I will the machine.

Tag: biking

  • Endogenous Rex

    Inquiry of a Soloist at The Big Rub Gravel Race

    First of all, you should know I accomplished the mission.

    My life force was just starting to recover from the burglary that is burnout, and I just went and dumped my savings on the trail, again. I have so been missing the 100+ mile days that I just couldn’t spare this year because I had to use all of that steam for life logistics; I finally caved and turned a race into this weekend trip archaeological dig.

    All last week, I just had to sit with myself and solve nothing on purpose. I still got on the bike because I can’t rest in a cage, even with empty legs. Day by day, a little more of the tension left, until one day I just felt high as a kite on nothing but a strong coffee. As unrealistic as it was for my circumstances, my expectations for myself just left, and were replaced by this intense interest to be hyper-aware of myself and my effect on other people.

    And that’s because you, dear reader, are whispering to me that I have one inside a collective organism that yells that I don’t.

    While I’ve been clawing at progress that seems unattainable, I’ve become more conscious that support doesn’t look like what I thought it would. It isn’t overt or exclamatory- sometimes it’s unstated entirely. I’m finding allyship in people who have said little more than “good morning.”

    I’m a words person… obviously. But 90% of human communication is non-verbal. So, what would happen if I started to listen more closely to that than I already do?

    With the help of a few sponsors, I registered for The Big Rub, packed my overnight things, and started toward Sedalia- 70 miles away. As eager and awake as I was, I kept the reigns tight to protect my energy. The first 35-miles were tense with anticipation, but otherwise effortless.

    Westbound on the Katy Trail out of Boonville, though, is deceitful. If you aren’t careful, a mild but steady grade for the whole stretch to Sedalia will pilfer from you. I had only ever ridden this section the opposite way, so I underestimated it.

    As the trail climbed, so did the temperature inside the humid tree tunnel. The slog to Pilot Grove took more from me than some full-days have in past years. I rolled up to Casey’s feeling like I needed to sleep in a ditch. I hadn’t eaten anything solid since breakfast, so I forced food down despite being entirely repulsed by it. A little caffeine and more Gatorade in my bottles, and I was off again.

    12mph. Then 11.

    10, 9, 8, 7, and finally 6.

    At mile 57, I stopped and made a phone call. I couldn’t keep myself grounded so I needed someone else’s voice. Being capable of double-centuries yet being so out of sorts in under 60 miles was more than just an off day; it was a reminder of the deep exhaustion I was trying to respect without entirely giving up on what I loved. I was still falling apart.

    I reached Sedalia after a push-pull cycle of trying to manage heat stress without being out in it any longer than necessary. Once I got into my hotel, I ticked boxes on the recovery checklist while reassessing everything about my plan. I came for a 60-mile race, with the logical expectation that I wouldn’t be very sharp, but now I was considering if the wisest choice would be to drop to a shorter distance to save myself, but still show up. I sat with that for the entire evening and let me tell me how I really felt about it.

    I didn’t change course.

    After feverishly processing my thoughts on my phone that night, I woke up before my alarm on race morning with everything but my legs feeling fully charged. I packed my bags again and as I rolled my bike through the hotel lobby to check out, the desk agent made prolonged eye contact with me while he said “Thank you”. Before I walked out the door, he chimed again, “Did you have a nice stay?”

    “Yes I did,” I said.

    What a lovely morning.

    I got to the race venue and dropped my bags off at registration. Shortly after, I felt a woman coming over to me. When I looked up, I noticed she was looking at my bike first, and then she asked,

    “You’re Genna, right? I was at your presentation at the Optimists Club.”

    I was in a dress and had eyeliner on that day; now I was in Lycra and scuffed sunglasses. The bike was the familiar one. I felt more eyes on me while I buzzed over someone who listened to my story in a meeting room now being inside its events. As I moved about the venue, I was conscious of how the internal pressure was brushed gently away like dust over the course of that hour.

    Like it was being politely handed back to its owner.

    Everything internal was dead quiet when the field lined up for the start. At the horn, I found a comfortable spot in the neutral rollout when those eyes appeared again, and moved up. I knew this individual strategically followed the wheels of a couple friends in events past, and if that happened today, I was going to go with them. So I chose my wheel, and silently planted myself there.

    The race went live and at 23mph on the gravel trail, I felt my disadvantage within minutes. As the race started to shuffle, fatigue paired with my annoying tendency to let gaps form was already making me sweat. I gradually fell back to find help closing them, knowing that if I could find a flow again, I could recover. Soon, someone I used to know alerted me that we’d be turning into a field, and gave me a bit of helpful advice.

    The last time this person had spoken to me, about a year prior, it was in condemnation. There was no trace of that here. There was nothing to gain from the assist, and no expectation of a return. Just “Here, you might need this.”

    The field was uphill and I lost contact with the front group. This section was rough and required high-end power I did not have, so I just kept it steady. Once on the road, I reoriented to that rhythm, with few people around. Now I was happy.

    What followed was the acceptance that I was not vying for a win today. To my surprise, I didn’t crack on myself for that once. The course then opened up to some of the most ethereal roads I’ve ridden in years- steep and exposed rolling gravel climbs flanked by chiccory, under just enough sun to singe the fields in gold, and low clouds to delay the oncoming heat. I entered an absolute flow state, jockeying back and forth with a few other riders in the waves of the road, but conversing mostly with just myself.

    On one of the steepest climbs of the day, someone else I used to know was cheering for passing riders. I stayed inside my shroud as I approached, and only as I came within feet of them did they decide to walk away. And then I heard “great work!” called out within a couple seconds.

    I can’t be certain that was for me, but if being aware of inflection has taught me anything…

    I kept cruising, eating more frequently than is usual to be doubly-sure I could stay in this zone until something else broke it. I stopped at an aid station and almost snorted a shot of pickle juice (shit burns), and reveled at how in-control I felt. In the final 15 miles of the race, the heat was climbing and the wind was in my face again. I felt the slow shut-down approaching as I was soloing back into town- until I heard derailleur clicks from behind me.

    Now back on city pavement, I looked back to see a man I had passed on one of the longer climbs gaining on me in his aero bars.

    How lucky am I? Are you really about to make my day?

    And everything came back online. I shifted up the cogs, threw some steady power into the ground, and started scanning for that final corner. I chose my line, started to make my turn, and as I stood up to sprint home, my left cleat unclipped from my pedal. A group of spectators in the grass started yelling at us both as they saw it. I recovered it, threw myself back over the bars of my bike, and the challenger eclipsed me about 50-feet from the line. I finished that race exasperated and laughing about how animated that finish was, and stopped next to the man who defeated me to bask in it.

    I finished third overall for the women’s field, with the note that one woman who surged past me on a climb late into the race would have put me into fourth if she’d not gotten off course. It was her first gravel race ever, and she’d had the bike for two days.

    I grabbed a soda to stave off a post-race bonk, and then got some real food. I recognized someone else from one of my presentations and he remembered me immediately.

    Without much to say, I strapped by bags back onto my bike, and walked around the building to get ready to ride home. The women’s 50+ winner (and 2nd overall) approached me for the second time that day to let me know that I was actually officially second, since she raced in a different category.

    It just didn’t really make a difference to me.

    _____

    Over the course of that day, I said very little to anyone. And for the first time I can remember, it was entirely because I was just content floating on my own- not because I didn’t know who to trust.

    And without many words at all, they started speaking volumes to me.

    People approaching and lingering.

    Others telling me about their ride before they remembered to share their name.

    “Hey, Genna,” from someone I don’t really know but seems to understand my energy anyway.

    Those eyes that won changing their path when they see me standing around a corner.

    A supporter that finishes my sentence.

    Someone I considered a friend that turns their whole body away when we make brief eye contact.

    The human condition is designed to recognize. Organized society forces us to lose touch with it for the sake of showing it what we think it wants to see.

    None of these people changed, but I did. The timeline was going one direction and after a sum of subconscious micro-decisions, I started walking a different one.

    I won’t sit here and tell you that you can simply choose to do that. I’ve personally never found any amount of self-help diatribe or rehearsed positivity to have an impact, really.

    But what does seem to work, to a degree that is almost woo-woo, is observation.

    It won’t lie to you by telling you that you don’t matter.

    _____

    I struggled through the physical shutdown again on the way home. I didn’t get upset with myself this time, though, even as I could hardly find words to respond to texts. I sat at that Casey’s again trying to wake myself up with a Red Bull/hydration bomb, and then stopped again at the end of those false flats for half-melted fudge pops.

    I crossed the river, hit mile 106, and came alive again.

    I finished 135 miles that day with one of the slowest speeds in a couple of years,

    and the book of “100 Reasons Why You’re the Problem” was slammed shut and finally thrown at them.

    Photo © Hannah Hartung

  • The Edge

    This is a follow-up post to A Foundation of Sand from May 24th.

    “I haven’t made a plan. I don’t know how I’m even getting to work, 40-minutes away, on Tuesday, let alone the days after that.”

    In the hours after I was crumbling on the patio of the coffee shop I wrote that from, remembering how many times I had been there…

    I remembered how many times I had been there, and how I had handled it. I looked over at my bike and felt something ease.

    I rode 40 miles to the lab, worked my nine-hour shift, and then 40-miles home that Tuesday. I was out the door at 4:30 in the morning, and back to the house after 7:00 in the evening. I ordered pizza, took a shower while I waited, and was in bed again just after 8:00. The schedule on Wednesday was the same. On Thursday I borrowed a car to stay out of the thunderstorms, and on Friday I was back on the bike. The van was delivered to me at work with a new pump, and I drove home. Reluctantly.

    That week was rough on me, but it felt good. So after I realized that another of the van’s tires was leaking from a bad rim (the spare was already on from the last time), I just kept going. A brand-new set of wheels for the van is on backorder but will be here in two weeks. I’m riding 80-mile days when it’s reasonable and babying the leak on the days I need to drive. It’s a little pathetic, but satisfying that I can sustainably handle this in a way that is absolutely unreasonable to many; my willingness to take the unfathomable path is my edge.

    I don’t know that I can ever translate the intensity of the emotion, the inadequacy, that I feel when I struggle like this often and have few people I can call even just to talk about it. People tend to minimize it, unintentionally, because each instance is small in isolation, and because my methods of independence lead me to solutions like 2.5- hour bike commutes twice a day and living in a van from 1985. The acceptance of extremes like that make me look so capable. But for me, a person who has teetered on the edge of not being enough for over a decade, it feels like I am somehow destined by some divine joke to lose anyway. To be cosmically, comically, torn open and kicked every time I take a step. It feels like I’m supposed to give up and to stop kidding myself. All of that is heavy even on a spirit that is just trying to survive, let alone chase something great.

    _____

    In June of last year, I moved in with a partner that eventually told me “You live your life by the edge of a sword.” The comment had multiple layers to it. It was observational, and I agreed with it, but it also held a nuanced implication that I was “too” something again. To him it meant I didn’t trust.

    To me it meant I didn’t trust sooner than it was earned.

    That relationship became dysfunctional over the course of ten months. Twice he told me to get out of the house and go to my van like I was a dog that had been caught chewing the furniture. His own family members told him how damaging that behavior was, and it transformed into just kicking me out of the bedroom because he needed his space. A space he had said was equally mine in words, but obviously not in practice. I had only had my new job for days when I picked up that sword, held it across my chest and said “enough.” In the couple of hours it took me to pack up everything I could take with me in the van, I watched him devolve from antagonizing to stupefied as I held up that standard I had warned him about. “If you think you’re going to relegate me somewhere else out of punishment because I’m my own person in your space, that’s where I am going to stay.” I flipped the choice he kept making, in an act of control he thought he had, and I cut the line.

    I have already lived that life once, and survived. I wasn’t going back.

    That was all at the end of March. I cried once- not because it didn’t matter to me, but because I have my wits so about me about what can and cannot stand that my own self-trust rocks me to sleep. I’ve been here so many times before. Although that snake still lifts its head and rattles “this is all your fault,” one side of the blade whispers back “you aren’t meant to stay here.”

    I listen faster each time. I am not faultless, but I am also not tactless. Over the years, through the thicket of so many friendships and romantic connections based on half-truths, or devoid of truth entirely, my eyesight and steel have both been sharpened. I’ve paid for that in advance by holding grace for longer than was quoted- the quiet part that the snake tends to ignore.

    I am back in this instability because I listen to the quieter voice. I am dealing with nearly incessant setbacks because that is the consequence of choosing to walk away from harm that comes from people. My parents, unhealthy partnerships, friends that aren’t really. Many can’t afford to leave toxic dynamics because of this very consequence- it doesn’t suddenly get sunnier when you leave.

    The vines often get thicker.

    And so, I draw my sword.

    _____

    For once, I am letting the unpredictability of the near future be. I have reached the limit of what I can control, evidenced by a wave of burnout in recent weeks, and using the bike as a tool of survival again. The fitness I’ll gain from riding to work for the summer (it isn’t a bad way to live even when the van is back to 100%) will be a hefty deposit in the bank for the future I have promised myself, even if I don’t know when it will come.

    Once I get there, I’ll get the added gratification of these posts to remember where I came from.~

    I have two longer posts in the works. ‘Projection, Your Honor: Learning to Trust the Part of You That Knows’ is scheduled for Sunday, June 22nd.

    And ‘The Microcosm’, my full monty of my five-year run of living in my van (that may or may not be over yet) is still in progress. This one is a hard write, but it deserves the time it takes.

    As always, thank you for being here.

  • Counting Up, and Counting Down

    I turned 30 today.

    In March of 2023, I made a social media post sharing my intent on making the Trans-Am Nonstop bike race my next big target. Historically, I love putting the proverbial cart before the horse and talking big game about my plans at the risk of them falling apart because, well, I hold myself to them better that way. Still, it was an outlandish jump from single-day ultras and week-long bike trips with hotel stays where I had recognized my love for the long haul; I had come to understand there that going bigger just required more gear and the ability to evolve on the move. I learned how quickly the body adapts to excessive mileage as long as you’re eating plenty and sleeping decently. I set 2025 as my goal year to assure myself that I had plenty of time to train, save for quality gear, and because I’d be turning 30.

    Here we are. Since that decision, I have learned through my fixation on mileage and speed data on my bike computer that numbers are limitations when they aren’t treated with due respect. Spend too much time trying to move too fast- overtrain. Set a strict date that doesn’t work out the way you hoped- unnecessary disappointment. Tell yourself you need to accomplish something by a certain age- realization that time doesn’t care about you or your goals. It’s all arbitrary, relative, and illusionary.

    All of this to say that we’ve made it to the dawn of Trans-Am 2025 and what I thought I needed two years to get myself together for, I’d still throw myself at last-minute if I had the opportunity. Supporting yourself riding 120, 150, or more miles every day for weeks is not something you piece together by the seat of your chamois, but the instinct to gas it is still there. The resources aren’t there right now though, and that’s just going to have to be okay. We’ll work on it. Alternatively, I get to drive and work a camera for the media team of the race’s faster cousin, Race Across America, this summer and can probably learn a thing or seventeen before my time finally does come. I am already dreaming of how I’ll write about that experience. I also have the opportunity to film a short documentary of a rider in the pro field at Unbound Gravel.

    But even while my big goals will sit on the backburner as I explore how to help tell the stories of others, I’m living in a hotbed of local gravel racing that I’m scrambling to get it together for. A whole host of events will happen within a two-hour drive from home in April and May, before I haul off for the aforementioned projects for most of June. We’ll see where the tailwinds push us and readdress the topic of ultra racing around then.

    Spring 2025 Race Calendar

    • April 5th- River Road Classic, 65 miles
    • April 19th- Furry Fifty, 50 miles
    • April 27th- El Chupacabra Grondo, 62 miles
    • May 3rd & 4th- Tour of Hermann Gravel Challenge, two 100 milers!
    • May 10th- Muleskinner Gravel Classic, 68 miles

    That’s a hot, HOT block of racing for someone who has been out of the game for a minute and is pushing the limits of a pretty clapped-out bike, but I’m hard pressed to sit anything out when it’s all basically on my doorstep.

    ~

    On my 29th birthday, I had a breakup. On my 28th, I experienced a mystery episode of severe abdominal pain that I suffered with all night and was driven to the emergency room for the next morning. Even though the occasion hasn’t meant much to me for a while, today I used it to daydream about the year ahead. I turned 30 today. I’ve been going grey since 19. With that comes a perceived loss of youth, but in some ways, I feel like I’m regaining one I didn’t get to explore fully the first time because I was too busy fighting. It’s taken this long to really unpack and let go and even though that work will never truly be complete, I’ve found myself capable of forgetting more often.

    So thank you for popping in to celebrate with me.

  • Fog on the Harbor

    In May of last year I went down to Arkansas for an experimental new ultra race. The massively popular Rule of Three, established in arguably the most bike-centric city in the United States, introduced a 200-mile category and I wanted in. It had been a spring of seriously unsteady income but the organizers got me a sponsored entry and a host of friends helped me put the rest of the pieces together.

    I took on the challenge with two objectives- add another ultra-distance merit badge to my proverbial sash and create a mini documentary of the experience with my phone. I found a handful of people also entered in the 200-mile event to ask one question, on camera- what are you in it for? Some seemed a little caught off guard by the question, and others delivered answers so nonchalant that I knew they were right at home on this horizon.

    The race started at 4:00 p.m. the day before the standard 100 and 50-mile distances and we had a 30-hour cutoff to beat. At mile 70, around 1:00 a.m. after hiking my bike up a steep powerline cut that spit me out to a dead-end road, I called for a ride back to town. I was aware this race was going to be a little rowdier than anything I had ridden before, but I went into it knowing that I was ready to take that step up. My limit turned out to be the building unsafety I felt from the combo of loose dogs in the dark, no-trespassing signs my navigation insisted I disregard, 20-miles straight of mostly unrideable (for me) singletrack immediately followed by mud pits and criminally steep powerline cuts that all slowed me to a drag. My body was in great shape but my mind already wasn’t, and I accepted that this was just not my style of race and not a reflection of some deficiency of mine before a support car even got to me. I missed out on getting the video content and the full-circle story I was hoping for, and so I had to settle for a 90-second Instagram reel that I am fond of but am equally haunted by.

    I still ache a little over abandoning the spirit of toughing that race out, but I had to call back that one question I had asked so many people before the race that I hadn’t taken the time to answer myself in entirety- what was I in it for?

    To briefly touch on themes from my past posts, I’ve labelled myself (or maybe my imposter syndrome has) as a major underdog whose drive to excel in the sport of gravel and ultra-cycling is mismatched with the reality of my life. My circumstances pretty consistently tell me that welfare kids from hoarding houses that feel safe absolutely nowhere can’t access, let alone succeed in, big-time athletic environments that eat resources by the shovel and demand consistent social connections. Despite those voices I persist, much to the discontent of my easily broken heart.

    And so I recognized easily that my answer to the big question was that I was in it in spite of everything- for the long haul and that one unsalvageable event wasn’t a threat to that. After a decade of chipping away at the confining factors that left me feeling so less than, I was rebelling again. I’ve experienced enough truly epic rides at this point that I didn’t allow one defeat to unravel that ideal for me, but it did remind me how fragile the pursuit of doing anything exceptional is.

    I talk about it so often because as if that saga wouldn’t be trying for anyone, I’ve inadvertently associated my efforts on the bike with the vindication of my broken adolescence. And for better or for worse, I don’t really want to untie them.

    I’m not sure I’ll ever write enough about the past to alleviate the weight of it, but ultimately it is time to direct these posts toward where I am now and where I hope to go, in spite of everything.

    I’ve been living in a town of 1,600 people for six months and in that time have had the most difficult time finding a stable new job (there are plenty of unstable ones). My boyfriend, Jeremy, has been propping me up and insisting that I not fold for something that doesn’t truly work for me, but I couldn’t have predicted it would be this difficult to even get a call back, and so I’m starting to sweat that my financial hiatus from racing might have to be extended into yet another spring. In the midst of that mess, I’ve been mitigating my job-board doom-scrolling and obsessive “apply” button-smashing by writing more, painting more, and reaching out to individuals I know in fitness and media for advice on potential longer-term ventures that complement life on a bike. The van has been parked on the curb, driven only every couple of weeks, I got my ass kicked by covid for two weeks, and I’ve gone through the motions of indoor training, riding outside when I can, running a 5k or two a week around the entire town, and will begin strength training again soon. I have some local target races I’m clutching to keep my goal-oriented capital-type-A personality engaged, and rejecting the expectations that come with turning 30 next month. Trans-Am is still the long game we’re playing even if it kills me.

    I have to remind myself daily that even though I’m deeply discouraged about how much I can’t do, I’m not allowed to let the mission slip away by not being ready when I finally can again. And as much as I am hellbent, maybe to my detriment, of creating this big story for myself, I am even more committed now to talking about it despite the massive political elephant in the room that might have me sounding a little tone-deaf. The loudness of all of those cogs turning literally keeps me up at night while I quantify the burden that passion has been on me, and I’m just going to let this life make whatever example out of me that it wants to.

    With a ridiculous fight, of course.

  • The Ghost of a Giant

    Meeting and Chasing an International Hero

    I haven’t yet become familiar with a successful competitive athlete with a story like mine. I’m sure they are out there. I hope they are. My whole “why” in endurance sport is to serve as an example of what can be done anyway, when the social support (namely, family and more than a few friends) that is so frequently a factor, the proverbial village of helping hands that it takes to reach a high level, is absent. The worry that maybe it can’t is the noisy, nocturnal rodent in the ceiling that I can’t seem to run off.

    In April of 2024, I sent a handful of emails to prominent female cyclists with questions about how they found sponsors, teams, struck the balance between responsibility and the pursuit of more, and I got exactly one reply. It was from Lael Wilcox, ultra-endurance rider, Trans-Am winner, and now Around-the-World record breaker.

    I had been following Lael passively for a while. Having grown up without any real role models, always fervently inspired and guided by something internal instead, I never identified any idols in my adult life either until recently. Something in my shift from interest in single-day podiums to point-to-point, multi-day events got me paying more attention to the voice and storytelling of those types of figures. From my very brief experience with bikepackers, people that embark on self-guided, self-supported, self-motivated, solo-survivalist passages are on a different wavelength than those that chase extreme output for a few hours to a day and then retire to climate control and hot showers at the end of the night. For myself, high-octane racing was the pure essence of sport in all of it’s golden and shadowed corners; bikepacking was temporarily stepping into an entirely different life.

    Although Lael’s epic accomplishments were unfathomable to me and dwarfed my solo expeditions that only lasted a few days and a handful of states, reading about her beginnings felt a little more relatable than I was used to. Stories of working in restaurants to save money for races and riding to them, riding to the start of already stupid-hard events was familiar. And having felt the frenzy of covering ground daily, the silent thruster that seemed to draw more power the deeper into the fatigue and the muscle soreness I got, being fast over days, weeks, somehow seemed less daunting than being fast for 100-miles.

    It inexplicably looked more possible.

    And so, when Lael set off from Chicago to break the women’s world record, with the campaign of it also becoming a global community ride for anyone to join her at any time, I started smacking the ceiling repeatedly with a broom every time that animal started scrambling, knowing it wouldn’t rid me of it but at least to get it to shut up every few hours. I kept eyes on her 170-mile-per-day average on Strava for the next three months.

    In the meantime, I continued having the most unpredictable year since I had moved away from my home city. Through hardship I had always trudged through by having some sort of beefcake ride or race plan on the horizon, and had historically been able to scrape just enough resources together to make them happen. But this was the year of rug-pulling, and every single plan I had for the summer fell apart like a sculpture of toothpicks. I did take one big leap-of-faith and moved back into a house with my new boyfriend and began the decompression ritual that comes with letting go of a life on-the-fly, and before I could dare to pencil much in on the calendar again, Lael was back stateside, cruising the coast of California toward the start of historic Route 66- her beeline to the finish of her record attempt back in Chicago.

    I now lived further from her track through Missouri than I had when she announced her plan, and I started pulling wires. My new boyfriend, Jeremy, was familiar with my wildness on a bike anecdotally, but hadn’t seen the intensity in use yet. I told him that Lael was on the way, and that I wanted to meet her, and that I wanted to do it in ultra-inspired fashion- a 450+mile round-trip bike ride from home to a strategically-planned intercept point, ride 75 miles with her to just west of St. Louis (if I could keep pace on a loaded bike), and be home in five days. I needed a lot to line up just right. I needed to predict her timeline that was not publicly posted, I needed the job that I had just started and had tried to ghost me to pay me so I could afford a couple cheap hotels, I needed the weather to stay temperate, and I needed my engine to run right for back-to-back days of hard riding I hadn’t been training for.

    And it all did. Flawlessly.

    I was ready by a Saturday to roll out on a Monday. Saturday night my overthinking habit served me in an unusually positive way- I realized my tracking math was wrong and I needed to leave a day earlier. After shit, anticipatory sleep, I began rolling south on Sunday morning, bound for the bunkhouse just east of Jefferson City, MO on the famous Katy Trail.

    The day was easy despite relearning to handle a bike with weight on the handlebars. 40 miles of rolling, buttery pavement dropped me at my first luxury gas station stop of the trip, and from there it was all flat, crushed limestone for 50 more to the spur into the dead-on-Sunday state capital. I hit the Subway downtown for an actual meal ten-minutes before they closed, and headed back to the trail for the last 13 miles to the bunkhouse.

    For just $10 a night, the Turner Katy Trail Shelter provides two floors of beds, a shower room, basic kitchen, and secure bike storage. The only drawback is that you have to pack in your own bedding. I had crushed a fitted twin sheet into my bar bag and precariously buckled a travel pillow onto my saddle, but with the night dipping down into the mid-40’s that night, I was kept awake for all but a few hours by shivers and a hyper-awareness of wandering brown recluses.

    Monday. This was the day I made the unknown haul to Rolla from Jefferson City (85 miles), through territory with no activity on cycling heatmaps. For expediency I knew I had to risk state routes as the backroads would all be unpaved, steep, and slow. It turned out to be the most beautiful stage of the trip as I entered the Ozarks and was met by rolling golden grass and rock walls, dipped in and out of river-valley towns, but the climbing only became steeper and denser as I neared Rolla. Over the crest of the last major climb, a cyclist who introduced himself as Matt ran me down and greeted me with “don’t usually see roadies out this way, they’re scared of the hills.”

    Yeah buddy. I told him about the mission I was on and he led me on a safer route to my hotel. We exchanged Strava handles and I carried on up the road.

    I checked into my hotel and immediately checked Lael’s location via the satellite tracker she had been carrying for her entire trip. She’d crossed the Oklahoma border into Missouri the night before, and stayed overnight just east of Joplin, roughly 170 miles away. She was now only about 60 miles from me. I had chosen Rolla as my meet point for two reasons- it was the closest town on her path that I could get to fairly directly, and it was my guess that she’d end her day’s ride in or near there based on her daily average. Her route across the world was visible from the start, but her stopping points were unknown without talking to Lael yourself. By this point, it was still early enough in the afternoon that I started to predict that she might just blow right through town in the dark. I needed to take care of my needs after 188 miles of heavy riding, so I cleaned up, grabbed some Steak-‘n-Shake from next door, and recapped with loved ones on the phone, refreshing the tracker anxiously every 20 minutes. I unloaded my gear from my bike and laid out a fresh skinsuit, and boiled with anticipation as I prepared to jump out onto the road and meet Lael Wilcox in the dark.

    At 9:04 p.m., September 9th, Lael crested the hill in front of my hotel as I stood over my bike with lights flashing. An escort vehicle following with its hazards on was a surprise to me, but as a hyper-vigilant person, it let me fully engage with Lael in conversation and not sweat passing cars. I asked her if the driver was Rue, her partner and photojournalist that had been documenting her ride.

    “No, it’s some locals that wanted to escort me to St. James because the roads are bad.”

    I hardly expected the worst roads she had ridden in the world, based on safety or surface, would have been in Missouri, USA. She insisted they had been great. Through the small-talk I heard the urgency in her responses. I had assumed that by this point in her effort, having only days to go in her globetrotting ride, Lael would be quite casual; instead, I recognized a similar intensity that I spend much of my life in. She was present, but she was on. I learned she was now trying to reach Chicago by day 108- two days earlier than her goal time. As we cut the darkness, I told her the bullet points of my life on a bike, that I lived in a van for five years to keep the dream alive, and that she was the only email that was returned.

    “Really?” the sharpness broke with what sounded like genuine surprise. “I really try,” she said. We talked briefly about finding sponsors in the ultra-endurance world, and she asked me what kind of racing I did prior.

    I said, “Criteriums, cyclocross, primarily gravel after that, but I don’t really jive well with most of that crowd.” She cracked a laugh.

    She told me she got exactly 7 hours of sleep every night, and that it came easily. As one who sweats everything, is kept up late into the night and hawks my alarm on race mornings, I was envious of that off switch. I avoided as many of the questions that I would have expected her to hear on loop throughout her trip as I could, while riding at her shoulder at 20mph along the frontage road of I-44, but made it a point to ask the most pertinent one to me at the time- “Where are you stopping tonight?”

    “Sullivan!” she declared through the wind.

    40 miles further up the road. My stomach dropped, but I was hell-bent. I told her I had planned to ride a chunk of the next day with her and asked what time she guessed she might start again in the morning, and started running all of my internal clocks. 30 minutes after meeting one of the few people I have ever genuinely revered, I bid Lael goodbye and let her know that I hoped to catch her in Sullivan in the morning. She went right, I went left and turned around at the entrance of a gas station.

    “Genna!” I hear from the window of the pickup that had been behind us for ten miles as it turned behind me. How the heck did this person know my name?

    It was Matt, the chance cyclist that had found me earlier in the day. Intrigued and inspired by the story I had told him about Lael and that I was on a mission to ride in her wake, he had come out to insure an uneventful ride out of Rolla. Like a plot device come to life, he and his excited daughter gave me a fast lift back to my hotel so I could more quickly get to bed and prepare to go find Lael again first thing the next morning. Like a cheesy sitcom joke, sleep didn’t come easily.

    I was on the bike and headed to Sullivan by 4:50 a.m. It was 49 degrees, completely dark, with some fog hanging in low spots on the road. I put the one t-shirt I had brought with me on over my skinsuit for minor protection from the crisp draft I was very underprepared for, with the spirit of “deal with it, bitch, we gotta go.” I kept the pace higher than usual for a loaded ride, caught between trying to keep the engine warm, and trying to cover the 40 miles fast enough to relax my sore legs for a moment before trying to keep up with a world-record-chaser. I got to town at 8:20. I took my goofy shirt off and refilled my bottles in a park bathroom across the street from Lael’s hotel, then decided a few minutes later to grab a quick breakfast from the gas station. I hawked the tracker watching for the moment it went live again so I didn’t miss her exit. I rolled over to the hotel entrance with a container of biscuits and gravy and sat on a bench. I opened the lid and took a bite, and then looked at the tracker again.

    It was on, and showed her headed east away from the parking lot. My heart stopped and instantly shot through my throat. I threw my barely-touched breakfast in the trash can, grabbed my bike, and hauled out of there in full aero-tuck with a growling stomach. Crushing it through town, I took my phone out of my pocket and checked tracking again. I was gaining. A few minutes later, headed away from businesses and out toward the frontage road again, I noticed I was now ahead of her location and I slowed to stop. I rolled onto the edge of the road and pulled out a Little Debbie fruit pie from my handlebar bag, and ate it while I waited for Lael to appear over my shoulder again. The tracker showed her stopped at and intersection for a while, so I took a moment to breathe in some relief.

    It was then that I figured out the tragic delay in the tracker that undid the story from here forward. Another update, and she was somehow ahead of me again. She had been the entire time, and all of my waiting put me what was ultimately ten minutes back. Still, I got back in the saddle and flat cooked the pace for nearly an hour, full-throttle over every roller, hunkering down in every straight, pulling my phone out every few minutes to see if it was doing any good. Eventually, I encountered road crews doing repair work. I asked a worker in passing if another cyclist had come by recently, and he said “yeah, about ten minutes ago.”

    I kept the pedal to the floor into St. Clair, losing all confidence but still hoping the silhouette of another bike would appear over the crest of the next hill. Once I found traffic again, now at the end of my range for holding that speed with a packed bike, I turned off into a Casey’s parking lot, officially giving up the ghost. I grabbed a Red Bull from inside to trip the brain’s reward system and distract myself from my disappointment, my perceived screw-up. I sat down on the curb and stared at my phone. I gave myself a few minutes to pick myself apart, and then a large group of cyclists rolled up from the road. They began talking to me, asking me where I was headed and where I had come from, and I told them. Many of them hadn’t heard of Lael or her ambition at all, and after a few minutes, I became aware of how much more interested they were in who I was and what I had accomplished just to meet her than they were anything else. Someone chasing a world record had just surged through town not long before, but they just wanted to know about me.

    I said goodbye to them and started the last 30 miles to my next hotel. I rolled into Eureka physically sound, but emotionally frayed. I sat down at a Mexican restaurant and ordered a jumbo margarita on the rocks, queso, and a chicken quesadilla I had to force myself to eat. As is the way of the ponderer, I let my guard come down and asked myself the internal questions about how I, a person that historically removes herself from the path of others and carries a nearly unbearable tension when approached by strangers, could only recognize the true intensity of what I myself was doing through the recognition from strangers. I had accomplished my mission to meet a legend, albeit briefly, but I hadn’t gotten to ask her the larger questions and learn more about her process to the top.

    I was denied any more opportunity to draw comparisons.

    I was gifted the freedom to continue to wonder. To not count myself out because what advantages someone else may or may not have had.

    I punched the end of the broom through the ceiling and heard that obnoxious animal hiss, and saw golden daylight through the hole.

    ~

    That evening on the phone, while soaking my sore legs in the tub, I told Jeremy that I was ready to be home. I laid out my plan to cover the distance of the last two days of my trip all at once. At 6:00 a.m. the next morning, I headed away for 189 miles home, on fatigued legs, at a large calorie deficit, and with an extra large band-aid on my rear tire to cover a gash that you could see the inner tube through.

    I finished the ride just after sundown, faster than I had ever ridden that kind of distance, with a loaded-down bike. 462 miles inside four days, alone.

    Haunted by something that just won’t let me stop pushing.