I Ride 300 Miles
on a Bicycle in 24 Hours
(I Meet Myself
In Person)
Well … things don’t always work out like you think. Nope, they don’t. Being together and sharing headlights and
camaraderie riding bicycles on a desert road in the middle of the night IS the
way to go and despite the challenge, it was
kind of a neat experience. I must say.
Side note: other than the sag wagon, support van, we never saw another car, truck or anyone
else, for that matter, during the entire night.
It was just the coyotes, and us, which we heard nearly all night, but
never actually saw. Another side note is
that it is nearly impossible to fully understand how un-night like the night can be, a hundred or so miles from any kind
of city or town. With even a sliver of
bright moon and quadrillions of stars in a cloudless sky and no human-made
ambient light to water it down, it really doesn’t seem all that dark.
With no cars, at all, coming at you from the front to
make your pupils shrink every couple of minutes, your vision – night vision –
can get pretty darn good. It’s amazing
really. I felt kind of like a cat. For a long stretch of that desert night, we
even turned our headlamps off and just rode in the natural light of the moon
and stars.
If you have never been in a true desert, a real desert, not just a plain open space
like say … Oklahoma, but a genuine it
rains like 2” annually, you ought to visit one. Without man made, or man installed,
conveniences – like water – a real desert
can truly support an ecosystem of one plant every square mile or so and maybe
one lizard (or snake). That’s an
exaggeration, but that’s what it seems like.
Oh, I forget, in some places that might include a zillion prairie dogs.
End of side note: :::
Leaving Phoenix and getting past all the outlying strip
mall towns, there is nearly nothing until you hit the outlying strip malls of Tucson. I mean nothing.
Saguaro cactus, some barrel cactus and other less than friendly plant life – spaced football fields apart. Out in the huge western states, these outlying strip malls can run for twenty or thirty miles. Tucson is one of those cities. And a lot of those strips malls can be quite seedy, that is rundown bars, drive-in
liquor stores, adult book (?) stores
(yeah, like they actually sell books), gun stores (generally right next to the
liquor stores – now that’s not a good idea, is it?). Not scenic and not pleasant.
Lots of pick-up trucks.
Lots of Highway Patrol.
Not a sort of place where you want to find yourself at
night. We happened to hit this fun spot just as it was getting
dark. Early night. We got through it just as night happened. Wheh!
The next 150 miles were in the desert, up
over the mountain (?), which as I
said we never found. Down the other side, in the early desert morning, which,
by the way, is the time to be in the
desert. Early morning in the Saguaro Desert
is gorgeous. Cool, dry (really dry),
incredible blossom perfumes. This beauty
and the whole chi of being there,
right there, on a zen quiet bicycle –
seemed to zap away all the muscle aches and sore butt of all the riding up to
that point.
And then – slowly it began to get hot.
The Phoenix Valley sun began to find us.
As we, honestly, crept into
the suburbs of the city, all 300 of those miles also began to find us. We began to split up into two groups. The ones who let all those miles slip into
their consciousness and those of us who apparently were too stubborn, or
stupid, to notice them.
Tiny gymnast, Benny, and myself were in the
front group. So, speaking only for
myself, as we got closer and closer to our starting point. To success.
The clock had begun to run out.
We had averaged close to twenty miles an hour, up until that point. This is, or was, an excellent pace for simple
non-professional, run-of-the-mill bicycle nuts, like us. However, no matter what we did, lowering
gears, standing up (honking) on the
pedals, we started to loose our pace.
We had about twenty miles to go and one hour
to get there. Our pace slipped to
eighteen, then sixteen. No way we were
going to make it. My left hand went numb
and became useless. (No it wasn’t a
heart attack symptom. Just numb from leaning forward on the handlebars.) Then my right knee started to jab me like an
ice pick and I could no longer tolerate pushing down on the pedal. It just simply hurt too much.
At ten miles to the finish, we were cooked,
totally cooked. None of the three of us
were even completely awake any longer. I
was operating on mere habit. A thousand
miles or more of training and survival brain reactions. I felt a glance of subliminal thought from
the other two guys. The same
thought. “I am not riding a 24 hour 300
mile race to loose!!!”
Our need hit some place inside each one of
us. The pace began to pick up. We found ourselves racing flat out through
those faceless, endless city suburbs. I
was standing up on my pedals, gripping the right handlebar like the claw of an
eagle trying to lift off with a really fat lamb in his claw. Skewed way over to the left side, trying to
balance on my one functioning leg. My
vision a razor slit of one single purpose – do not stop!
When I saw my
car in the parking lot of our start,
I saw myself standing there in my bike clothes getting ready to leave to begin
the ride. “What?” I thought. But there I was, all chipper and goofing
around with the other guys. Further my
mind said, “That guy is insane if he
thinks he can actually do this. Ride 300
miles in 24 hours!”
I looked at my
watch. That guy, the one I saw standing
there getting ready to start, had done it!
And … he had done it with ten minutes to spare. Twenty-three hours and fifty minutes. As the two of us blended back together, me
and the idiot my mind had conjured up, the rest of the team pulled in with less
than a minute to spare.
That was my only
out of body experience in my
life. Ever. Before or since. I learned one thing from that experience – I
then knew, and have maintained the true knowledge, that if I set my mind to
something, I can do it. A person, any
person, who truly wants to do something, to get through the impossible gate,
they can. I got to my point of collapsing, went through
it. I got to another place of complete
collapse and went through that. Past the
next and
the next, until only a single string of thought, focus, remained and I had
remained upright and gotten across that string.
I learned that
it is a person’s mind that controls their destiny. The body can ache and hurt to the point where
it is possible to simply ignore
it. The brain can become confused
and overwhelmed with boredom and seek any manner of excuse to quit, but the mind
can overcome that. This knowledge has saved my butt more times
than I can count. Through tropical
storms – with lightening – when I been caught out on my motorcycle. Through high seas, huge waves breaking over
the bow and directly into my face, when I have been miles out in my sea kayak.
At the bottom of
ski racecourses where my quadriceps felt like someone was holding a branding
iron on them.
Lastly, this is
more than survival. Surviving some
nearly intolerable condition, in which a person finds themselves, is a natural reaction. We will
if we can. And sometimes, we just can’t. That is that. Survival
is more of a kharma thing. Circumstances can totally prevent simple
survival.
But purpose
is something entirely different. Purpose
is a choice. And the capacity to
make sentient, intelligent or find the necessary moral options, is what makes
us humans.
Sometimes to choose to test ourselves to go past our absolute limits allows us to find who we
were before. If accomplished, we see
ourselves in a totally new way. After
this test, if successful, we meet ourselves as we were with person as who we
are now.
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