Day 44: Marmato to Palmira

176 miles

Last night I had a dream that I was done with the Pan-American. I was super happy to be done, and I felt incredibly content. But I wasn’t happy that I had accomplished some thing or that I had finished, I was happy to be done. Happy not to have to wake up and go at it every day. Happy to be able to relax and feel normal again. Happy to decompress. I’m usually not one to give my dreams much credence, but while I’ve been out on the road, all of my dreams have seemed to have a lot of intentionality and meaning. I definitely think that there are concrete emotions that are driving my dreams at the moment. I don’t think that my dream last night was a manifestation of loneliness or feelings of homesickness. I think my dream was more representative of my desire to have some of the mental and physical strain lifted. Yesterday was one of my favorite days of the trip and I feel great. Finally, after almost a week of sickness I’m starting to recover. It’s not like I’m in a deep dark spot and this dream was representative of all my desires and wishes to be done. I think this dream is just a representation of the small undeniable part of me that is getting worn out and jaded by the constant stress and battering my body is taking. I don’t think it’s problematic that I have a little bit of subliminal burn out, I think that is an inevitability and if I didn’t, I probably wouldn’t be pushing hard enough.

In my entire life, I can never remember having a reoccurring dreams. That all changed this winter. I almost never remember my dreams. I can usually have a vague idea about the topic of my dreams immediately after I wake up, but I never remember them very clearly. The one exception to this is the one reoccurring dream that I have had over and over this year. It’s the only reoccurring dream I can ever remember having. In the dream I am in the last 1000 miles of the Pan-American. I am cycling along the vast flat plains of southern Argentina. I’m in my aero bars, but I’m not moving very fast. There’s a killer headwind. All of the suddenly I hear a noise over my left shoulder and Michael Strasser, the current Pan-American world record holder, blitzes by me on his bike. He gives me a little hang 10 symbol and a cheeky grin as he passes. Immediately after both of his support cars pass as well, and his girlfriend, who is on his support crew for the entire trip, leans out the door of their RV and waves at me as they pass. In just a couple of seconds he disappears across the horizon. This dream is so incredibly vivid every time. It’s like I’m watching a movie that I can replay in my head after I wake up. I can watch it in my head all day long. Strasser has a documentary on his record attempt, so I know exactly what he would’ve looked like biking along this section of road and my dream gets every detail correct every single time. I first had this dream in January when I began my first training block in earnest. I got it about once a week for the next eight months. For the first week of my Pan American attempt I would have this dream seemingly every night. As the trip wore on and I began to put down solid miles. I began to build confidence in my own ability, and I stopped having the dream. Then, when I was hit by the truck in Queretaro I had a dream once again that night. When I cracked my frame in Nicaragua, I had the dream again. On days 41 and 42 I had the dream. Since day two of my attempt I been ahead of Strasser in terms of virtual miles. My lead grew consistently through the United States until I go to Texas. I then grew my lead more and more through northern Mexico, but since getting hit by a truck, in Queretaro, my lead has plateaued a bit. When I cracked my frame my lead started diminishing. When I only had back to back 100 mile days on either side of my flight from Panama to Columbia I once again hemorrhaged time to Strasser. The last two days I have started to get back into a rhythm but for two weeks Strasser was getting closer and closer to me. It was not and still is not a crazy thing to believe that his virtual miles will catch me and surpass my progress before I get to Ushuaia. If I were to have an incredibly brutal headwind for the last 3000 miles through Argentina, as it is totally possible, it would be very possible for me to lose the record in the last, 1000 mile stretch where the dream has kept occurring. Obviously, it’s just a dream, and I can control my own destiny to an extent, but at the same time, many of the setbacks I am faced with have been out of my control, and a small part of me—an irrational part of me—worries about my dream becoming a prophecy that I must fulfill.

Today was another beautiful day in the paradise that is Columbia. However, I did not have the same all inspiring views, challenging hills, or chaotic cities as yesterday, and today’s and sights pale in comparison of what waits for me closer to the Ecuadorian border. For this reason, instead of recounting a narrative of my day that will simply be dwarfed by the days to follow, I want to capture my mental state at the time. I’ve noticed something quite remarkable. I think that through the first couple weeks of this trip, my thoughts got progressively more nuanced, and I turned inward, many times through Canada and the United States. I have not gone back and read my blog entries, but from my perspective this is how my mind has felt. I try to keep my blog entries as true to the emotions that I am feeling so I believe the progression I am talking about is also evident in my writing. In the plains of the United States I felt like I had a lot of time to think. I worked through a lot of my emotions and grappled with some really hard days. When I went into Mexico and Central America I felt like my mind turned off a little bit. My pseudo philosophical wonderings seem to taper off as I became more invested in making it to the end of the day and less invested in expending mental energy on deep thoughts and ponderings. This is of course, a reflection of the environment I was in. In the United States, I felt incredibly comfortable. My biggest worry was whether there was headwind or not. Upon entering Mexico and the subsequent states that I have been through, I had a slew of new issues, which I was concerned about. Everything from the language barrier, to crime, to bike mechanicals, to proper nutrition. So much more to worry about that I spent a lot of my mental energy simply on surviving. Upon arriving in Mexico, the style of the riding I am doing changed completely, as expected. This change in riding style had subsequent effects on my mind, obviously. In  some ways I liken it history. Throughout history, we see golden eras, and times of stagnation in terms of culture and arts. During times of political or social upheaval or general hardships of life, history shows a stagnation of development and progress, which is reflected in the liberal arts. Look at the middle ages, for example. It was an incredibly difficult time to be alive, and everybody was more focused on surviving than they were on sparking the next great movement. For centuries there was essentially no progress in the arts. Then came more stability in life and the Renaissance was sparked. Over and over throughout history, we see golden ages following the stabilization of society. In this way, I say reflection in my own writing. I felt very stable and secure through Canada and the United States, so my mind had space. In Central America and Mexico I thought more basic. I felt like I was more focused on the narrative of my day than these questions of life. After spending the better part of three weeks in foreign countries now I’ve gotten used to the changes in riding style and lifestyle that accompany the riding I am doing. Particularly in Columbia, I’ve began to feel more relaxed. I still have a healthy amount of anxiety and my head is always on a swivel, but I feel that I have turned inward to evaluate my own emotions more than I did through Mexico or Central America.

My dream this morning about my satisfaction with not having to ride my bike anymore didn’t exactly scare me, but it raised some really important questions in my mind which I really wanted answers to. I was a bit confused about where these emotions are coming from since yesterday was one of the best days of my life on the bike. I wanted answers to some of the questions my dream had raised, so I turned off my phone and rode in silence for the first several hours of my ride. My body felt pretty awful. All that climbing yesterday had definitely taken a little bit of a toll on my legs. For the first time since week one I could feel a little bit of fatigue. It’ll just take a couple of days of climbing for my legs to get used to all of it. More than anything it was all the low cadence peddling that I had done that stresses the muscles in slightly different ways. I was also feeling quite sleep deprived since I camped last night. Even though it was probably only 80 to 85° when I was going to bed, a huge thunderstorm rolled through and everything got soaking wet. The humidity was at 100% and I could not stop sweating and had a lot of difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. As much as sleep deprivation sucks, there are some benefits to it. I often find that sleep deprivation removes some of the filters in my mind. It’s like having unfettered access to my emotions. In fact , studies have shown that people tend to be more creative when they’re an acceptable amount of sleep deprived. Jimmy Hendrix said that he wrote some of his best music while being sleep deprived. He would sometimes use it as an aid for creativity. Doubtless used many other things that aided his creativity too so I’m not sure I should be looking to him for advice on this front, but it is quite an interesting side effect of sleep deprivation. I just rode and thought for several hours. I felt so awful on the bike that I decided to take a quick break and sat down at a little hut for some coffee. I looked in the coffee grounds of my Colombian brew for some answers, but the only place I found answers was back on the bike. I figured out my dream is actually quite simple to explain. Essentially, I’m not tired of riding my bike, I’m just tired of the constant mental stress. I love the physical challenge of riding my bike. I am absolutely a masochist. Not in the sexual sense, but in the sense that I seek out discomfort—as cliché and corny as that may sound. All endurance athletes have to be masochist to an extent. There’s no rational explanation for what I subject my body to. I crave this challenge and thrive off of it. The physical challenge. Overcoming physical challenges and pushing through physical pain gives me great satisfaction. Certainly, this trip has provided a lot of physical challenges, but the hardest part about this trip has been the mental aspect. It feels like riding my bike is just the interlude between problems. Every time I start peddling I’m just waiting for the next thing to go wrong. I usually don’t have to wait that long. Riding the bike is the easy part. Dealing with all the stuff that keeps going wrong is the hard part. I’ve been doing my best to take it in stride and I’ve been developing a lot and terms of how I approach my problems, but I’m getting jaded from the constant beat down. I want the challenge of this journey to be the biking, and not the logistics. It’s not that I can’t handle it. I think I’m better equipped to handle my problems now than ever before in life, but it doesn’t give me the same satisfaction to overcome these logistical and mental hurdles. I don’t get the same satisfaction out of the mental stress and challenge that I do out of the physical stress and challenge. I set out on this bike ride to challenge my legs, and yes to challenge my mind, but it feels like I’m at an imbalance right now, and my mind is being challenged while my body is chugging along with no problems. I think the Andes present a fantastic opportunity for me to start hurting a little bit more physically with all this climbing, but then again it still feels like I’m just waiting for the next thing to go wrong. I’m very on edge about it all. Even if it feels inevitable that I will overcome the next mental challenge, I still don’t look forward to it the way I look forward to the next hill or physical challenge. The mental strain has me jaded. My dream is a reflection of that. It’s a reflection of the corner of my brain that craves a short break from the constant mental stress. That corner of the brain that just wants to decompress and escape the load that is always weighing down on me. For some reason, this hadn’t really been apparent to me until this dream. I think my mind is so calloused, and as I spoke about a couple of days ago, my emotions are so intense that I have either blocked them out or never felt them in the first place. That corner of my mind is starting to wonder when the break is coming. I’m not sure there is much I can do to alleviate this anxiety. Even if nothing goes wrong for the rest of the trip, I’ll always be worried about it in the back of my mind.

The brutal irony about my realization is that about 30 minutes after I came to the conclusion that I was am stressed about the next thing that’s going to go wrong, I looked down and noticed that my carbon seat post is cracking. Oh joy. Obviously, my seat is pretty important. This is a really big problem. The seat post on this bike is not cylindrical. It is teardrop shape. It is designed by GIANT specifically for the bike that I am riding. You can’t go into any Bike Shop and find the post. It is incredibly niche. This post clearly will not make it to Argentina. I don’t know when, but at some point, the crack will become large enough that the seat will begin slipping down into the frame. When that happens, the only way to ride this bike will be to stand out of the saddle. If the seat falls down too far, my bike bag will begin hitting my wheel, and it will be impossible for me to ride the bike. You don’t need to know a lot about bikes to know that my seat is another one of these things that could end my ride if I don’t fix it. There were no bike shops along my route today, and there were certainly no shops that were going to be able to fix it. I need a new seat post ultimately. I think there are a couple different ways. I can make the crack, stable and delay the inevitable, but I need a new post. If I can’t find a new seat post, I will fill the hollow carbon tube with some type of resin, epoxy, or acrylic that will pour in as a liquid and then harden into a strong solid. The good news is, I will be going through several major cities over the next couple of days. I have four opportunities and four different cities to get a seatpost between here and Quito. I’m not overly confident that any of the stores will have a post that works for me, but between the 4 GIANT stores between me and Quito I am hoping that I can source a new seat post. In the meantime, I went to a motorcycle shop and put superglue all in the crack. I was looking for some type of epoxy to wrap the seat tubing, but I couldn’t find anything. I had to settle for electrical tape, which I wound around the crack as tightly as I could. It is out of sight, but it’s not certainly out of mind. Every time I hit a bump I can hear it creak. I don’t know if it’s the crack getting bigger or if it’s just already cracked carbon rubbing against itself. The one saving grace of this crack is that about 2 inches above its insertion point the crack splits horizontal, instead of vertical. This split makes me think that I have a couple days at least until the seat decides to crack even more all the way through. Still, with every bump I hit—and there are a lot of them on these roads I am riding—the fear of what might go wrong races through my head. Like I said in the morning, I’m just waiting for the next thing to go wrong. As I rode to Palmira in the evening, I got another dose of unfortunate circumstance. I was on the main Highway 25. My friend Jesse V., who has spent a lot of time in Colombia told me that the locals have warned him about highway 25 after dark. Around Cali and south of Cali it can often get a little sketchy. I wasn’t more than 15 miles away from Cali and it was well past dark when I got a flat. It was a very slow leak, but it clearly needed to be changed very soon. I was only about 10 miles away from my hotel so I decided to try to ride on. I stopped to pump it up to about 120 psi then road until it went flat again, which was about five minutes. I repeated this process over and over until I got to my hotel. Changing the tire would’ve required me to stop on the side of the road and take off my rear wheel. It probably would’ve taken about 15 minutes and I would’ve been stuck completely flat footed. If somebody tried to roll up on me during this time, I would be completely defenseless and I would have no escape. In the event that someone did pull up on me while I was pumping up my tire, even if it was flat, I could theoretically ride away. Every time I stopped to pump up my tire, it only took about 2 minutes opposed to 15. I figured it was much safer to keep riding with my periodic stops than it would be to try to change the whole thing. It was a bit nerve-racking. Certainly not an ideal situation. It also cost me about 30 minutes of time which is 30 minutes less of sleep. Then, of course, once I got to the hotel I would have to change the flat which would take more time and since this is one of my last tubes, I would rather patch it than replace it which takes again more time. This was the 24th flat that I’ve gotten on this trip. If you think about how much time those flats represent it adds up to a lot of lost mileage. Strasser had nine flats on his entire trip. I had one day with six flats alone. Something about my luck it’s just absolutely rotten.

All morning I was riding along the Coca river. While it looks flat on the elevation profile, there was a lot of up-and-down next to the river and I went incredibly slow because my legs weren’t feeling great. Nowadays, it’s taking me about three or four hours to really warm up. I had a couple decent climbs around lunch before punching through a long tunnel and dropping into the valley of Cali. The tunnel was over 3 km long. Months ago when I was routing the section, I remember looking at the elevation profile and seeing a 2 mile stretch at 36% gradient. I knew that this must be a map glitch at the time, and now it makes sense why that glitch exists. The map just assumed the road went up and over the mountain instead of going underneath it. Bikes were not allowed in the tunnel which I didn’t realize until I was right at the mouth of the tunnel. To turn around would cost me about 60 km. In addition, I would have to make the 4000 foot climb over the mountain instead of punching straight through. There were a couple guards at the entrance of the tunnel, and I knew they were about to yell at me.

I decided to risk it and try to punch through. I built up as much speed as possible and blazed right past them. They didn’t see me until it was right on top of them. I heard a couple shouts from behind me, but I knew that even if they were inclined to jump on their motorcycles and chase me, they wouldn’t catch me till I was already more than halfway through the tunnel which point what were they going to do. It’s one of the situations where I don’t really like breaking the rules, but I felt a little backed into a corner. The reroute would’ve cost me about four hours maybe even more with all the climbing.

I ate incredibly well today. I didn’t take pictures of my lunch because I had just discovered the crack and my seat post and was anxious about that and never even thought to take a picture of my food. I stopped at a little restaurant and ordered a tamale and a couple of empanadas. The tamale cost two dollars which was way more than I was expecting. I thought I’d been ripped off until they brought out the tamale. This thing looked less like a tamale and more like one of those Yule log cakes. Instead of being wrapped in cornhusks, it was wrapped in an entire banana tree leaf. These leaves are about 3 feet long. The tamale weighted several pounds. I cut into it with my knife to reveal rice, vegetables, and a full side of short rib pork inside the tamale. I almost couldn’t finish the thing. It was huge. Easily a foot-long and 5 inches wide. Once I dropped into the Cali Valley. It was extremely flat for the rest of the day which was a nice break. My legs finally started to feel good again and there were a ton of cyclists on the road. The last few hours of the day I even had a slight tailwind as some storms closed in from behind. If I had felt good this morning today would’ve been an easy 200 mile day. I’m pretty disappointed that I didn’t sleep well last night and squandered the opportunity to get my first 200 mile day in South America. That will come, but probably not until I get to Peru. I wasn’t expecting for today to be as flat as it was, but that won’t last. Once I leave the Cali valley it will be nonstop hills until I reach Guayaquil. I love the hills and I’m looking forward to the beauty, but at the same time, it’s hard to overstate how much they slow me down. The road through the mountains is also so windy that it often feels like I have to go 2 miles to do 1 mile of southern progress. This is just a nature of the route. I’m excited for it even if it does have its drawbacks.