276 miles

Ah, there it is. After 3000 miles of complaining about the headwind, I’ve finally been given a day with more favorable winds. I’ve made some pretty audacious claims about my ability to do 250+ miles per day without the terrorizing presence of the headwind, so it’s nice to finally back up some of those statements.

Last night I set up camp and then lay down in my bivvy ready for some deep sleep under the gaze of the bright moon. As soon as I put my weight on my ground pad, I heard a hiss, a rip, and all the pressure instantly went out of the pad. I hadn’t checked where I had set up camp and there had been some barb wire partially covered by the dirt and I’d put my pad right on the sharp end. It was an incredibly stupid mistake on my part. The gash I had caused was a little bit too big to be patched. I moved away from the barb wire and spent the rest of my night sleeping on my back straight on the ground. My sleeping bag provided a little bit of cushioning and I slept just fine, all be it probably not as well as I would’ve with a ground pad. Not having a ground pad isn’t the end of the world. When I was bikepacking in Central America all of my gear had been stolen the week before so I went down there with only a tent, and for 14 nights I slept on the ground, no ground pad, no sleeping bag, just a thin layer of tarp. Looking back on it, that was a crazy call, and I definitely paid the price for my reduced sleep quality. Lucky for me, Big Agnes is my camping gear sponsor and before I even woke up I had multiple messages from Big Agnes letting me know that they were there to help if needed. We were able to source a store that has Big Agnes ground pads in stock in Lubbock, Texas. as long as the store has the equipment I need in stock, it’s not considered support. I’m incredibly grateful for all the awesome people at Big Agnes and I’m so happy to call them a sponsor company! If you were looking to get into camping or bikepacking I really encourage you to look into getting Big Agnes gear. I’m not just saying this because they’re a sponsor company, I’ve had Big Agnes gear my whole life and have always believed in their quality. My first ground pad ever was a Big Agnes ground pad. I learned how to camp with that ground pad and I fell in love with nature on that ground pad.

I woke up at 2:30 AM to go to the bathroom. When I stood up I was surprised to feel a warm breeze coming from the north. If I were on my bike, that would theoretically mean I would have a tailwind. I was definitely not expecting a tailwind, so I quickly turned my phone on and checked the weather forecast. Sure enough, the winds had shifted and I was slated to have a tailwind until about noon. I was immediately super excited and hurried off to bed so I could get an early start to make the most out of my tailwind. I woke up before the sun was out and was on my bike in time to watch the horizon change colors with the first light today. I passed through Kit Carson and turned south carried by a 10 mile an hour tailwind as the sun rose over the horizon. I rode almost nonstop for the next five hours, only stopping one time to refill my water bottles. I made it to the town of Lamar by noon. I had a pretty consistent tailwind all morning and was sitting in an average speed of around 22 miles an hour. I stopped for a super quick lunch, which I took with me to eat on the bike. The wind was slowly shifting to the east, so I wanted to squeeze out every bit of help the tail crosswind would give me. As the day wore on and I got further south, it got hotter, dryer, and very noticeably, much flatter. Just a bit past Lamar I went up a bit of a climb and everything started looking like the desert. I saw my first cacti and there were rock outcroppings and formations that were very reminiscent of the desert vibe. The grasses had given away to desert plants which I’m not very well acquainted with. However, I dropped off a little bit of a plateau and the grasses came back. It still felt more arid than yesterday though. There was almost no farming around the Colorado Oklahoma border and what little agriculture there was seemed to exist in the form of largely empty cattle fields. Even though it was drier, the land seemed more alive. I think this is largely because of the lack of human interference on the natural landscape. The fields were not as overgrazed as they had been yesterday which allowed for many of the native grasses and shrubs to thrive. Everything was still a bit brown and bleak, but there were dark and rusty greens and more lively yellows and oranges mixed in with the brown and tan grasses. Shortly after crossing into Oklahoma, the scenery changed back to what it had been in Nebraska. Except now there were absolutely no hills. For much of the sections of Oklahoma and Texas that I bike through today the land was as flat as could be. You could lay out a 10 mile long level and it would be accurate to the hundredth of a degree. My cycling computer elevation map looked like I had glitched out, it was just a flat line. The good news for me is that flat usually means fast. After entering Oklahoma, my tailwind became a sidewinding, and then a slight headwind for about three hours. Because it was so flat and the wind was only coming at me at about 10 miles an hour I was able to get pretty aero and I felt like I was slicing through the endless cornfields with rapid efficiency. Even with the headwind, I was managing around 20 miles an hour. My legs just felt fantastic.

The Oklahoma panhandle was one of the more boring places I’ve ever been. There weren’t many towns outside of Boise Coty and there was absolutely nothing to look at other than corn and irrigation systems. I found myself riding on President Donald J Trump Highway. Like I’ve said before, this blog is going to remain completely apolitical, but I am studying government and I am fascinated by demographics so I am very interested in the political landscape of the Oklahoma panhandle. This region is the most conservative in the entire country. The panhandle district went 92% red last election cycle. The only other places in the US that are that homogenous politically are downtown San Francisco, which can go up to 94-95% blue, and parts of New York, which can also get into the 90s democratically. Growing up in the south, I’m no stranger to deep red political environments, but 90% agreement on politics from one side or another is a little bit astounding. It points to incredibly homogenous populous in thought which surely has interesting effects on the culture much beyond that of just politics. Interesting political thought, in my entire crossing of America I will not pass through one blue district. I thought perhaps Lubbock or Amarillo would be big enough population centers to be blue, but I guess not, or perhaps they are just gerrymandered to pieces. I wasn’t sad to leave Oklahoma behind, but it’s not like Texas was any better. In fact, Texas was a little bit worse to ride through. The cornfields were now punctuated by oil wells and industrial cattle feedlots. The wind started to quiet down in the late afternoon, but I almost wanted it to keep blowing, even if it was a headwind. The cattle feed lots absolutely stink and I could smell them from miles away. You could see them from miles away too. Thousands of cows crammed into tiny little pens with nowhere to go but walk in circles had turned the ground into thick dust. From miles away, a dirty haze could be seen above these feedlot. As bad as they smell, it was way worse to look at them. It’s really really sad to see how these animals are treated. Prior to this trip I’d been red meat free for the past five years mainly due to environmental concerns around beef production. I decided to pull out all the stops for this trip because I need to eat as much as possible and beef is a readily available source of protein. But looking at these feedlots now, I want to stop eating red meat again just as much for the ethical reason as the environmental reasons. It’s really hard to reconcile my love of nature and animals with the fact that I’m eating the animals produced on these farms. The cattle look sick and tired and unhealthy. There’s no life in their eyes. They exist solely to be pumped full of drugs and the cheapest grains possible so they might get fat enough in the shortest amount of time so they can be sent to the slaughterhouse. It’s hypocritical of me to talk big game on climate change while I am eating red meat, playing into the industrial farming machine. I’m doing this ride to raise money for solar panel installation in the Amazon, so it feels incredibly hypocritical for an environmental point to keep eating red meat, and from an ethical standpoint, it is absolutely irreconcilable. I understand other people might have different opinions on this matter, but I think I’m going to stop eating red meat again. I can’t go back to being a vegetarian because I’m already struggling to get enough protein as is, but cutting out red meat from my diet shouldn’t be that hard. At least for now.

The sky didn’t quite have the same brilliance that it had yesterday. I think it was a combination of the heat mirages rising off the cornfields and increased air pollution. It was still lovely being outside, but everything looked a little bit dirty, and there was always some type of weird smell permeating the air. The most common vehicle passing me now are semis hauling cattle trailers. I don’t have to look up to know that one of them just passed me as the air absolutely reeks of manure and death. These trailers often smell very similar to festering roadkill. There are lots of them too. I probably get passed by one every two minutes on average.

The pain I had in my feet yesterday did not disappear today, but manifested in a slightly different way. My shoes have small vents in the bottom of the soles up by the front pads of my feet. They’ve never been a problem before, but today I found the small holes rubbing blisters into my feet. It was incredibly painful to ride and around 4 o’clock one of the blisters popped. I was met with that familiar white hot pain that seconds later changed into a cool shooting pain as the blister opened up and air ran over my exposed raw skin. I’m not too worried about blisters on my feet. They might be very painful and inconvenient, but it’s not like an injury that might derail my progress. As long as I can clench my teeth and push through the pain they don’t really matter. That being said, I was invested in finding a solution to the pain. I knew if I could cover up the vents from the inside then my feet would stop bunching up in them and the blisters would not have a reason to form anymore. I stopped at a gas station and found some very thin cardboard. I cut the cardboard into pieces that would fit nicely over the pads of my feet, then I doused them in lemonade and let the cardboard sit out under the sun to dry. In the Texas heat, it only took about a minute for the lemonade to evaporate leaving behind a sticky sugary mess. Evaporated lemonade was just sticky enough to be the perfect adhesive. I placed the cardboard directly under my skin and then gingerly pulled the sock up around it. My DIY solution worked like a charm. Some type of mole skin or thick athletic tape would’ve been better, and the ultimate solution would be a new insert, but none of those were available to me and my fix held up pretty well. Tomorrow when I stop at an outdoor shop in Lubbock to pick up my new ground pad I’ll see if I can find some mole skin so I’ll be better prepared if this keeps happening. Anytime you make a minor change to any part of your set up, there’s usually reciprocal fallout somewhere. If I keep sticking dried up lemonade and cardboard on the bottom of my feet, it’ll probably backfire eventually.

All day the cities seemed to be spaced out by almost exactly 50 miles. While their frequency did not increase, their size slowly did. By the time the sun was setting I found myself in Dumas, Texas. I passed through town of Dumas as the sun sunk off to the west, and I was gifted another almost cloudless sunset. The sunset didn’t have quite the same brilliance or luster as those in the past. Something about the oil wells, vast industrial cattle farms, and air pollution took away some of the luster the sunset has had in the past. From Dumas to Lubbock the road was pretty busy and it was dark the entire time. I had a very light headwind that’ll get to you by then so it wasn’t that long and the road road wasn’t too long built into the night in preparation for tomorrow’s beating. It took a lot longer for the moon to come out tonight. I had almost an hour of riding after the sun went down before the moon came up. There were a couple of clouds in the far distance on the eastern horizon. The moon had to fight its way over these clouds before I could really appreciate it. Because of all the air pollution and dust, the moon was once again a very dark orange. It emanated a light reminiscent of that of a very cheap incandescent lightbulb that is concealed under an old plastic cover that has yellowed with age. Kind of like the light you would expect to see under the carport of a sleezy motel. Across the horizon to my left and right there were thousands of windmills. Each windmill has a red light that blinks at the same time across the entire farm. Every couple of seconds a flash of red light burst across my field of vision. With about 30 miles to go I came to the edge of a long, slow descent into the town of Amarillo. The city seem to expand out forever in a sea of suburban lights. There were cell towers and radio towers littered across the landscape. These towers also would blink red at different intervals. Between the almost artificial light of the moon, thousands of windmill lights, endless twinkle of Amarillo, and the flashing towers, everything looked very dystopian. It was a unique sight, but it didn’t really like it that much. It made me feel a little uncomfortable. Everything looks artificial and machined. There’s a lot of open space, but at the same time there’s no open space because every field is privately owned and lifeless. Even the fields that have vast heads of cattle or leafy green shoots of corn feel dead because there’s no real energy behind them. Nothing emitting any life or diversity. Everything reeks of the smell of man and his meddling designs. The only resemblance of life or energy are the artificial lights that we have strung up across the landscape.

I worked my way into Amarillo on increasingly busy roads. The two lane divided highway had been on since entering Texas would soon become Interstate 27. I crossed over Interstate 40 and was at my destination for the night. Because I didn’t have a ground pad I figured I might as well stay in a hotel to make sure I got some good sleep. My mileage worked out well to be in Amarillo right before 11 as well. I hadn’t realized how dirty I was until I got in the shower. Two days of sunscreen trickled off my body, carrying with it all the dust and grit that had been caught along the way. I wear a deep tan now. My sunburn has faded into a light shining tan. I didn’t really think I looked that tan until I took my kit off and saw the contrast between my pale unexposed skin and dark suntan. Physically, I felt no different than any other day. Mentally, with my progress from today I was satisfied. At the same time, I feel a dull sense of boredom and distaste. I really don’t like the region of the country that I’ve been biking through the past two days and Texas in particular has been depressing to me. The endless flat fields and industrial agriculture is starting to wear on me. My big day was behind me and I was happy with it, but I was just trying to focus on the future and the next two days are going to be pretty grim. When I’d gotten to my hotel room, the TV had already been on so after my shower I sat in bed and ate ice cream and wrote while sports commentators argued about people I’ve never heard of doing things I’ve never heard of. It must be hard to fill 24 hours of news coverage on SportsCenter. As I ate my Cherry García ice cream I couldn’t help but think how detached I am from the rest of America, and the rest of the world. I flipped over to the news and realized that I knew nothing about what’s been happening recently. But at the same time, everything is the same as it always has been. All the news headlines seem to be repeating themselves. When I’m really invested in the news and American culture things seem to change so much day by day, but month by month nothing actually changes. The same political rallies I’ve seen a million times before played out across the screen as reports of civilian deaths in Gaza and Ukraine rolled in. This news could be half a year old and I wouldn’t know any different. I drifted off to sleep trying to mentally prepare myself for the battles to come in the next two days.

I would say that today had the least natural beauty of any of the days of my trip to date. However, what it lacked in natural beauty I managed to make up for in my riding. I’m incredibly happy to have my first day over 250 miles. The wind definitely helped me more than it hurt me today and the terrain could not have been better suited for a big day. I had very little climbing and about 1000 feet of net elevation loss on the day. It was hot, but never over 90 so all things considered it was pretty good riding temperature. Today felt sustainable from both a mental and physical perspective. I actually don’t think I put any more effort in today than I have been putting in on rides over the last week, the conditions just aligned for me to have a solid looking numbers day. I think some of the days that I’ve been fighting headwind I’ve actually worked harder and I’ve been in the saddle for the same amount of time. The lack of headwind just gifted me an extra 70 miles. I’m rapidly approaching the southern border now. Once I get into Mexico, I have no idea if or how my daily mileage will change. The riding will inherently be a little bit different, but I honestly do not know what to expect. I would say of my entire route, the section through Mexico is the part I am least familiar with geographically, culturally, and climatically. I’d love to make it to the border in two days which would entail back to back 230 mile days. I’ve shown that this is possible, even with a headwind, which I am slated to have for both of the days. Even if I only manage about 200 tomorrow, I might make a big push on Saturday to get there for Saturday evening. I’ll kind of just wait and see how I feel. Regardless, it looks almost certain that I will make crossing of the US from north to south in under nine days. If I can get there Saturday night, then I will made the crossing in 7 1/2 days.

A question from the comments: Walter asks if I plan on taking any rest days. No, I do not plan on taking any rest days, but that is very much subject to change. To be honest, I have no idea what I’m doing at this point. This is by far my longest bike trip of my life and I’m not really sure if or how my body is going to continue to function. Mentally, the next 60 odd days are completely up in the air for me. I don’t know what to expect for myself. I hope I don’t have to take any off days, but if I feel the need to, then I will. Of course, I’m out here for the adventure and for the memories and the challenge. The challenge needs to be weighed against the experience. Even if I continue to feel good physically, I might need to take a day of rest mentally. I want to make sure I don’t get stuck in a spiral of dissatisfaction with what I’m doing. From a world record perspective, I need to average 163 miles a day to get to Shaya on time. So now that I am averaging Ushuaia in 84 days. In theory, every five days I could take a zero day and still be on world record pace with the days I’m currently pulling. My pace will slow as I get further south into harsher conditions, but for the moment, concern over world record pacing itself does not prohibit me from taking an off day, which is good to know mentally. It’s always an option if I need it, but I’m hoping I don’t need to take one. More likely than an off day, there may come a time when I want to just do a 50 mile day and lay in bed the rest of the day. I think it’s highly unlikely that I take a true zero day. From a physical recovery standpoint it would actually be better for me to ride a little bit than to take a complete day off and mentally I think it would be damaging for me to stay in the same place for 24 hours. Who knows, time will tell. Thank you for the question.