188 miles

The stars last night were magnificent. The Milky Way spanned the sky in its full magnificence. The stargazing up here is better than almost anywhere else I’ve ever been. I even can get the stars to show up on my iPhone 12 camera. I lost an hour of time yesterday when I crossed into Alberta from British Columbia. This was very readily apparent when the sun still wasn’t out when I set off at 7:30 AM. I was headed east until the town of Valleyview. Today was once again a battle against the wind. It picked up steam until leveling off at a 15 mile an hour block headwind. I do a lot of complaining about the wind but it really is the largest factor in deciding the mileage for my days. I truly live and die by the wind. In theory the miles I am covering right now and the next 3000 should be the easiest and fastest due to the relatively flat roads and safe environment. However, every day that the wind is to my face is another day in which I feel I am falling short of my full potential. I keep riding on in anticipation of the day the headwind will stop or shift but for now it feels like mother nature is playing a cruel game on me, and every time I turn the wind turns on my face. The constant battle I am waging is getting under my skin in ways which I shouldn’t let it. It’s the fact making me irritable and more high strung. I’m too busy focusing on how I wish things were going and not how they are actually playing out. I’m letting it distract me from the good work I am putting in. I’m still slogging right along at an average of 200 miles a day, but every night I go to bed feeling like I left more out on the field, like I have unfinished business. At Valleyview I got breakfast then continued on my way. Last night I slept right on the side of this two lane divided highway on which I cycled on all day. There’s a nice wide shoulder and for the most part it’s relatively clear, but the road is busy and cars are moving fast. The drivers here are more gracious than they were yesterday. But around lunch I had a semi truck come over the white line to buzz me intentionally. I don’t think truck drivers understand how much their turbulence can affect a cyclist. After his cab passed me, the wind threw me out towards the middle of the road. I immediately countered with all my weight back to the shoulder, but the momentum of the wind ripped me left into the rumble strips. The rear tires of his trailer screamed along the same rumble strip as my skinny bike tires at the same time. The rumble strip is only about 10 inches wide so the margin for error here was almost nonexistent. If I hadn’t been leaning towards the side of the road at an angle off set by about 15° from vertical then his trailer certainly would’ve clipped my shoulder. I was quite rattled and just coasted along for a number of seconds after he passed. But my immediate fear quickly turned to anger and frustration. He had intentionally come over the white line and into the rumble strips just for the heck of giving me a hard time, and he had a very nearly taken me out in the process. I was already irritated by the wind, so this act of belligerence and negligence on his part only worsened my mood. I pushed on to Fox Creek and stopped for lunch. I was able to get on FaceTime with my girlfriend, which ended up being by far the highlight of my day, and I was brought back into a good headspace. But a flat tire while we were talking ended our conversation, and my spirits were brought down a bit. Between Valleyview and Fox Creek the wheat fields slowly turned back into forest as the road gradually gain a couple hundred feet of elevation every 10 miles. By the evening clouds rolled through in preparation for tomorrow’s rain. I found myself in the midst of a pretty homogenous forest of conifers and deciduous trees. I was still on the large divided highway so I didn’t really feel like I was biking through the forest, but rather existing on a separate plane, detached from nature. Although the trees returned the hills, for the most part, did not. The road bumped over low-grade rollers, but even calling them hills would be generous. The sky didn’t look nearly as large as yesterday and the blanket of clouds stole away the excitement of a sunset. All afternoon I was in a weird headspace. After my flat tire I kind of became numb to the wind and just started riding on. Which is good in a way, but I became almost apathetic and my speed continue to drop both due to my apathy and the headwind. It really was not the afternoon of riding that I was looking forward to or that I needed. I want to get to Calgary by tomorrow evening to get my bike serviced which meant that I needed to turn out very large day today, 240 or more miles ideally. If I had no wind or a tailwind or even a crosswind today I would’ve managed at least 240 miles. With the winds I struggled to average over 15 miles an hour throughout the afternoon and was relegated to just 190 miles on the day. that leaves me with a hefty 230 miles to complete by 7:00 PM tomorrow evening. Now the forecast calls for a tailwind for the first time on my trip. However, it also calls for an entire day of rain. But nonetheless, I have faith in my riding ability and am going to count on the fact that I can average over 18 tomorrow. I believe I can eliminate my stoppage time to under an hour. Thus, I’m going to go to bed early tonight (11:00pm) to get out of the headwind and hope that by the time I wake up at 4:00 am the tailwind will be ready to carry me to Calgary. If I do not make it to Calgary by 7:00 pm, then I will be forced to go onto Billings. I really do not want to have to go the extra 700 miles as my rear tire will most likely blow out since the threads are already showing, and my rear shifter cable will most likely snap if I ride an extra 3 1/2 days on it. I have an extra tire with me and I can replace my rear shift cable so I am willing to take the risk of pushing on the Billings if I miss Calgary tomorrow night. I just do not feel comfortable with this decision. I could of course wait until the morning on Friday when the bike shop will open back up, but then I would lose four hours of riding as they do not open until 10 o’clock.

I now want to turn to a question that was posed in the comments. I am riding through open field all day. I don’t have nearly as much narration. I don’t know what to tell you, every field kind of looks the same for 14 hours straight. This question gives me the opportunity to provide a little bit of insight on my mentality around this trip and how that mentality evolved over the course of my training and preparation process. The question comes from Ashok Khandelwal and company who ask:

We were debating when you could be writing the blog. Is it at the end of the day? Your posts are full of the days details, and we feel it is just impossible to remember in that much detail. But at the same time we also think it is impossible to do unsupported pan-american ride the way you are doing :-)

This question seems to have two parts. The first question is quite simple to answer, and I will do so in just a second. However, the second question is which is subliminally explicated in the last statement will require a much longer and rambling response. Although I believe the sentence “But at the same time we also think it is impossible to do unsupported Pan-American ride the way you are doing” is intended more as a rhetorical statement of incredibility than an actual question to the feasibility and/or validity of my effort, it still evokes the question: is it possible to ride the Pan-American unsupported in a time faster than Michael Strasser’s supportive time? And if it is possible, how is this ride possible? I would like to take some significant time to answer this question and evaluate how my answer has changed over time because it is a question that I struggled with a lot and the question I still do not fully know the answer to. My response will be full of directions, and will be atypical to the traditional narration of this blog but I am incredibly bored on my bike right now, and for my own sake, and for yours, if you want it, I think it will be beneficial for me to put my thoughts down in a concrete manner. So we will return to this question in just a second, but first, let me answer the primary question Asohk poses.

The question is essentially how do I find the time to write these entries and what is my process of capturing my feelings and the sights I see in words. I spend well over an hour every day on this blog. However, I rarely do it all at once. Throughout the day while I am biking, I am constantly writing down thoughts which I would like to capture either for myself, or for the blog. If I see something beautiful, or something I want to capture and share with the rest of the world then I will pull out my phone and jot down some quick thoughts or short sentences. By the end of the day I am left with a long list of of what are essentially notes from throughout my day. In the last hour or two of my ride I can go in and provide narrative interlude to connect the various things I’ve written throughout the day, in order to form a somewhat cohesive storyline. I sometimes try to use voice to text while on the bike instead of typing out my blog although this usually does not work very well. Every night when I get to camp I take about 20 minutes to read over what I have written, and do some basic editing. Reading back over what I have written on this trip, my writing feels half baked, sporadic, and unfinished. It’s simply the disjointed nature of which I am writing one little section at a time and cobbling them together that creates this less than satisfactory writings that I then publish. I wish I had the time to truly sit down and write and do justice to the things. I am seeing and the experiences I am having. At least I know that the content is there and if I ever want to go back in after this trip and touch things up that will be an option that is available to me. Cell service permitting, I then upload my text and select images to my blog. My Dad’s fiancé, Michelle, has graciously offered to manage my website while I am on the road (shoutout Michelle). After I have uploaded my blogs and images, Michelle goes in for a quick read over for major grammar edits, and make some small formatting changes to the layout of the blog, then links my Strava data to my website. Even though my effort is unsupported, there is a lot of help that I am being given behind the scenes, while still remaining unsupported by the letter of the law. Thank you for your help, Michelle! I generally enjoy writing these blogs. For the last five years of my life, I have kept a journal any time I am traveling. I used to write these entries for myself to reflect back upon in the future and for my immediate friends and family, so that they could follow along on my travels if they wished. This past year as my training really ramped up and I began returning from training rides with wild experiences (constant hypothermia, international theft, hitchhiking, all sorts of mechanicals, etc. you can read all my stories in my regular blog section if you would like) some of my friends began requesting access to some of my travel notes and training logs, so I begin publishing trip reports from my weekend bikepacking adventures online. It never really occurred to me that people outside of my immediate friends and family would have any interest in what I am doing, much less take the time to read my often long winded entries. I find it incredible that this blog receives over 500 daily readers. In the moment I find it productive to capture my thoughts in writing, and some of my most prized possessions are my journal entries from past trips and experiences. Looking back at my old writings, it is powerful to see how I have changed as a person and it is entertaining to read back over memories I might otherwise have forgotten. Even if nobody else in the world were reading these blogs I would still be writing them for myself every day. I probably spend about 30 minutes a day working on my blog which I could use to sleep or bike. I believe the time I spend putting into my blog is an essential element of this trip that I would regret not doing later in life. That being said there are many days where I simply do not feel like writing, much less editing and the 30 minutes a day I sacrifice translates into about 8 miles of wasted productivity on the bike every single day. Over the course of 80 days this will absolutely add up, but again, I think it’s worth it.

The answer to part two of this question will come at a later time. I spent a lot of time today writing out a response to it, but I am not happy with what I have written and need to work on it for a couple more days. For the time being I will leave you with the short answer to the question. That is: yes, it is possible for someone to break the supported world record on an unsupported attempt. Maybe that person is not me, but I do believe it is possible.