Privilege to suffer
It was a Thursday evening and I had three separate veggie burgers before I came back to consciousness. I was sitting across from my best friend and their partner and they said the color rushed back into my face with the last bite I took. That’s when I knew I could stop eating. I had spent eleven moving hours (twelve total hours) getting to that table, just to drive home after dinner. I had never tasted something so good that it eliminated my ability to hear, but if you asked me what it tasted like I couldn’t have told you. Salt? Maybe?
Earlier in the day it was over 32 degrees and I was losing peripheral vision. Which is apparently an advanced sign of heat stroke. 32 degrees is above 90 for those interesting in using “freedom units.” I hadn’t brought enough food, and dramatically underestimated how much water a body can lose in an hour of direct sun. It was the only time in my life where I took candy (and water) from a stranger. I’ve never been more grateful to see a Winnebago on the side of the road in my life. To this day I salute them when I pass them on the highway.
Exactly three days before I sat down at that random burger joint, my friend asked me if I wanted to ride my bike up to San Luis Obispo from LA. They were driving back that night and could get me if I didn’t make it before sunset. Sold. It was going to be just under 320 kilometers (200 freedom miles) and who knows how many hours. On a bicycle.
What unfolded was a series of naive, pre-smart-phone route decisions that put me on the 101 nearly a dozen times. I fueled with lemonade and burritos, and didn’t listen to music. I wanted an adventure and that’s what I got.
At that point I’d been a cyclist for six years, just long enough for Dunning and Kruger to firmly situate themselves in my subconscious. I was confident and willing to put in the work, without any of the experience required to take on such a feat. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was discovering one of my favorite philosophies to date:
“we have the privilege to choose how we suffer”
I wanted to see how far I could get, and how hard I could push. I wanted to see if I could hold an average speed higher than that of a car in Los Angeles going from Santa Monica to Downtown LA—16 miles per hour, if you commute during rush hour. I wanted to prove that with very little planning, and a whole lot of willpower, we can achieve exponentially more than we thought was possible.
Surprisingly, sitting on the bike for that long didn’t hurt. By the time I was leaving Santa Barbara after my first burrito of the day, I was already outside of my body. I focused on the white line on the side of the road and let my legs do the rest. It was a bike ride that turned into an eleven hour meditation. There are retreats for things like this.
At the time I didn’t understand the reactions people had when they heard about the ride. I told friends about how there were a few hours that disappeared: some of them from the heat stroke, some of them from the meditation of being on the road solo for that long. I talked about how my bike worked perfectly and I didn’t have a single mechanical issue. I talked about how many burritos a single stomach can process in a day. It’s three.
I know now that people were curious how I was able to sit with discomfort for that long. The secret: I wasn’t actually uncomfortable because I got what I expected. I prepared for heat stroke and hunger and sore muscles. The only reason I wanted to do the ride was because I thought I could. Over the course of the day that thought turned into a knowledge that I could.
Again, it’s a privilege to choose how we suffer.
-
I haven’t ridden my bike for more than six hours since that day, let alone eleven. I still love to ride and push myself, but use other avenues now and I’m sure I’ll have something to say about those soon.