblings visiting their parents on their property back in these hills. I begin to close the gate behind me and Emily asks what I’m doing and if I need water. They had stopped to watch the sunset and found chairs, food and drinks nestled in the shade, voluntarily becoming the caretakers of trail magic left for Arizona Trail enjoyers. Emily gets up from the chair, sits on the ground, opens up the cooler and they both insist that I stay a second. It’s hard to know what people see in you. It’s even harder to know if they see anything other than dirt, blood, minor delirium, and some shit strapped to a bike. Mark offers me a beer from his personal stash and Emily holds an orange and a case of oreos. I hate thinking about this interaction now. I felt that I needed to be somewhere, that I needed to inch closer to Tucson, then to Phoenix. I continued to hold the gate open and say out loud that I should continue riding. My brain was keeping me from actually continuing to ride. That somewhere that I needed to be, was right there and I was refusing to acknowledge it. I took three oreos and the orange. I should have taken the beer and the chair. Mark is a cinematographer working on conservation issues in southern Arizona and Emily was visiting from Germany. I don’t remember a single word I said. They were gentle, infinitely curious and warm. I felt so comforted, though I was finding it difficult to flip the switch from 12 hours of sensory overload to easy conversation. My head was yanking me north, but my body stayed put. I stayed ten minutes and loved every second of it. I regretted leaving immediately upon shutting that gate behind me. I was riding with the wrong motivation and making decisions I would never normally make. As I lay in my sleeping bag in a dirt patch late that night, shoveling more chips and a chocolate chip cookie in my mouth, I listened to the soft sounds of Michael Nau and Cut Worms, while watching the occasional shooting star glance by. I vowed to never again “race” through a place new to me. I never again wanted to pass up the kindness of strangers for the sake of a reaching a finish line, hypothetical or not. I was going against my own beliefs. The natural world demands our attention and to move through it with eyes on the ground, racing towards nothing, is a shame. I want to be too close, dissolving into the dirt, indistinguishable from the place I’m in. To that point in my ride, I could barely tell you what I saw. I could tell you how thirsty I was, how little I had eaten, where I started and where I planned to go, how horrid the thorns were, I crashed, I wasn’t having fun and I wasn’t doing anything to change it. My alarm sounded hours before sunrise. I planned to push hard today. I also planned to quit. Mount Lemmon, the apex of the course and home to the Cookie Cabin, would be my hypothetical finish line. I had decided the night before, under half shut eyelids, that I would come back when the desert was anew. Winter would begin the decay of chest high thorns and come spring, I could enjoy the living museum that is southern Arizona. At a lonely road crossing on the outskirts of Tucson, I stood for a moment, watching the shimmering orange glow of the city. A pair of lights snaked through the trail behind. The two circles beaming from their handlebar looked vaguely familiar. I wanted to say hi to whoever it was, but I was hoping it would be Colt, one of the people I love most in this life. They reached the road crossing and in the early dawn light said, “Alec?”. Yep, that would be me and the voice was unmistakable. Colt and I proceeded to ride on, quite honestly, a pristine section of desert trail into Tucson. FUN, like, REALLY ACTUALLY FUN. It was what I had been wishing for since 6:30 the previous morning. Dreamy swoops and swirls around cholla and ocotillo cacti, sun rising at our back and a market resupply in the near future. Off of the singletrack and back into the rush, I walk into the store and back out with coffee, orange juice, pasta salad and two bags of cheezits. I wanted to eat more, but my appetite still wasn’t what it should have been. That was all that sounded appealing. I imagined the next 15 miles of pavement to be a welcome reprieve from the bumbling singletrack, but it was just the opposite. The morning traffic only a few feet from my being caused me to continuously shutter. The piercingly loud noise, the smell, the uncertainty of being clipped by drivers not giving much space. I looked forward to the return of thorns. The ever so subtle headwind wasn’t helping. The aerodynamic advantage of laying my forearms on my handlebar was probably negligible thanks to my cut-off carhartt shorts and 50 pound steel rig. Look good, feel good, am I right? Before leaving Tucson and beginning the slow pedal up Mount Lemmon, I filled my three bottles with about 750 calories of Tailwind, a carbohydrate filled drink mix. Most of my calories consumed from the previous 30 hours were from that and my collection of crushed up potato chips. When your stomach isn’t agreeing with the thought of solid food, having liquid calories turned out to be invaluable. I had strangely been looking forward to riding up Lemmon. It’s a hefty climb, some 6,000 feet of ascent. Beginning down in the saguaro desert and ever so slowly morphing to grassland, then oak forest and pine forest as you reach the top. A long day on feet brought me from desert to forest a few years ago, but this time around would be entirely different. With a bit of dirt to start, most of the climb would be paved, allowing the opportunity to point all of my attention to the physical effort. And also staying out of the way of wide eyed inhabitants of the motor vehicle. Pushing myself through endurance sports is not new for me. They’re my obsession, an addiction. I think part of the human condition is finding a limit. This is a frequent topic of conversation in the endurance world. It’s romanticized so heavily that you sometimes feel a deep desire to do more than what’s sustainable. Limit is perhaps the wrong word to use in most instances. If you push until your heart fails, is that the physical limit? Death? Is an effort entirely quantifiable? Is there a point in our neural pathways where we reach a wall, unable to use cognitive ability to function? Or is it an infinite void, able to extend miles within? I’m going to label my 36 hours atop my bike as the most mentally and physically taxing thing I’ve ever done, by far. Mount Lemmon was the cherry on top; a breaking of the hardened shell I previously called my hardest effort. The view I had of myself suddenly lay in front of me, waiting for my tires to roll right over. Upon reaching Molino Basin, I refilled all three bottles from the cached collection of water, knowing that was likely the last water I’d see for the next few hours. I like to think I know my body well, well enough to gauge the heart rate and breathing I can sustain for a long period of time. I settled in and focused on pedaling. It’s just riding a bike. About 11 miles from the top, the Cookie Cabin and my hypothetical finish line, I began to slow. My speed remained about the same, though the deep, painful fatigue in my legs and dwindling ability to focus stepped into the spotlight. I pulled off into some shade for my one and only break. Colt had given me a pair of headphones when we were packing some days ago. I had chosen not to use them for most of the ride, as an effort to stay present. However, I do love music and I’m well aware of its ibuprofen like qualities. It was immediately clear that one headphone (so I could also hear cars approaching) wasn’t going to do. An escape was once again my focus. The eyes of onlookers wasn’t the concern this time, I was the concern. The leash I put around myself was hugging too tightly. Chris Cohen, Night Moves, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, and maybe even a little Paul McCartney blew away the remaining crumbs of my ego. Focusing on the art circulating through my ears, some other version of myself took the bodily controls. I forgot I was breathing, I forgot the pain I was feeling, I forgot what I was doing. I just wanted to pedal my bike. The revolutions became euphoric. The sweet, citrusy, bubblegum like smell of pine drew a massive smile across my face. I stood out of the saddle and sprinted to the top of the rolling hills as you near the end of the paved road. I imagine I had been maxing out my heart rate for some time, too lost in the experience to know what was happening inside. The second to last micro downhill brings you to one last punching climb. The levitation and unison I had just been feeling, slowed again. Blurring life hit a puddle of molasses and sucked me into feeling who I was. My knees teetered on the brink of giving out. Throughout this multi hour saga, this was another first. Approaching bodily failure! Not remotely close to death, I felt more alive than ever, but a moving part becoming loose. I couldn’t believe that that’s what it took to feel satisfaction. I’m sure there was a sigh of relief somewhere in my heavy breathing. I had long abandoned the actual finish line of the Arizona Trail Race, but I crossed a personal finish line. That’s what I set out to do and I liked the way it felt. I pedalled with anything that remained down to the Cookie Cabin, attempting to cry for about the fourth time. I gently laid my bike on the ground, stumbled to the edge of the dry creek with trembling knees and sat. I tried to cry again, but couldn’t. No energy for emotion, nor comprehension of time or admiration of place. I sat, that’s it. I had nothing left to give and expected nothing in return. My chest, from the bottom of my ribs to my collarbones, was numb with the feeling of flowing blood wrapping me in its warmth. Ringing in my ears grew louder and louder, then softened, then silence. Maybe this was the feeling of metamorphosis that I sought to achieve. A feeling of invisibility; disappearance deep within myself. I slept poorly that night. My heart rate still sat at 90 beats per minute, more than double my normal. I wanted to get back on my bike so badly. My knees twinged continuously on my walk the next morning. I made it one mile before needing to sit. I called my sister, just to talk, and could hardly form a meaningful sentence. I told her I couldn’t resist pedalling. I rode in the easiest gear for an hour, then I went for a trail ride the next day, then I kept riding days after that. The irresistible freedom of invisibility has consumed me and I can’t wait to do it again.
I’m very lucky to love and be loved by my family and friends. Hard to consider this a solo endeavor. It’s far from it, but I like it that way.
