Power on
Finding that inner strength, even when the stoke is low

The past few months have been – to varying degrees and for a plethora of reasons – hard. Usually, I’d get through these tough times with a mountain bike ride. Pedaling through oak scrub and pine is one of the only things I know how to do when it seems like I don’t know how to do anything.

But it suddenly seemed as if I’d stretched myself so thin with work and life things, that by the time I got on my mountain bike to face steep, exposed terrain or big rock drops, I was spent. I just didn’t have it in me. I tipped over even just looking at an off camber berm or an uphill root. I could barely navigate my dishes; how could I hit that drop? I bailed on friend rides to watch trashy TV while my phone pinged email messages at me that I needed to respond to, but didn’t. I instead picked up my phone to check this year’s Tour Divide racers.

The 2023 Tour Divide had started the exact day my stress levels peaked. It was that day that 200 endurance cyclists were lining up in Banff, Canada, to start the 2,745-mile Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. Among the riders going south to Mexico were three of my personal heroes: Alexandera Houchin, Katya Rakhmatulina and, of course, Lael Wilcox. All three are badass ladies who continue to raise the bar for women in cycling. I put stars on all three of their dots on Trackleaders, and by the time these ladies made it to Idaho, my stress had crescendoed. I fell down on my couch where I remained, unable to get the chutzpah to ride my own bike.

I hid from the world and watched as Lael made her bold, brave statement, “Oh, I’ll catch them,” when a reporter informed her she was in seventh, placing behind six guys. I watched Katya’s bike fall apart twice and her having to detour into towns to get it fixed. I watched all three women push their bikes over mountain passes, through mud, rain, snow, wind, bears, skunks and cows. What they were all doing was really hard, and through it all, they (mostly) had huge smiles on their faces. 

Each photo showed them grinning or giving a thumbs up when most people would be giving a solid thumbs down. Videos had them in high spirits and often commenting on the beautiful scenery or how good they were feeling while they were pushing their bikes through nighttime mud with wind in their faces. They could have been covered in cow shit and cactus needles, and I think they’d still be smiling.

That same weekend, my friends and I were scheduled to go on a bikepacking trip, which I was trying to find an excuse to get out of. I had already shunned my mountain bike, and navigating one more difficult thing, fun or not, seemed impossible. But the route we had planned didn’t seem so hard, and because I was no longer willing to do anything hard, I said yes.

On our drive toward Telluride, the rain started coming down, and there was snow falling right where we were planning on camping that night. Even though we’d brought winter clothes for such an event, the thought of snow in June didn’t really appeal to any of us. So we made a left-hand turn instead of a right-hand one at Dolores and went to the desert instead. 

The sudden detour and change of plans turned our previously easy two-day, 60-mile trip into an almost 100 mile, two-day uphill slug – about 12,000 feet up from the hot Utah desert floor into the thin-aired mountains. We were so high that we found snow, and my winter wardrobe didn’t go totally unused. Our second – and final – day was our biggest. We summited and subsequently found the downhill singletrack we were supposed to reward ourselves with. However, the first mile or so was covered in fields and mounds of deep, slippery, off-camber snow-slush, downed trees and mud. And the only way to go was forward.

I slid my body and fully loaded bike under trees, over and down slushy snow, and slopped through mud. I was scratched and bleeding, and my bags were starting to fall off my bike. My bike was starting to fall off the mountain, and I was falling along with it all. I was struggling to carry my bike over a tree trunk when I met up with the conjoined group that had stopped to catch their bearings, and my friend sang out, “This is awesome!” 

I laughed loudly at what I thought was a joke, but based on the smile on her face, she clearly wasn’t kidding. I questioned her two more times before I truly believed that she was not kidding and actually understood what she meant. And that she was right, it was awesome. 

I wasn’t really thinking about whether or not I was having fun, if this was “good,” “bad” or “hard.” I was just focusing on not falling off the mountain. But when I did think about it, yeah, it was hard, but yeah, I was actually having fun. I was surprised that after 60 some-odd miles, my body felt great, the scenery was nice, and it was all actually awesome.

I was smiling (for the most part), and if anyone took my photo, and if I didn’t need to keep a death grip on my bike, I would have given a thumbs-up.

When we got home from our bikepacking trip, I logged back into the metaverse to see Lael’s smiling face as she pushed her way through strong headwinds in New Mexico. She was speaking with a scratchy throat saying that she needed to get an IV at a clinic in Abiquiu, because she kept throwing up and became severely dehydrated. She said her asthma was flaring up (yeah, this pro endurance athlete also battles asthma) because of the heavy headwinds, and it was slowing her down.

Katya had another mechanical and spent a night sleeping by the side of the highway. She was getting tired of riding on the pavement with cars, and then she and Lael, in both their videos, and Alexandera in a photo, all gave a thumbs-up.

What they were doing was really hard, but they all had big smiles on their faces, said how good their bodies felt, and then kept pedaling at the 11th hour toward the finish line.