Getting over the hump when you aren’t quite sure you should

Well, we made it back from another successful foray out into the world. Is there a more exquisite feeling than coming back home? The final push, then the final corner, then the sighting and everyone’s tail starts wagging. Makes you kinda wonder why you ever left in the first place.

What, actually, is the point of hardship? Why should we tackle difficult challenges, not go the easy way, or let AI write these newsletters while I’m off riding? Why raise our voices in protest, why ask (and answer) the hard relationship questions that make everyone feel awkward? Why ride your bike 100 miles?

While traveling, we always ask the same question: which way should we go? Our ideal destination is one we have never been to before, and less ideal is one where someone, either of us, has been before. We started doing this when Misti lived in Kansas, taking a different route to everywhere we went, be it to the coffee shop we had never heard of in Eudora or the back road from Lawrence to Denver. It’s slower and more inconvenient, the offerings are sometimes slim but we are here to tell you with guaranteed certainty that the murals on the walls of small towns are far superior to those of the cities on the interstates. Everyone should stop and see the Van Gogh display in Goodland and the murals on the old grain silos in Salina. Just make sure you check before you go, because the Swedish festival in Lindsborg is only held every other year (the odd numbered years) — and it should not be missed.

So, you sacrifice speed for details when you take back roads; that’s one reason why. If you can, you should stop and smell the roses but how can we become fortunate enough to have that luxury?

My cousins from South Africa have recently wrapped up a two week trip to America, their first. They spent a week traveling from Boston (after running the Boston marathon in 3:29) to Washington D.C. then flying to Vegas and driving to Salt Lake to fly home. They saw every tourist sight on the east coast, set a course for as many desert national parks as they could fit in- sunrise hike in Bryce and sunset in Antelope Canyon kind of thing, wake up on the south rim Grand Canyon, go to sleep in Moab, pose for the photo in each place and move on.

Why?

Because they had never been here before and wanted to get a big picture overview so they could bring their daughter back next time and show her the greatest hits in deeper detail.

I met them for the first time in South Africa, 2007, when my brother and I went there for Cape Epic. We arrived five days before the race started, so we stayed with them at their place in Cape Town. They took us around, showed us the sights and their lives, including a truly sublime afternoon of wine tasting and a perfect backcountry Stellenbosch inn where the proprietor made us the most extraordinary meal from what they had on the shelves and in the back yard that day. Could not have been better.

When the race started, the world shrank to the butt in front of you, the bushes and rocks immediately to your left and right, the overwhelming heat and the vuvuzelas given out to the thousands of kids willing to skip school and cheer the racers on by blowing insanely loud trumpets at them. At the end of the race day, the real cultural experience began- we paid extra to have accommodation arranged for us rather than sleep in tents in the field with the other racers. The first night we stayed in a hostel, second in a mud hut, third in an artist studio, fourth in a stone playhouse, fifth in an actual hotel, sixth in a treehouse and seventh again in a hotel with stairs and air conditioning. Guess which ones were the least memorable?

It was the Cape Epic that taught me the lesson that if we are going to make the effort to go halfway ‘round the world, there is much more to see of the place than a lycra butt and a dusty, blurry road. Race pace is akin to driving on the interstate- you get there faster but you also miss most of the best parts.

So why even go to race? It’s funny you should ask because we just had this conversation with a musician friend of ours last weekend. He didn’t understand why anyone would subject themselves to the hardship of driving a long way, paying a bunch of money, then exerting yourself for that many hours. Of course, there is no such thing as too far, too expensive or too long for a concert, but a bike race, fugeddaboutit!!!

The more we talked, the more we found similarities- both involved a dynamic social group where your individual presence adds to and is required for the larger whole. The vibrational component was fun to explore- the band putting out the music for the crowd to receive was very similar to finding the athletic flow of terrain and distance, finding balance and harmony in giving and receiving. In the end we concluded that while cycling was more participatory than spectating, both revel in raising the bar of finding the outer limits of possible, taking something familiar and creating a new opportunity for growth and expansion.

So, ‘when’ you find yourself examining your commitment to an activity, embrace your choice fully. Trust that there is a reason, and make the finding of the ‘why’ your mission — sometimes it’s as plain as ‘why not?!?’. But not every day and every time. Best to ease into the daily world, lest you miss the good stuff.

Cheers