I will the machine.

Photo © Tristan Sheldon

“… a researcher’s precision, and a poet’s restraint.”

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My name is Genna. I’m a 30-year-old trauma-informed writer, creative, and ultra-endurance cyclist. In 2013, before graduating high school, I was kicked out of my family home by my parents after an adolescence squandered by domestic violence, hoarding, and narcissistic abuse. Fearful, consistently displaced, but convicted to remain the authority of my future, I picked up bike racing, using the deconstruction of generational and cognitive patterns to use meaning as a road map forward.

For five years, I lived in a classic van to self-support my ambitions, and have since broken the 240-mile women’s Katy Trail record twice, planned and completed multiple solo bikepacking routes, and am currently on a winding but firm collision course with an exponentially greater challenge- the Trans-Am Nonstop.

This is an ongoing collection of essays documenting my progress, exploring thought itself, and parallel stories of human endurance where I invite you, dear reader, into the pulse.

Latest Posts

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  • We Interrupt This Program

    If a friendly gesture that is not returned as expected prompts a negative reaction, what was the real intent? _____ In 2023, I was almost exactly in the middle of my first fastest-known-time attempt when I passed another rider stopped on the edge of the trail. Minutes later, this same person rode up next to…

  • I will the machine.

    It means that forward motion is authorized internally. The mantra predates this blog by nearly a decade, and for most of that time, it primarily revolved around bikes. But I have determined more recently that it’s also the language of a self that has always operated from endogenous permission because the authority structures in my…

  • The Rider

    When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered that I wanted to be a jockey. But I was the tallest kid in my class by the fourth grade, so even then, I quickly accepted where I did not belong. When I was still new to bike racing, a fellow cyclist…

  • Helm’s Over, Into the Channel

    Through the Fog on the Harbor, I come to port. _____ Someone told me recently that it surprised them that I still care what anyone thinks. I replied, “What people think of you informs how they treat you.” I spent so much of my life in waves pulled upward by the storms of people that quiet…

  • Solve for Y.

    “Fake it ’till you make it,” does not work for a person whose survival has depended on orientation to cold truth. And I’ve already received my rejection letter from the Dissociation Association. _____ The person I was riding with that day pulled ahead up the climb, and I felt my body raising its fist at…

  • All Available Forces to the Front Line

    “They don’t make movies about your kind of success.” No, we write books. Coming this year. Early into adulthood, people I spoke to about my history would make comments like, “Well, you don’t show it.” I attributed that result to having developed in spite of a childhood of neglect and instability, but as the years…

  • Ring 0

    My smile has no shortcut; it is not generated with a command prompt. It cannot be recruited as a firewall against emotional violence. It is not a productivity interface, nor a nostalgic CD-ROM. It is a background program that can truly only be viewed, or shut down, by those with the code. You won’t know…

  • What Are You Looking at Me For?

    _____ This might be my final post of 2025. I’m not entirely sure, because I’m not consciously in charge of the timing of my writing. The engine fires on its own—if I don’t jump in, it goes rogue. I had planned to finish The Microcosm and use it as my first-year finale, but I have…

  • The Ghost You Are Chasing is Behind You

    A Conversation with Tycho Wagner _____ I arranged to speak with Tycho at length about his recent self-supported Katy Trail fastest-known-time. We had met before, on a gravel road, at a group ride, at the start of a race, yet still hadn’t really met. I shook his hand as he arrived on the coffee shop…

  • The Torch

    Disclaimer: This passage contains themes around end-of-life and grief of Papa, the person for whom I wrote The Eulogy of the Man Who Always Came to My Rescue. But it will end well. I promise. _____ This piece is unplanned. And I know this passage will likely not hit anyone else with the meteoric impact the…

  • Cathedral Nouveau

    Just before dawn, an owl flew right up to the towering pane of stained glass and scraped the soldering with its talons. It crashed into the pane again and again, whilst the glow from behind the opaque window set fire to the bird’s eyes. As its shrill echoed off of great stone walls, the patron…

  • The Thoroughbred

    The spirit of I will the machine was fundamentally in conflict with my years riding horses. I was directing the autonomy of something else. Then, the bike raised my own to the second power. _____ Two years after moving into a van, a decision I made to stay committed to the expensive sport of cycling…

  • Take a Look at Yourself in the Sword

    Before I can finish writing the story of another, I have to look at something about my own. One day, when I was in elementary school, Papa took me to the park. I was spinning the faces of the tick-tack-toe game on the playground by myself when another little girl came up to me and…

  • In Pursuit of Paradox

    I was driving home from work last week on an evening with one of the more saturated sunsets I’ve seen in my life- violet clouds singed with orange, crepuscular rays streaming upward as if God was about to make an otherworldly announcement. The clouds then took on a strange, hazy filter until I traced the…

  • Goin’ Up on a Tuesday: A Question of Ethics and Advantage for a Record Ride

    This month, both the men’s and the women’s fastest-known-time records for the 239-mile Katy Trail were broken. The route is run from the western terminus in Clinton, MO to the east in Machens. The trail is predominantly flat with one section of subtle grades that stretches roughly 30 miles, and highly exposed for long and…

  • Fire on the Ground Floor

    A Meta Essay “My base isn’t sand, it’s… magma.” –A Letter to My Readers I created this blog with the intention of recounting my childhood for two reasons. First, the one thing a narcissistic family system cannot account for in their manipulation patterns is accurate documentation; they’ll insist to their death that you remembered it wrong,…

  • And Thanatos Said, “You Shall Not Pass.”

    I pressed through Nyx’s dominion with the moon floating centered with the break in the trees. The glitter of thousands of spider eyes caught by my headlight traced the edge of the trail for eighty miles or more. I found that deep rhythm I had been seeking, and it carried me further into the dark…

  • GB & the Diesel Mechanics

    Live tracking for my 320-mile time-trial can be found here. There’s not much of my route on Saturday that I haven’t seen. This is about internal exploration, so I’m alright with that. I’ll be starting from Mission Hills, Kansas between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m. on Saturday to find my rhythm and get the night riding…

  • Letters to Thanatos: A 300 Prelude

    Daemon of nonviolent death, We’ll speak in person soon, in a quiet place. Just when I started feeling steady, I up and upped the stakes on myself again. I’ve had some ask what the impetus is to keep coming back to the rail trail for big distances when I could just as soon start them…

  • We’re All Dirt: Trans-Missouri 300 Update

    This is a follow-up post to The Closing Argument: Trans-Missouri 300. “We’re all dirt,” Aaro said during our 62-mile ride yesterday, where I was still fussing with comfort issues on a new (sponsored) bike I’ve had for a week. It was the humble version of “We’re all made of star stuff,” which was part of the…