Pre-Trip Jitters

I’m off on another “great bike adventure” in a few short days. The last one was in February of 2000, when I rode from Santa Rosa, California to Tucson, Arizona. My life is so much different now than it has been in any of my previous trips. Our lives change in profound ways, and sometimes they’re not so subtle. Aside from being past the age of 40 now and married, I’m also lugging an extra twenty pounds around my midsection, which has to go over those big hills and long mountain passes along with the 40-50 lbs. of gear hung on my bike. Hopefully by the time I get to the mountains, several pounds of Abbott will be left behind. Middle age is a thing we must wrestle with here in America, where we’re supposed to be forever young.

Time can do funny, fluid things sometimes. This trip has been far away for several months and now that it’s only a few days away, time seems to compress and every moment is valuable and has, or should have purpose. Now suddenly, there are two airplane flights and one short week between me and the day I’ll be in Minneapolis throwing my leg over the bike, with the feeling that I’m nowhere near ready physically or psychologically.

I wake up at five o’clock almost every morning and think about how many miles I have to ride in order to make it back in time for all the responsibilities I’ve acquired in the past few months. There are 2200 miles and 39 cycling days between Minneapolis and the end of the trip. My calculator smokes from overuse and the Map Point program has several different versions of the route ranging from 2096 miles to 2304. I feverishly punch numbers as my wife dreams in an adjacent room while I try to figure the distance and the number of days and the number of miles per day that need to be done in order to make it back in the allotted number of days. When one set of data is not acceptable, another set of numbers swiftly takes its place in an attempt to find the surest, smoothest and shortest route across the northern plains. I’ve calculated by dividing the number of days by the number of miles, the number of miles by the number of days, the number of miles that I think I’m able to ride in my current physical condition and the miles I think I’ll be able to do when my body gets acclimated to being in the saddle for several hours every day. My mind spins at the thought that there won’t be time to stop and smell the roses or even talk to people, but I know from experience that those things will happen and everything will be okay so long as I breathe and keep moving forward. It may seem neurotic, but neurosis is probably a large part of the makeup of a 44 year old touring cyclist.

It’s all speculation at this point and I’d be better off if I just went out and rode my bike. If history is any guide I’ll go out there and beat my brains out every day for a few weeks and end up far ahead of schedule. All the doubts and conjecture will fall to the wayside once the bike is loaded and the cranks are turning.