Overview

In the summer of 2005, between my first and second years of graduate school, I rode my bicycle from Austin, Texas to Anchorage, Alaska. It took 70 days and it changed my life. There were 19 of us on the team that rode the spine of the Rockies and I'd be lying if it went smoothly everyday. We were a bunch of young people wanting to have an adventure and to make an impact and many of us got slapped in the face with the reality of averaging about 75 miles a day through rain, wind, and blistering heat. Sitting on a bike for up to 8 hours a day, though, gives you a lot of time to think about life and the direction you want it to go. The imperitave to think deeply became stronger the more we interacted with the cancer organizations, hospitals, and patients along the way. By the end of the summer, I barely cared about the ride and the adventure; it was more about getting my priorities in life rearranged. I'd like to say I came back a changed man, but it wouldn't be strictly true. Rather, the seeds planted began to grow and now, even years later, I still think back and remind myself that I can nudge my life a little closer to the ideals I established while I pedaled mile after mile on the road to Alaska.

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Back in 2005, I wrote this about myself for the organization's blog:

"Well I'm a graduate student in the aerospace engineering program. (which probably makes me the oldest rider in the group this year!) But, when I'm not studying religiously I like to get involved in just about everything from soccer teams to international engineering contests. I really enjoy getting outdoors and I think it's even better when I get to spend time with friends."

And I wrote this about "Why I Ride":

"It seems everyone I know has lost someone to cancer. And in my own family cancer has been present. Odds are high that if you live long enough you're going to probably experience it yourself. But what can I do? I'm not a doctor and I'm not rich. I figure the best I can do is participate in a worthy charity event that can take the funds we raise and apply them to what they know needs the most funding. Sure the bike ride will be cool, but the cake beneath the icing will be knowing that maybe somewhere the quarter million dollars we raise will be able to help someone who truly needs it."

I think both of those things are more or less still true. I probably should have studied harder, though, since I got my first and only "C" in a class I should have got an "A" in, except that I was more interested in the clubs and this team than studying for the final. Also, we ended up raising quite a bit of money, but we also spent a lot of money. I don't recall what the ratio ended up being, but I know we donated about $100,000 to the MD Andersen center. We were the second team to make the journey and a lot of what we were doing was new, including trailers, racks, and so on that future teams benefited from. I promise you that we ate terribly with too few calories to save as much money as we could.

Also true was my line about cancer being in my own family. A few years ago, I lost my dad to Leukemia. I held his hand while we removed his breathing tube and let him go. Damn, that was hard. And it reminds me again why cancer is a personal struggle at a global scale. 

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My job on the team was the Route Coordinator for the Rockies team. (There was another team that travelled up the west coast.) This meant that I had a team of five or six people and we worked to figure out what cities we would travel to, the roads we would ride to get to them, and then find volunteer hosts to house and feed us. We tried our best to line up our dates with cancer events, such as walks, and to schedule times at hospitals and with local cancer groups. This was an interesting job for me and, frankly, it took the tremendous work of everyone on the team to pull it off as well as we ended up doing. It's not easy to cold call a church or "friend of a friend" and ask them to house 19 college students and, "Oh by the way, can you feed us dinner and breakfast and maybe even make us lunch too?". But everyone on the team got the job done and, even out on the ride, people kept working to improve the situation. There were lots of times people would walk into a fast food restaurant and ask for free food for the team and somehow snag pizzas, subs, chicken buckets, and so on.

I also ended up being the unofficial public relations guy. Probably because I managed the route coordination so knew the hosts, I wrote the longest blog posts, and I was (I think) the only graduate student. I ended up enjoying this role quite a bit and it led to me doing other public relations work in the future.

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One thing I'll say is that we learned how to suffer. There were days where I could barely tick the pedals over I was so tired, and I'd still have several hours to go. I recall a day in Montana where I was fried. I had nothing left in the tank and there was a big mountain climb in front of me. Fortunately, there was a service station and I bought a Snickers bar. I was so depleted that I could feel the energy of its sugars coursing through my body after a single bite. Another day, it was pouring rain for hours. I was totally soaked, lightning started popping all around me, the wind was blowing in my face, and cars were spraying me. I also remember a day in Canada where we cycled in a frigid mountain valley with mist and rain. I stopped after two hours at a team rest area and I needed help to pry my nearly frozen fingers off my handlebar long enough to get a sandwich and then back on the bike. 

A lot of people have asked me if I became Superman by the end of the summer, able to ride infinite miles without breaking a sweat. In short, yes. I recall a day in Alaska, riding with a teamate up some steep mountain and having a conversation while dancing on the pedals without breathing hard. My first 100 mile ride of the summer nearly killed me, but by the end I could ride 100+ miles before lunch and not need a nap. Getting to that point required breaking my body down and rebuilding it. Roughly, the first week or so broke me down little by little until I got sick. Most of the team got sick around this time for the same reason: you just can't ride that far day after day without recovery and come out unscathed. But for the next eight weeks, we all got a little stronger. Our bodies adapted, our minds rewired themselves, and away we went.

That's not to say there wasn't still some drudgery. I recall being in Oklahoma somewhere, riding by myself, and the song "How many miles, must a young boy walk before you can call him a man?" was running through my mind in cadence with my pedaling. I changed the word "walk" to "ride". Over and over and over and over that phrase bounced around my head. It was driving me nuts. I didn't have a music player, so there was no way to drown it out. I must have mentally sung that phrase a thousand times. To this day, I can't hear that song without cringing.

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The three most common questions I got were:

1. Where did you start? From the first day, people who asked this were impressed, even though it had only been 60 miles or so. By the end, some people didn't believe us.

2. Where are you going? It was like question 1, except in reverse. Day one, people found it hard to believe. Day 70, people were still impressed we'd go that far in one day.

3. How did you use the bathroom? This one is funny because I've heard that pilots, astronauts, long distance runners/rowers, and so on get this one too. For us, when we were far away from a restroom, we got real good at finding groves of trees, even in the middle of the plains of Wyoming or Kansas. Or maybe we'd find a ditch by the road just deep enough to hide us. It also helped that we were often riding the back country roads to minimize the amount of cars zipping by us.

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I used a teamate's laptop to write my blog posts. This worked out pretty well until we got to Canada and we camped in the wilderness more often. No power meant no laptop and so my journal entries tail off. I roll my eyes at my past self for not just grabbing pen and paper and at least jotting some notes down.

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My final thought for this post is to consider the question, "Would I do it a second time?". My answer is "no". It was an adventure, I learned more about myself and the real world, and I cherish the memories. However, like my Te Araroa trek in 2017, I had a nagging feeling by the end that I wasn't being that productive. People would hug us and, with tears in their eyes, tell us how wonderful we were. Total strangers put us up in their beds and got up at 4:30 AM to make huge breakfasts for us. One time we were even in the center of a circle of people all praying for us. It was always give, give, give to us and (I felt that) we were barely doing anything for them. The balance was not there in my personal accounting and it stripped away some of the fun. Much better for me, I found, is working hard for causes such as LiveStrong and FIRST robotics. I love a good adventure and pushing the envelope, but it has to have direct purpose and allow me to work for others.

I hope anyone who finds these posts enjoys reading them. And if no one finds them, that's okay, sometimes these things are important to share with myself.

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I used to have all sorts of pictures. Unfortunately, they were stored on rewritable DVD. It no longer seems readable. I continue to look or solution. In the meantime, it's just text and your wonderful imagination.