Colorado to New York, one year later

November 21, 2012 by Filed under Advice, Curious, Happy Tagged with

Erika asked me recently:

I am interested to know how you feel now, about everything you were riding toward and away from last fall.  How did the ride change you, what are your thoughts about the entire adventure now, what have been the long-term effects of the trip, and where are you in your life now?  Also – would you do it again?

It’s hard to know where to start in describing this…  I’ve been sitting here for almost 20 minutes trying to find an angle on it, and utterly failed.  So instead I’m just diving in, saying whatever appears in my mind.

A long solo bike trip is a combination of exposure to strangers and the unknown, and long stretches of peaceful, private time.  I remember the trip as much for the books I “read” and the self-absorbed notes I took as for the things I saw and did.  New feelings and ideas came from everywhere.

It sits in my mind as a mountain range sits on a landscape, dividing my unhealthy, upset past from my more balanced, secure self.  I remember the turns of the pedals and the sweat and the vitamins and all the protein I tried to stuff into myself, and how my body seemed to change shape as the days passed, and how surprised I was that such a change could still happen … That I could, indeed heal.  That I could indeed burn off the constant stress and fear and misery, that I could actually come to terms with leaving a job that I had staked all my pride in, not by feeling content with the outcome, but by wringing the feelings out of me, leaving them on the road, expelling them in each breath.  By outrunning them, and by staking a new identity in a fresh terrain, with a reclaimed store of energy.

When I arrived in New York I was an almost completely recycled person, seething inside the same skin.

There was still a big problem though: I didn’t have a plan.  I finally had a handle on my health, and an idea about where I wanted my career to go, but the sense of clarity that I’d been hoping for in my romantic and emotional life just hadn’t materialized. With so much experience already behind me, what would catch my interest now?

The trip also beat some perspective into me about ambition.  My ambition to be a good contributor to the world and to society and community was not, I realized, a typically male motivation in a career.  I was not interested in power or rank, not particularly interested in high pay or prestige or appearing authoritative.  I also realized that my mode of interacting with people was not typically male either – it spread further across the spectrum.  I was interested in cooperation, rapport, empathy, egalitarianism, reassurance.  When I combined that with my very strong history of nuts-and-bolts software engineering, it led directly to a key phrase that popped into my head somewhere around Indiana that made everything clear:  “I like helping scientists.”

As an aside, it also laid the foundation for another realization that happened post-trip, that was so novel I was shocked that I hadn’t realized it before:  Just about every woman I’ve seriously dated or fallen in love with or even had a short fling with, has had a strong bisexual side.  I could go right down my dating history from beginning to end, and whenever there was mutual attraction, it was with a woman with some bisexual traits, whether it be a sexual history with women, or an assertive masculinity to her personality.  I finally had a pattern to work with that wasn’t based on something so arbitrary as hair color or ethnicity or height. That knowledge enhanced my sense of peace with who I am.

Even now, a year after the trip and all those long thoughtful days, I can still pull fresh ideas from the experience. I also make regular use of the equipment I had to purchase; for example I wore my rain gear three times this week – pants, jacket, and hood – and stayed warm and dry for my daily office commute. Ripples from the event seem to echo perpetually across my life. Sometimes just being out and about on the recumbent will naturally lead back to the trip.

For example I was out earlier today cycling between the UPS store and the office, and I stopped at a red light, and a tall black man with a graying beard, carrying a bag of groceries, ambled over to me from his spot on the crosswalk and gave me a fist-bump, and said, “Nice wheels, man! Where you riding to?”

“This is just how I get to work, nowadays,” I said. “But I did ride it across the country once!”

“Whoah!” he said, and laughed. “Hell yeah, now that is some serious riding!”

Then the light turned green, and we each took off.

Around town, I’m probably known more for the recumbent than for my face. That was true all across the country, and it remains stubbornly true at home. There is an endless supply of people who have never seen a recumbent before. Thankfully their approach is very civil – they don’t see me as some kind of space alien, like people in Missouri did. … And I still remember being stopped by a cop in the middle of an empty Kansas highway just because I was an anomaly and he wanted to – I quote – “make sure I was okay.”

In fact, cycling around Oakland is comfortable in general, and I don’t think I really appreciated that until I rode through a lot of other urban centers. Oakland is very supportive of cycling, and is spending good money to untangle the bike lanes and signals and curbs and increase awareness. Motorists are very forgiving and observant of cyclists, racks are plentiful, and even the school crossing guards will blow their whistles and halt traffic for you if they happen to be around. I recently realized how accustomed I was to this environment when I went on a date with a woman who lived in Santa Cruz.

We were on our bikes, coasting down Piedmont Avenue out of the Mountain View Cemetery, and she said to me, “You know, you just did a bad thing back there.”

“Oh?” I said, stopping at the bottom of hill next to her.

“Yeah, you rolled through that 3-way intersection, right in front of a cop. He looked straight at you. So don’t be surprised if he comes zooming up behind us.”

I stared at her, blankly, for a long moment.

“Ah,” she said, “Right. I forgot, this isn’t Santa Cruz, this is Oakland.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Cops in Oakland have actual things to do.”

A year after the long ride, I’m still fighting the urge to think like a lazy urbanite, and that bothers me. It’s only three miles round-trip to visit the post office, three miles round-trip to the grocery store, four miles to either of the Farmer’s Markets, four miles to work and back. Less than half a mile to eight different restaurants. Even if I hit all those places in one day, it would still be less than a quarter of the typical mileage I covered each day crossing the country. When will I really get the clue? So it’s raining; so what? That’s an extra 15 minutes of prep time, tops, and I never have to worry about the parking lot being full. So it’s blazing hot; so what? Put on shorts and a bandana; stick some iced-tea in the cup holder; off you go. You’ll arrive refreshed and ready.

I’m astounded sometimes when I think about how I owned a bike for almost 15 years and saw it mostly as a toy.

Now it’s also a serious implement, an essential part of my health, a cost-saving device, a wellspring of stories and conversations and community involvement, and the best choice – unequivocally the best – for exploring new parts of the civilized world. If there’s one thing the cross-country trip convinced me of, it’s that.

So. Would I do it again?

Yes; hell yes.  I would leave tomorrow if I had the chance.  All the gear I need is here, arranged around me in the living room as I write this.  It would take me less than a day to tune up the bicycle and load it for bear, and then I could throw together a plan to feed the cat, lock the door, put my foot on the pedal at the edge of the sidewalk, and be gone.

Perhaps I’d ride north, then pull a gigantic S-curve across the entire USA, ending up in Boston or Maryland, and by the time I got there I’d have a berth on a container ship reserved, or my carrier box shipped out so I could stuff the bike inside.  Then perhaps I’d keep going. I would arrive in Spain in late winter, then do another S-curve through Europe, ending up at the edge of Italy in the fall, where a ferryboat can bear me across to the east edge of the Mediterranean, and Turkey.  From there … Russia, China … who knows?

But that’s probably not the way it will happen, if it does happen, because of the lesson I learned on this last trip:  I can only be rootless for so long.  It’s most likely that after reaching the Atlantic, I’d actually be impatient to get home, and work and build and write and hang out with friends.  Then perhaps I’d consider picking up the trip where I left off.

And that also connects with my immediate situation:  If I can leave tomorrow – quit my job and housing search, and take off – then why don’t I do just that?  What’s stopping me?

Essentially, a feeling that what I need next, what I’m looking for, is not out there over the horizon, but is closer at hand.  It’s here, somewhere.  In this architecture, on these streets, in the market stalls, in the minds of the people I talk to at work, and at restaurants and concerts and rallies.  It’s here, I’m almost totally certain.  And I’m just as certain that something isn’t quite aligned correctly in my everyday life for me to pick up the scent of it.  That’s where I’m at in the day-to-day, now.  Something is not quite adjusted right, but I’m narrowing it down, checking old items off the to-do list, tweaking the sails to catch a new angle in the wind and bring it to my face.  What is it!  What is this thing!!!

Let’s find out.

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Stress sucks.

May 15, 2012 by Filed under Advice, Stress

Enter a period of psychological stress, and your organs release a steady river of hormones, telling the cells in your body to burn more energy. After a few days of this feedback, your cells begin sending signals to all the mitochondria living inside them, telling them to divide, increasing energy capacity. This is important because when the energy production system is bottlenecked, little chemical packets called “free radicals” are released inside your cells, especially from the struggling mitochondria. Free radicals are damaging to the DNA in your cells, including the DNA of your mitochondria. So having enough mitochondria to avoid a bottleneck is important.

Unfortunately, this is a paradox. When your mitochondria are overworked, it’s like running an engine too hot. Free radicals are the equivalent of smoke coming out of the engine compartment. To address the problem, your mitochondria reproduce by dividing, making more to share the load. … But some of your mitochondria have been damaged by running too hot. When they make copies of themselves by dividing they pass the damage along to their offspring. Eventually, there are more damaged mitochondria inside your cells than clean ones, and the whole operation of the cell becomes degraded because of the extra resources this consumes.

As the mitochondria decline in efficiency, the cell will shift across the spectrum of genes it can express, to devote more resources to mitochondria recycling. This reduces the cell’s effectiveness as part of a functioning organ. (Stem cells and heart cells do not divide their mitochondria, and therefore are not directly under the influence of this cycle, but they can still suffer from the decline of other organs.) Each cell also has a feedback loop of signals inside it, designed to detect this degradation. When a cell in your body realizes it has dropped below a reasonable efficiency level, it commits suicide, removing itself and its damaged mitochondria from your collective internal gene pool.

Yes! Your own cells sometimes kill themselves because they can’t keep up.

Here’s what this means for you, on a human scale: When you pass through a cycle of stress, part of you dies off while the rest of you decides to repopulate, spreading slightly less efficient mitochondria throughout your tissues, resulting in a subtly decreased energy level. You really begin to notice it in middle age.

This effectively cannot be reversed, because you can only work with the genetic supply of mitochondria that you have. Your best hope for renewed health is to maintain a higher set-point for energy capacity, via a higher standing population of your current mitochondria, so that when you are pressed into high-stress situations, you do not logjam your energy supply chain and create damaging free-radicals.

In other words, sufficient sleep, complete nutrition, and consistent aerobic exercise places your body into its most long-lasting mode. It delays the onset of virtually ALL late-life diseases. This may seem like common knowledge, but now you understand why it is so…

And why there is absolutely no product, service, or diet that can turn back the clock. Your very best outcome is to slow it down.

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Packing Up The Bike

December 18, 2011 by Filed under Advice, Tech Tagged with

The key to taking apart a bicycle is to have one of these on hand. It’s a tiny adjustable wrench, small enough to carry in a toolkit and lock nuts in place, and just big enough to remove the pedals from a bicycle.

And, of course, you need a variety of hex wrenches!

The key to transporting a bicycle once it’s in pieces is to use a sturdy box. After sinking a big chunk of money into the recumbent itself, I figured I could justify spending a chunk to get it home safely. I chose the Crateworks “tandem”-size box.

It’s freaking enormous. 70 x 11 x 32 inches. Even so, it was just long enough for me to fit the main boom of the recumbent in diagonally. Around that I packed almost all of my gear – three of the bike bags, the clothing, the sleeping bag, the tools, the spare tire, and some remaining food. The fourth bike bag remained outside, so I could use it as carry-on baggage for the plane ride home.

Recumbent disassembled and placed into a Crateworks long-style box.

It took most of a day to break down the bike and install it in the box. The end result was close to 110 pounds, the ceiling for cross-country oversize shipping at the local FedEx depot.

The box is clearly labeled with arrows indicating “this side up”, but as far as I can tell, FedEx employees totally ignore these. When it arrived in Oakland six days later it was upside-down in the back of the truck, and the delivery agent dragged it out and lowered it by turning it end-over-end, leaving it upside-down on the sidewalk in front of me. At least he helped me carry it into the house.

Interestingly enough, due to the seasonal discount on my plane ticket, it cost just as much to ship a 110-pound box home in a week as it cost to fly my 180-pound ass home in 12 hours.

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After the Trinidad to Toledo ride: What would I keep; what would I change?

December 13, 2011 by Filed under Advice, Tech Tagged with

First things first: The recumbent was awesome!

I would not use any other style of bike for such a long trip. I never had to worry about saddle sores, or aching wrists, or a kink in my neck. My wind profile was nice and low, and my luggage capacity was high.

My decision to leave behind my tent was a good one, since there were almost no places to camp along the way. I suppose I could have asked strangers if I could camp in their yard or on their farmland, but as a lone traveler on a long haul with some expensive gear, I didn’t feel comfortable enough. With two people sharing a tent the variables are different, I’m sure.

Other changes I would make: New gloves. My ski gloves didn’t block moisture, and that was a problem. I also needed some kind of waterproof over-sock, so I didn’t have to use plastic shopping bags. I used the bags even when it was dry out, to reduce windchill. I know there are waterproof covers for biking shoes, but I don’t like them for three reasons: First, they’d get beat up whenever I walk around off the bike. Second, they all have a hole in the bottom to expose the pedal clip, and on this recumbent, the soles of my feet go vertical during each pedal stroke. After half an hour of cycling into a rainstorm, the liners would fill with water. And third, I can’t find any in my size. Bah! So that’s still an unsolved problem.

My water sack had a slow leak, so I couldn’t use it for this trip. I kept all my water in metal canteens instead. They didn’t seem to add much weight, and they could attach to the outsides of the bike. I never worried about dropping or puncturing them.

Toolkit:

The toolkit was great. I used the needle-nose pliers to remove thorns from my tires, pull my brake cables, cut zipties, loosen the valves on my tubes, and manipulate the wiring on my hub generator. I used the miniature wrench to adjust my headlamp, and attach and remove my rack, seat, tail light, and pedals. It would have been almost impossible to disassemble the bike without those.

The plastic tire levers saved me a lot of trouble. I used a bunch of the zipties, and almost all of the chain oil. I used the hex keys, of course. I had a swiss army knife, and I used the knife, bottle opener, screwdriver, scissors, and saw (to cut a hat brim to extend my helmet). I used the tire pump a dozen times – totally worth it. (A spare tire is useless if you can’t get it inflated, right?) My set of folding scissors turned out to be completely frivolous. Those are out. I didn’t use the electrical tape, but I’m strangely reluctant to discard it. To my relief I didn’t need any of the spare parts (screws, washers, chain link, brake pads), or the tire repair kit, or my medical kit – but I’m keeping all those. I should probably add a chain tool, and a spare 20-inch tire to go with the tube.

Tech toys:

The laptop was very helpful in the evenings. It was powerful enough to deal with my photos, and the physical keyboard was great for my logs and correspondence. I researched my route on it from hotel rooms, with maps and weather reports and topography and restaurant menus all open in the web browser. The extra USB ports charged my gadgets at night. Doing all this stuff with a tablet – the iPad even – would have been much harder. It doesn’t have the horsepower, and even with a detachable keyboard, there is basically no concept of “keyboard navigation”, which would drive me bananas.

In fact, I should have left the iPad at home. The only time it was uniquely useful on the trip was when I wanted to look at a map, and AT&T didn’t get a signal to my phone, but Verizon got a signal to the iPad. That’s it. Sure it made a good conversation piece and it was fun to watch The Daily Show on it in restaurants, but that didn’t make it worth the weight. Next time it’s staying home.

I brought that Contour GPS camera along for the entire ride, but never turned it on once. It was just too easy to use the iPhone for taking video, and I knew that if I dug out the Contour I would have to wait at least 30 seconds for it to get a GPS lock. Then there would be the effort of importing, cropping, and transcoding the video… Next time I’ll just leave that thing at home.

All my gadgets stayed dry, thanks to those waterproof “lok-saks”, and an overabundance of sandwich bags. I could have used another dry-sack for dirty laundry, instead of just cramming it straight into the pannier.

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Day 32 – The last day of riding on the Colorado to New York route

December 12, 2011 by Filed under Advice Tagged with

The day began like the rest; I had most of my gear already packed up the previous night, so all I needed to do was throw on clothing, stuff the sleeping bag into a pannier, and shove the bicycle outside to the parking lot. After an entire month of this I’ve gotten pretty efficient!

The trip uptown was uneventful, though I had to pedal at 6 miles per hour the whole time because of the destroyed rim. The fellow at the rental station had my minivan ready in the parking lot. He showed me how to use the new-fangled electronic key, demonstrated the automatic doors, and helped me fold down the seats and load the bike inside. The stereo had a line-in jack, so my first stop was Wal-Mart to purchase a cable for wiring up my iPod. Then I hit the freeway! New York, here I come!

As I drove along, bellowing lyrics to They Might Be Giants and then listening to electronic boopy and beepy music, I thought about my trip:

Q: So how many miles did I ride?
A: Somewhere around 1300 miles, from Trinidad, CO to Toldeo, OH. That works out to 43 miles per day. For comparison, my original route to New York was 1800 miles, and to make it there in 30 days I would have needed to ride 60 miles per day.
Q: Was it everything I’d hoped for?
A: Well, I had a pile of different plans and ideas for the trip, but when I got on the road I became focused mostly on enjoying each day as its own thing. That was probably the best approach – the most important, at least. I didn’t have any expectations about what I would find, but I had some personal goals: Relax, see new places, restore my health, and figure out what to do next. I think I met those goals.
Q: How did a bike trip work to restore my health?

A: Last year I developed a thyroid condition that pitched my metabolism into overdrive, burning my body down like a road flare. Then my thyroid swung hard in the other direction, and I gained a lot of weight, became very lethargic and depressed, and had huge difficulty concentrating at work.

The causes were both psychological and environmental, and to get healthy again I wanted to push everything off my calendar and do a lot of aerobic exercise outside in the fresh air. It was especially important that I stay away from my apartment, which had become a gas chamber of mold spores and dessicated rat crap. A long bike trip was a perfect activity, and it had the desired effect.

Q: Did it cost too much?

A: It certainly cost a lot. I planned a pretty loose budget, and I still went over it. A hundred bucks a day is serious money, especially when you’re not working. And as much as I’ve fantasized about the idea of biking across the country while I do contract-based computer work on a laptop, the real world is not very accommodating for it. I need long chunks of quiet time to write code, and the daily costs of sitting in place – hotel, food, and camping fees – appear to outweigh the benefits of using that time to work.

Better to drop anchor and work some place cheap – like an actual apartment that you can rent for the equivalent of 15 bucks a day – and save up the vacation time for later.

Q: Is that the kind of life I aspire to? Work a while, then bike somewhere new?
A: When you’ve been working 60 hours a week for five years, the idea sounds grand. But this trip has taught me that I’m too interested in planting roots and building things to be a seasonal nomad. There are plenty of people who bike around the world perpetually. Some have written books about it. I’m not going to be one of those people.
Q: If I was going to do it again, what would I do differently?
A: I would set a much longer deadline. I would budget for 30 miles a day – like I knew I should have – instead of 50. I’d save up a bit more money. I’d leave three months earlier. I’d have more time to explore, talk to people, and write. Less of a backlog.
Q: How did my equipment fare? What would I keep; what would I change?
A: The answer to this is long and warrants its own post. :D
Q: If I did this again, would I do it alone, or with other people?

A: I have never gone on a trip like this with other people. If I wanted to do so, there are organizations – web communities – that I could use to find companions pretty easily. Since I have never done so, I must conclude that there is something in me that prefers to go it alone. I can think of a few reasons why: It’s easier to plan and schedule a trip for one. I can go exactly as fast or slow as I want. I can listen to audiobooks for hours, since I don’t have to keep my ears open all the time.

Of course if I had a companion I could substitute audiobooks for conversation… And I’m sure we could save a lot of money and carry less weight… Maybe I’ll try it some time; who knows.

Q: What am I going to do next?
A: Enjoy the holidays, look for a better place to live, and get employed!

I arrived in Elmira after seven solid hours of driving. Erika’s parents greeted me and gave me a tour of their impressive home, then Richard and I caravanned to the airport so I could drop off the rental car. Business concluded! A little while after that, we all drove to the airport in Binghamton and met Erika. Smiles and hugs and tears of joy ensued!

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