I appreciate your patience while so much has broken in my hands.
For the first time in nearly a year, I had a normal week on the bike. I put my ultra rig back together after harvesting it for parts recently, took a spin around the neighborhood, and didn’t want to put it away.
The next day, I went out at dawn and chugged slowly on the gravel. On a climb 16 miles in, I soaked my face in the boggy sunrise and thought,
I will never take simply feeling slow for granted again.
And I took myself on a day trip of a place I already know as home. I finished overheated, hoping for the weather to ride again tomorrow. And the day after that. I wrapped up the week with over twelve hours in the saddle, and none of them were spent feeling like a foreigner on my own machine.
“One day it’s just suddenly going to be right,” a friend said to me on the trail one day, when they found me sulking on a bench.
You called it.
I have suffered a lot. Hating the thing that has offset that for so long is especially suffocating.
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The bad news is I couldn’t solve everything soon enough to make Mishigami possible, and so that has been shelved until 2027.
The good news is, one, I don’t need an event to go flip off across state lines solo; and two, the runway is clear for me to target the one other thing I said I was going after this year—an attempt to take back the Katy Trail FKT. All of the self-study I used to figure out why I was in so much pain on my bike can now be applied to determining how quickly I can rebuild the engine.
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Over the weekend, I interviewed three women from separate corners of bike racing for an article that became significantly more fascinating than I anticipated. The conversation around small fields and cut programs abounds, and I wanted to learn more about that without any predetermined theories. The goal, as is now the standard when I bring anyone else’s voice into my writing, was to try to understand how each of them experience the sport and their place in it, which is a taller order than simply asking for opinions.
A pattern persists for all four of us. Over the coming days, I will be pitching this piece to larger publications because these conversations are bigger than my little blog, and I want to know if my Anderson Cooper roleplay has merit elsewhere.
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I know that I have both readers that admire that I keep dreaming despite how precarious everything is for me, and those that mock me for it (I’m often one of them).
What may be less obvious is that all of it is evidence.
I will the machine. 