Epilogue -- Some observations about my adventure

Now that I'm home and I've rested some, I've had a chance to contemplate my bicycling adventure in its entire context. What follows are some thoughts, feelings, and observations about the whole trip, and about what's ahead for me. This is going to be a long post. Read what you want. But remember, this is my journal. It's ultimately for me. I'm trying to memorialize what's happening so that later in life I can read back over it and help myself to remember what happened, and what was going on in my head at the time. I'm not keeping a separate, private journal, so it's all here -- well, most of it; after all, some of what happens on the road, stays on the road --like in Vegas, only different.

I know better than anyone that my ultimate goal was to ride my trike from Pensacola to San Diego. I didn't make it. Oh, well. But please don't say to me, "Well, at least you tried." I did more than try. I pedalled a bicycle over EIGHT HUNDRED (that's eight-zero-zero) miles under some very, very difficult conditions. That's a long way. I spent 20 days on the road. I traveled in or through five states: Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Wow.

There was a time (several times, in fact) while I was on the road, when I was trying to decide whether, when, and how to abort the mission, that I was very sad (depressed even) and was struggling with the whole "quitter/loser/failure" thing. I'm over that. WAY over that. I came to terms with my limitations on this trip. I'm okay with it. I'm happy to be home. I'm even happier that I had a goal, that I made concrete plans to effectuate that goal, that I did more than just plan to effectuate it -- I actually got up off the couch and got onto a bicycle -- and that I did the very best that I could to realize my goal. I am proud of myself! I did not make it to San Diego, but I made it to Navasota, Texas. Wow! Good for me!

In making this trip, I learned A LOT about myself. Some of it I kind of already knew, but either didn't accept or was in denial about, and some of it I discovered anew. None of it is bad. It just is what it is. It's me -- for better or worse. In some ways, I'm much stronger (mentally, physically, psychologically, emotionally) than I thought that I was. In other ways, not so much.

Here's what I'm most happy about: I actually did something big for myself. Don't get me wrong. I've accomplished many things in my life -- big things. I have a lot of education. I have a career. I own a home. I still have money in the bank (not a ton, but enough). I have great friends who have been very, very supportive. But in relation to accomplishing personal goals (as opposed to career and financial security goals), I have had a difficult time in life moving beyond the mere planning stages. I can plan the hell out of things. With this trip, I actually did it. I minimized my needs down to two small bags, lashed them to a bicycle, and rode away from everything and everyone that gave me security in life. That's big!

So even though I did not realize my ultimate goal of riding my trike from Florida to California, I did something HUGE for me, and I'm happy about it. Despite all the pain and misery I experienced along the way, I will FOREVER be grateful that I did it, if for no other reason than I got to meet and travel with some exceptional people. Ryan, Bryan, Mike, Carol, Jeff, and Dave are all wonderful people -- truly salt of the Earth. While we all had our own individual personality characteristics, we were amazingly compatible, considering that we were all from different places, of different ages and genders, and from different backgrounds. I suppose the commonality of our goal -- to bicycle across the continent -- was what made it work. I wish everyone the greatest success in realizing their goals, both in relation to this trip and beyond.

In considering my need/desire to stop riding and come home, I have identified a few contributing factors. Please hear me when I say there is nothing and no one to blame. There is no fault here. Ultimately, I (me, myself, and I, and no one else) made a variety of decisions along the way that led me to the conclusion that I did not want to continue on this journey. Internal and external factors affected my ultimate decision, but nothing and no one made me stop. It was a decision I made for myself. What follows are some contributing factors, but I'm not interested in listing them as justification for my decision; what I'm more interested in is what they taught me about myself.

Let's start with my level of fitness. When I decided to make this trip a reality, I was admittedly grossly out of shape. I was significantly overweight. I had been sedentary for a long, long time. Part of my decision to take this trip was to motivate me to get fit, get in shape, lose weight, and start living a more healthy, active lifestyle. After all, I'm not getting any younger. And I'm starting to feel the ill-effects of my sedentary lifestyle. So last year, I started making changes to my lifestyle. I tried several things. It was hard to break old habits. It wasn't until August that I got truly serious about burning calories and building endurance. That didn't give me much time to lose a lot of weight and build muscle. But I trained hard. Nearly every day. I still struggled with the diet aspect of it all, but I made tremendous progress in a relatively short amount of time. I wouldn't have been The Biggest Loser, but I lost nearly 30 pounds of fat, and gained a fair amount of muscle, before I left. I constantly worried about my fitness level for this trip, and almost aborted the mission in January because of it, but ultimately I hoped that I had done enough, and that I would be able to build upon my fitness level along the way. Here's what I discovered: Riding 50 miles on a bicycle was difficult. Thankfully, we didn't ride 50 miles every day, especially in the beginning. At the end of a 50-mile day, I was dog tired. In the beginning, my knees bothered me and contributed to my overall level of discomfort. Over time, they got better. It also got easier, over time, to ride 50 miles. Anything over that, however, was very difficult, especially when there was a headwind or hills, or both. I found that, in some ways, I was getting stronger every day -- especially in my legs. Despite the calories I was ingesting with chocolate milk and Little Debbie, I was still losing fat, which was a good thing. At the same time, however, I felt my overall health diminishing. I wasn't sleeping well at all, so I wasn't rejuvenating overnight like I needed to. I suspect that shivering all night actually zapped my energy and lowered my immune system. More about that later. An exceedingly poor diet also contributed to my progressively worsening mental and physical health. Ultimately, as we got closer and closer to the mountains of West Texas, I knew that I was not in the kind of physical shape necessary to maintain the mileage while climbing serious altitude. When I got a head cold, I knew my body was telling me to stop -- at least for awhile. So I did.

Probably the next major contributing factor was food, which I grossly underestimated. I knew that I would have to increase my caloric intake, given the level of exertion. What I did not realize was that we would not have access to more healthy eating options. The route we were on took us along country roads and through very, very small towns. Populations rarely exceeded 1,000 people. Our options were almost exclusively convenience stores, small country grocery stores, feed stores, etc. The food selection in these places, even in the small grocery stores, was sometimes sketchy. And we had to think about the caloric value of foods. One can theoretically eat an entire bag of baby carrots, but there aren't many calories in carrots. Thus, one would have to follow that bag of carrots with a giant Snickers or a honeybun or something with high carbs in order to sustain enough energy to pedal 15-20 miles to the next store. At the end of the day, while camping, we had tiny stoves and a single pot to cook in. We couldn't afford the time or energy or fuel to cook a big, healthy meal. Most people made Ramen noodles or Lipton's rice packets or mashed potatoes, if they cooked. If not, it was peanut butter on some type of conduit -- bread, cracker, tortilla. When we found ourselves in Walmart, I would buy several apples, oranges, and bananas, but they're heavy to carry on a bike, so weight of food was an issue, too. As for food prepared by others (like at a restaurant), there weren't too many of those along the way. We did manage to have a sit-down meal a few times, but it was restaurant food -- usually hamburgers, pizza, fried chicken, cheese sandwiches, etc. No vegetable plates. Unless you consider french fries and onion rings to be vegetables. So diet was a major issue. For future endeavors, I will definitely need to consider this aspect of a trip, since there is no doubt in my mind that my poor diet along the way significantly contributed to my diminishing physical -- and mental -- health. Multivitamins, which I did take, can only do so much.

Next: the weather! OMG!! It was cold. No, it was beyond cold. It was downright freezing. Day after day. Night after night. I didn't have the right gear and couldn't do anything to change it. There were times when I wore every stitch of clothing that I had to bed and still wasn't warm. Those were some miserable nights. Everywhere we went people were complaining about the weather. It was an aberrational winter -- everywhere. The worst in decades. Some people are better able to acclimate themselves to changing conditions. I am not one of those people. I don't like the cold. That's why I live in Florida. Still, I knew before leaving that we would face some cold temperatures. We were leaving in mid-February, after all. I just didn't anticipate, and wasn't able to adequately adapt to, the persistent cold and wind. It zapped my energy and wore me down. For future endeavors, I will need to make better gear choices, or else plan everything for the summer months on islands in the Caribbean.

Okay, so those were some of the major contributing factors. Here are some things I learned (or confirmed) about myself. Again, they're not negative things. They just are what they are. I'm sure they contributed, as well, to my decision to leave the road. I'll just say it: I'm a spoiled, middle-class, American girl. I like creature comforts. Not necessarily extravagant things, but to many in the world, they are luxuries: running water, flush toilets, hot running water, beds, real coffee with real half-and-half, warmth however generated, and hot, nutritious food. Had I been warm, the camping aspect of the trip would not have bothered me so much. I had a roomy tent, a comfortable sleeping pad and a pillow. I was just too cold. Because of that, I would have stayed in more motels along the way. But a large part of riding with a group is making the necessary compromises along the way. Different people had different budgets and different needs/desires in terms of where they laid their head each night. Unfortunately, all the camping we did was a compromise that I think compromised my ultimate success. The alternative for me was to break from the group and do what I thought I needed to do to succeed. However, I didn't think that I could have succeeded alone. And didn't want to make this trek alone. That's why I advertised for companions to begin with. So it was a Catch-22 situation. And ultimately a no-win situation. I wish that I had been strong enough mentally and emotionally to stay behind when I got sick, rest up, then continue on alone. But I knew that I was not strong enough. I learned that about myself. The conditions of living on the road were too much for me to negotiate alone. I admire those like Carol (and many others) who can do it. Power to you, girls!

Here are a few other random observations about the trip:
1) I felt very out-of-touch with the world. We caught bits of news here and there, but I felt very isolated from the general population.

2) Being so out-of-touch led to a certain amount of mental dullness. Although we talked during stops, I lacked mental stimulation, especially the kind of fast-paced, in-your-face stimulus I was accustomed to in "the real world."

3) Our nation's roadways are in serious disrepair. And they are not even remotely friendly to non-motorized use.

4) People lose their minds, and their civility, when they enter a motorized vehicle. I found myself creating new expletives to hurl at drivers, since the standard ones seemed ineffective.

5) We saw a ton of road kill. By far, the majority were dogs. People in the country apparently having little regard for their dogs. They live on busy roads, but don't bother to confine or constrain their dogs in the least. Dead dogs littered the side of the roads. It was very, very sad.

6) Speaking of dogs. I had several close encounters. Usually, a stern shout "No!" would do the trick. But not every time. I didn't carry mace because I didn't want the wind to carry it back to me. I also didn't know how I would steer and change gears and manipulate some device while trying to keep my arms, hands, neck and face away from gnashing teeth. One dog, in particular, went for my left bicep, but missed. It then sunk its teeth into my left pannier. Although I was pedalling hard, it yanked me backwards. While screaming, I swung my left arm backwards as hard as I could, nearly pulling my arm out of socket, trying to get him to let go. When he did, the force sent my bike careening off the right side of the road. I managed to correct myself before heading down an embankment and into a pond. It was a truly frightening moment.

7) Rumble strips should be outlawed. If you're driving a car and are (a) drunk, (b) falling asleep, (c) on the phone, (d) shaving your legs, or (e) all of the above, then you deserve to run off the road and into a tree. Rumble strips should not be there to save you.

(8) Buy stock in Dollar General. They are EVERYWHERE. When there was absolutely nothing else in "town," there was a Dollar General. Seriously, they must belong to the rabbit family.

(9) We met some AMAZING people along the way. Even in passing, people were friendly and encouraging. Others went out of their way to befriend us. Every single day someone (usually more than one person) confirmed that we were out of our minds. It was priceless.

Okay, I think I've exhausted myself about this whole bicycle trip. I've been writing forever. 'Nough said -- at least for now.

So how now, brown cow? What about the PCT? What, indeed. It was, after all, my original goal. The bicycling thing was merely an intended prelude. There was a time on the bike trip, when I was at my lowest, that I thought to myself, "If I can't do this, I surely can't do that." I'm not so sure about that anymore -- now that I'm rested and warm, sitting on my comfy couch in my living room.

Here's what I'm actually thinking about that whole endeavor: I need to get it out of my system. I've been pining to hike the PCT for over a decade now. If I don't at least go out there and do it, I'll never know. Like the bike trip, if I make it only 20 miles, or 200 miles, or 2,000 miles, then I will have made it that far. I need to go and see for myself what it's all about. I may like it, or I may not. I may finish the whole trail, or I may not. Whatever. I have the time and money to do it, so I should do it.

In many ways, it is entirely different from the bike trip. I will be hiking alone. Which is to say that there will be approximately 300 people starting the hike within four weeks of each other. The vast majority will start the week after the kickoff party, so I will not really be "alone." It is common for people to form loose associations along the way, hiking and camping together as their hiking styles permit. But I will be able to hike at my own pace. If I want to hike only 5 miles a day, I can. I can't sustain that over time if I have any desire to reach Canada before the snow flies, but my point is that I can do what I need to do, when I need to do it. To me, hiking alone along the trail is far different from bicycling across the country alone. I can't say that it's less perilous, but it seems less perilous to me. And hiking is more predictable. You hike as far as you want in a day, then you drop your pack and lie down wherever you can find a nice spot. Of course, water in the desert is a HUGE concern, so where and when you drop your pack is contingent in some respects on water sources, or at least your own water supply at the time. And unless you're in a town along the way, your only choice is to stealth camp, so you don't have any tempting alternative. Mentally, I think it's harder to stealth camp when you know there is/was a more comfortable alternative that you could afford. When it's your only choice you learn to deal with it. It makes town stops that much more enjoyable.

So I think I'm going to fly out to California in mid- to late-April and hike the PCT. In the meantime, I will make some gear changes and work on identifying better food choices for the hike. I will continue to train, as well. I may even take a few training hikes somewhere. I will also cyber-stalk the guys as they make their way out west.

Again, thank you all for being so supportive of me during my bike trip. It meant a lot to me. I will need support, as well, on the PCT, so I hope you'll follow along with me. I will post blogs occasionally between now and then, just to stay in the habit and to update everyone on my mental and physical process of preparing. Feel free to email me or post comments. Otherwise, do something BIG for yourself, whatever that means to you.