Day 36: Nagarote to El Manchón

65 miles

For the first time this trip, I woke up without an alarm. I laid in bed and stared at the ceiling. I had slept for 10 hours. It felt nice to sleep for a long time, but I definitely still feel like I am well behind. I think it would take about a week of rest to feel like I’ve caught up. My body is just so deep in the hole. I am so physically fatigued day after day. I do not even remember what it feels like to be well rested. There were a lot of things I could’ve been doing, but I delayed in bed and stared the ceiling. I was only 30 miles from the bike shop and it didn’t open till 11. I didn’t need to leave until 9 so I had nothing to do all morning. I tried to fall back asleep but I couldn’t. I finally got out of bed and did a little bit of logistic research on the upcoming parts of my route. They’re always things I can be working on—things to look over or to memorize to prepare myself for what is coming. I could also be working on my Spanish. In the past couple of days it has finally started to get a little bit better, but it’s still a long ways from where it once was.

I had a Bike Shop picked out. I had been able to talk to the mechanics yesterday and they told me they had a couple frames for me to choose from. I wanted to find an almost identical frame and transferred all of my parts onto the new frame. I am incredibly lucky and I had several sponsors step up and offer to support me financially through this new frame selection. I will no longer be riding a TIME. The company has been so incredibly generous to me. All my life I’ve wanted to become a professional cyclist. To have a sponsor give me bikes for free or pay me to do what I love—ride my bike. As long as I can remember this has been the ultimate dream. I would sit in front of the TV and wish I were like the pro riders on the screen. TIME was the first company to offer me a sponsorship. The frame that they sent me is much more than a piece of carbon. That Bike represented two decades of dreams and 15 years of dedication to cycling. It was just an object, but it’s a symbol all of the, hard work that you can’t see. I want to give a huge shout out to Dustin and Tony and the whole team at TIME. I also want to make it very clear that it is not TIME’s fault that my frame snapped. I rode into an absolute crater of a pothole at 30mph. Any bike would have broken. In fact, it’s remarkable that the frame did not snap completely in half. I have incredible faith in the engineering of TIME bicycles and hope that one day I will be able to get back on one of the beauties. The entire team at TIME worked as hard as possible to try to get me a new frame, unfortunately, the logistics of getting a frame to Central America and short order simply impossible. Nicaraguan customs are a nightmare. It would’ve taken weeks, and there was a high chance that customs would have confiscated the frame. In addition, hurricane Helene has left TIME’s US distribution center in South Carolina without power, rendering a shipment to Panama in a timely manner impossible.

I slowly began riding towards Managua. The team at TIME had been very explicit that I should not ride on the frame. It was not safe to ride. The crack is in the worst possible spot because in theory it could snap at any time and a crash would 110% be inevitable. I knew the risks, but I was confident that the frame is not ready to snap yet. I kept my speed well under 20 miles an hour and pedaled softly. The crack runs all the way around, but it’s not a circle, more of a spiral, so I didn’t think it’s ready to give out yet. Every time I hit a bump or got out of the saddle, I could hear the carbon staining and cracking further. Luckily, the road was relatively smooth until I got downtown. I managed to make it to Bicimania, the bike shop I’d chosen . Upon arriving, I felt up a spark of hope. There were several nice bikes. However, it became clear that my options were very limited. There were two nice frames that were the right size. However, they were both brand new and only compatible with electronic shifting. I do not want electronic shifting because it is almost impossible to fix. No matter what happens to my mechanical shifting, I can troubleshoot it relatively well and it is much cheaper and easier to find a replacement mechanical shifter. Electronic shifting is expensive and finicky. The mechanic brought out a frame that would seemingly work and I got excited. However, we soon realized that there was not a compatible seat post for the frame. He told me he had one option left for me. he went in the back and pulled out his old road bike. The frame has 8000 km on it, but it is a nice TCR advance. I have faith that he took good care of his bike and he is a very good cyclist himself so hopefully he kept it in good condition. I didn’t think he was going to scam me but with a broken used frame. Anyways, I didn’t have another option. This was my ride or die. I said, let’s do it. This frame isn’t the perfect frame for what I’m doing. My TIME  ADHX frame was the perfect frame, but this frame is a little bit too racy and not as robust. I also don’t love buying a used frame from an unfamiliar person at an unfamiliar shop, but I had no other options and in the end this was not a bad option. We begin transferring my components onto the new GIANT frame. I left and went to the grocery store and ATM while the mechanics built up my new bike. By 5 o’clock in the evening, I was ready to roll.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge how incredible it is that I cracked my frame in rural Nicaragua and was able to back on a fully built up bike in 34 hours. Breaking my frame has always been the worst case scenario other than being run over or robbed. I chose a pretty bad spot to crack my frame too. Nicaraguan bureaucracy is very slow so I was stuck what was on hand in Nicaragua. Getting something shipped in was not an option. I am so lucky that there was a frame that worked for me. I’m also lucky to have had the extraordinary help of Lenar, the mechanic, and Bicimania, the shop. I genuinely cannot thank you guys enough for keeping my dreams alive. They were incredibly accommodating and agreed to build up my bike in a single day with no extra charge. They were understanding of my situation and despite the language barrier, I think I made some great friends. Although Managua is a city of several million, cycling is not a common pastime for very obvious reason. I a forever grateful for the help of the Lenar.

I was excited to get a feel for my new bike. Even though the sun was about to set and I was in downtown Managua, I decided to take a small gamble and press on East out of the city on my new frame. I named my TIME Bike Le Revè, meaning “the dream” in French. The name alludes to the frame being the culmination of two decades of dreams, but also to my great Pan-American dreams. I have named my new bike never Le Rndè, short for “Le Revè Never Dies…Ever” . Not only are my Pan-American dreams, alive and well, my Pan-American world record hopes are still thriving. I have faced an incredible amount of hardship and bad luck during this journey. Although this incident was not so much bad luck, as a mistake on my part, it still counts as a hardship. I can’t believe that I’m still ahead of the world record.

From Managua, I rode through Masayo in the dark. On the outskirts of town, I began a steep climb and was immediately greeted with a front flat. I couldn’t help but laugh. How ridiculous is that. I really cannot catch a break. I wasn’t even annoyed, I thought it was a little bit funny. The universe wanted to remind me that even though I might be on a new bike, this is still the same journey with the same trials. At this point, I am becoming an expert at changing flats. In the dark without a flashlight, I managed to change it in about two minutes. I was on my way. I rode into city and grabbed a hotel for the night. My spirits were so incredibly high.

I’m still in disbelief that I cracked my frame. That has not even sunk in yet. When I first crashed and looked over at my frame, I was just in shock. I didn’t even know how to react. 36 hours later, not only do I have a new frame, but I’m over 100 miles from where the incident occurred. If I can make it to Panama City in three days time, then I will  only have lost one day to this incident. For the non-cyclists out there, and even for the cyclists out there, I don’t think we fully understand how remarkable this is. It’s simply incredible to be faced with the worst case scenario and be able to rebound like this. I know that I am a completely different person than I was when I started this journey because an incident like this would’ve been so devastating to me a month ago. I feel a little bit like a Bobo doll. These are the dolls that have a round bottom and when you push them over, they always spring back upright, no matter what you do to them. I’ve faced so many unexpected hardship on this trip that—while not having broken me—have molded me into something new. Every time something bad happens I feel no other option exist ms other than to get back up and keep biking. The only thing I want to do is keep biking. It’s the only logical thing to do. If my bike is broken, then I pick it up and keep walking. This has happened twice now in the past week. I honestly don’t really know what to say about my resiliency now. I don’t think of it as being resilient. It is just the most logical option. I don’t even see it as hardship. It seems more like a chore. Something goes wrong or something breaks and the only option is to move on and make the best of it. When I cracked my frame, I sat on the side of the road and for approximately 30 seconds I thought my trip was over. I snapped back into reality and realized that my trip was just facing another speed bump. It’s not the first speed and it probably won’t be the last. I can only hope that I have learned from my mistakes and built up a little bit of good karma. Even though I keep rebounding from these mistakes and setbacks, I’d obviously rather not have them happen and my lead on the world record keeps getting diminished. When I am able to ride unbothered by Mechanicals and headwinds I have consistently shown my capability to ride well. However, all the small mistakes are adding up and every setback has a cost. I can’t afford to continue riding like I have in the past week. Since I left Mexico, I have had 13 full days. Three of those days have been throw away days in which I have gotten less than 100 miles due to my frame cracking and being hit by a truck. For the remaining 10 days that I have spent south of the border, I have averaged 208 miles a day. On one of those days I had six flat tires and walked 5 km to a tire shop. On another one of those days I had a flat tire that I had to tie off and pump up every five minutes for 100 km. I wasted about five hours on the tire that day. If I had been accident free since the day since I left the United States I am confident my daily average would be around 220 miles a day for the last 10 days. That’s something I never ever dreamed of happening. When I began this trip, I would’ve been happy to average 160 miles a day through central America. I’m still in awe that I put down a 265 mile day in Mexico. Call it resiliency, call it grit, call it a chore, it doesn’t really matter. I continue to pop up from these setbacks. I’ve been knocked down so many times and somehow continue to stand back up. I really don’t know what to say. I’m so thankful for everyone who is helped me both virtually and in person. My virtual support network is so strong and loving thank you all. I wish I didn’t have all these mistakes and setbacks, but the silver lining of all these Accidents is that each time I am reminded of how many people I do and do not know are out there cheering for me. Thank you guys so much. Sometimes I feel like my luck is so rotten out here, but I know I am one of the luckiest people in the world at the end of the day, even if I can’t always see it in the moment. I want to keep these blogs coming for you guys and for myself. I hope they can make a return. I will try my best. They probably will not be as long as they once were. However, every time I try to shorten the length of my writing I fail. I’ve always been an over-writer. I have so much I want to say and so many things happen to me every day. I don’t want to leave my story incomplete.