Day 51: Sullana to Chepén

198 miles

I have developed a metaphor for myself to help explain how this trip is affecting my mind. Maybe this metaphor only makes sense to me, and granted it’s definitely a little bit tacky and totally reductive of my feelings, but some version of this metaphor has existed in my mind since I was in Canada and from time to time it has helped me internalize some of my feelings. Now that I’m writing it out, it seems really stupid, but it’s true to my emotions and a lot of aspects of the metaphor really makes sense to me. Essentially, all of my struggle on this trip can be likened to the process of cooking a soup. We have to go all the way back to the beginning of my training cycle to really fully understand this metaphor.

In the winter, when I was first struggling with how to process the long training weeks, I was talking with a friend and likening my mind to a glass bottle. I had to shove my emotions into the bottle, which was fine, but eventually that glass would start to crack and when that glass shattered, I could be ruined. My training progressed, and I started to learn how to better deal with the mental load of the training I was doing and the sacrifices I was having to make for my training. The glass bottle metaphor didn’t work as well anymore. My mind was then like a pressure cooker.

I remember as a kid sitting on the counter and watching my mom use the pressure cooker to can food. That pot got incredibly hot and the pressure under the latches would get scarily high. As a little kid, I always thought of it as a live bomb on the counter even though I’m sure it was totally safe. The cooker had a tiny little vent on the lid. There was a black metal weight that could be placed on top of the vent to entirely shut it off, or let a certain amount of steam out of the cooker. This weight would dance up and down on top of the vent, making a sizzling noise that could be heard throughout the house. For the spring and for much of the summer, I compared my mental state and brain processing to that of a pressure cooker. Inside, I kept pouring all of my emotions and the mental toll that my training was taking on me. But it wasn’t all bad. Inside the pressure cooker there were good times and bad times. Everything inside was a byproduct of the effort I was putting into training. It wasn’t a selection of the worst moments, but rather the sum of everything I was doing. Nonetheless, even with all the good things that were happening to me, I couldn’t—and still don’t—fully understand the impacts of all of my training and time spent alone. So even those good times had had a certain mental weight. All my mental baggage was in this pressure cooker and the pressure would build up to dangerous levels, but I kept finding ways to take off the little weight on top and vent some of that pressure. I was lucky to be surrounded by some of the people I am closest to in this world, people who love me and care for me and were there to talk things through for me. I had easy days, or at least days when I wasn’t on the bike for 8+ hours a day. I had other things going on in my life that allowed me to relieve some of the stress and mental toll that was building up in my pressure cooker. The problem was—and is—that it’s really hard to control the flame on the stove that I are cooking on. I’ve been cooking on the stove for a long time now, and sometimes I can adjust the knob a little bit to turn the heat up down, but the gas line has a mind of its own and the knob is mostly broken. The amount of fuel being fed to the fire is akin all to the random ups and downs of life. Sometimes things are just hard. I remember a good friend telling me “Some weeks are weird and you just have to let them be weird. Some weeks are bad and you just have to let them be bad.” So when misfortune seems rife, the stove gets turned up really high and that pressure builds up a lot faster than it otherwise would. Throughout the summer I got better and better at releasing the pressure from my pressure cooker and I slowly begin to turn all that mental load into some actual beautiful results, beautiful food. What I cooked up in that pressure cooker over the last 10 months represents a very rough set of tools and experiences that I then stored away and can now utilize during the Pan-American. It’s like I was preparing my ingredients in this pressure cooker. I took all those ingredients and put them on the shelf. They weren’t ready to eat yet, but I’d worked hard already and was a lot closer to dinner than I was before I started cooking (dinner is finishing the Pan-Am. Stick with me here. Hopefully this all makes sense).

In the weeks leading up to the start of my Pan-American, I stopped cooking in the pressure cooker. Time was up. If I hadn’t cooked the ingredients that I needed by the end of August, then I would have to make do without them now. My mind was no longer like a pressure cooker, it was like a huge pot. I put the pressure cooker away and put this big pot on the stove. Really quickly it started to fill up. I had a lot of anxiety and fear over what lay ahead of me on the Pan-American. As I finished finals in school, all of my friends begin to leave campus and I started to feel lonely before I even left New Hampshire. When I landed in Prudhoe Bay there was already a lot of stuff in the pot. I had some of my prepared ingredients in that pot, but I also had a lot of random junk and none of it was that good. The ultimate goal is to cook a beautiful soup. I will call it a bacon chicken soup because winner winner, chicken dinner. I’m trying to bring home that bacon. I know it’s corny, but it works for me. In Prudhoe Bay I had a bunch of nasty looking liquid in the bottom of my pot and not much else. As I begin riding and encountering new experiences, learning new things, and overcoming novel challenges, all of these moments represented more stuff I was throwing in my pot. I had my ingredients on the shelf, all the physical and mental training that I already done, and I was able to utilize the ingredients to start making the soup taste a little better, but my pot was getting really full really quickly. The biggest fear is that the pot is going to boil over and that soup is going to jump out and burn me. I don’t want to get scolded by the soup. As I got beat down through America that pot started simmering right up against the lid. A couple drops splashed out in Texas as I felt myself falling apart. The heat on the soup had been turned way up. The gas line was fully flooded. Of course, I can turn off the gas line completely. This is representative to quitting. It’s a very simple solution to keep myself from getting burned. But if I turn off the gas line then I don’t have any soup. I just have a bunch of cold nasty ingredients together in a pot and I’m going to go hungry for the rest of my life. The gas line only has two positions, completely open and completely closed. I have to leave it open all the way to Ushuaia or until I run out of gas. As the gas was flowing through freely the flame was staggeringly high. Luckily, once I got to Mexico, the flame died down a little bit, and I managed to escape without having my pot boil over too much. I got through northern Mexico and then was hit by a truck. They fire flared up again and my pot began boiling. This time I was scalded a little bit, but just on my hands. It left a mark though. The soup wasn’t ruined yet, it was perfectly fine, but it was at risk of being ruined. Throughout Central America, the gas kept flaring in random spots. I cracked my frame, I got a bunch of flats in one day, the weather wouldn’t cooperate, etc.. Soon, I realize that I needed a bigger pot. I was a good enough cook now that I had been given the keys to the chef’s closet, so I went in and grabbed a bigger pot. This is representative of my mind toughening up a bit. I’ve learned how to cope a little bit better, and my reciprocal for my emotions is much larger. Still, I have a lot of soup. The problem with the soup is that I can’t take it out of the pot. Once I put something in there, I can’t take it out. The only way I can even begin to lessen the quantity of my soup is by giving someone else a little taste. In professional kitchens there are tasting spoons and chefs can go around and get one little bite of food from their own or another chef’s pot with the intention of giving the chef a little advice on what to add to make the food much better. In this way, I can talk to my friends and give them a little taste of my soup and they can help me out and try to let me work off some my emotions. But ultimately, my pot of soup is massive. One little spoonful out of the pot doesn’t really make a difference at all. It helps to know what I have to do in the future to make the situation better, but it doesn’t lessen the load of the soup.

When I got to Colombia and started working my way through the Andes, I felt like I was learning how to control the flame a little bit better. The knob was starting to work again. There is a tiny little knob on the gas line, but it doesn’t always work perfectly. I can try to make micro adjustments, and the more skilled the chef is, the better he is at controlling this flame, but ultimately the gas line has a mind of its own. The gas line is still representative of all the bad things and good things that can happen, these variables that are completely out of my control that have a massive effect on how I ride. In Colombia and Ecuador the soup was brought to a really nice healthy simmer. It started tasting really good too. I could finally begin to feel like perhaps the soup was going to turn out alright. Still, it had a long time left on the stove. I began feeling perhaps a little bit too confident in my cooking abilities. I still think the soup is going to turn out really good, but I’m going to have to put in a lot more work to get it there than I thought. The magical beauty of the Andes kind of brought me to an unrealistic view of the rest of my trip. The reality of the cooking that I have left to do is starting to hit home a little bit more. As I get into Peru, the headwinds that I am forecasted to have pretty much all the way to the end of this trip represent a huge flare in the gas. That flame is getting really high. I just checked the chef’s closet, and I don’t think there’s another pot for me to use. I’m using my biggest pot already. I’m not sure how much stronger my mind can get. My pot isn’t full. There’s definitely still room to add some more mental load, but it’s definitely more than 75% of the way there. The ultimate goal is to get to Ushuaia and have this nice beautiful soup all cooked up and ready to serve. My aim is to be able to give the soup out to all the people who have helped me get to where I am. All my friends who support me are going to get a bowl, my girlfriend‘s going to get a bowl, each one of my sponsors is going to get a bowl, I hope that the Honnold Foundation gets a huge bowl—this, of course, being analogous to the money I’m raising for my fundraiser—and my dad is going to get a bowl that is practically overflowing for all the help that he is giving me along the way. I hope I get to Ushuaia and I can dish out the soup and I’ll be left with a bowl for myself and tons of leftovers too. Those leftovers represent all the good things that I’m taking away from this trip. I’ll be able to snack on those leftovers and give them out to people for years to come hopefully.

One might be asking “what’s in the soup for everyone else?” “Why would anyone else want some of your bacon chicken soup?” Well, I think it’s different for everyone, but I hope that my cooking, my struggle and effort out here on the bike, has at least a little bit of an impact for at least some people. Maybe someone is a little bit inspired by what I’m doing or at the very least gets a little bit of enjoyment out of reading my blog. In this way, I hope to be giving a little bit of soup to people, a little bit of enjoyment, maybe a little bit of inspiration. Everyone has different taste buds, so everyone’s going to get a little bit of a different experience from the soup, but I hope to make that soup available. Maybe not everyone will like the soup. There might be people who just aren’t a fan of what I’m cooking up, and perhaps the aftertaste will be bad. Perhaps I’ll return as a completely different person that some people won’t like. One thing is, this soup is very unique. I never had any soup like this before. The fun part of this metaphor is that everybody who has supported me has also taken part in the cooking process. Hopefully you get to eat some of the soup, but your support is also helping me cook the soup. Like I said before, not everything in the soup tastes bad. There’s a lot of good things that are going into the soup as well, all that emotional support that I’m being fed is really helping me enhance the taste of the soup. Everyone reading this blog can help me make the soup better. You can give my sponsors a little bit more soup by supporting them, or you can donate to my fundraiser and we can ensure that the Honnold Foundation gets a huge bowl of soup. I feel like I haven’t been plugging my fundraiser on this blog enough. I really really care about and think about the impact my fundraiser could have as I bike through countries that face environmental destruction and social inequity. If you have the means, please consider giving a little soup (cash) to the foundation.

Additionally, you can add to my bowl of soup. Just by reading this blog post you’re adding to my bowl of soup. One of the big takeaways I hope to get from this trip is sponsors so that I can do this type of thing in the future. Every time you read my blog, you increase the website traffic on my page. When I go to pursue sponsors after this trip, I can say hey look, I have X number of daily readers on my blog. You can add to my soup by sharing this blog, sharing my socials, maybe if you know someone in the bike industry, you can talk me up, or if you know somebody in the journalism industry, you can give them a lead on my story. Increasing the publicity of this attempt is a great way for you to put on a chef’s hat and come cook with me. The heat is on. There’s no question about that. It’s getting hot in here. That bowl is soup is looking really big, but it’s also looking like it’s hoping to turn out. It’s not guaranteed, there’s still plenty of time to burn the soup or let it boil over, but every minute that passes, we get a little bit closer to sitting down for dinner.

On an entirely different food note, I think my taste buds are shot. When I was in Peru in 2021 I remember trying their signature soda, Inca Kola. The stuff tastes like bubblegum and is a neon yellow. In 2021 I almost spat it out. It was so sweet and toxic tasting. It’s the epitome of artificial. Nothing even remotely taste like this in nature. As a very little kid, I remember trying this drink at the Coke museum in Atlanta and having a similar reaction. Today when I stopped at a small store, I found some Inca Kola and I had to get it. When in Rome (Peru), right? I cracked it open and took a big swig of the cold liquid. It tasted fantastic. It really hit the spot and I actually kind of enjoyed the sweetness of it. I’ve been eating hundreds of grams of sugar per day. Some days I eat pounds of straight sugar. There’s not much variation in my diet. I haven’t had a salad since I was in the United States. I eat a lot of fruit, but that’s really sweet too. Pretty much the only thing I eat that doesn’t have sugar in it is an occasional hunk of meat. My taste buds are definitely shot. This tastes way too good. It’s funny because Inca Cola is owned by Coca-Cola. In South America, you don’t see a lot of the big US brands that I saw in Mexico and Central America. Stuff like McDonalds and KFC are around, but only in the biggest cities. Oil conglomerates seem to be different, or at least Exxon and Shell and the likes are good at astroturfing their subsidiaries in South America (although Texaco has Colombia in a chokehold). Coke really does seem to be the most universal product. It’s everywhere. It’s a staple. Throughout Colombia and Ecuador I was drinking almost exclusively Coke in my bottles. I counted how much I had one day and I got up to 12 liters of Coke in a single day. Even though I’m brushing my teeth twice a day, all that sugar has to be doing awful things to my teeth. That soda cannot be good for me and every now and then I forget to brush because I fall straight asleep. It’s going to take a couple months to put myself back together after this trip.

At the store, the attendant asked me if I was biking to Argentina. I paused for a second. This is the first time anyone has ever asked me this. I’m finally getting close enough, that people aren’t that surprised that I can bike all the way there now. Even when I was in Ecuador and Colombia I would tell people I was biking to Argentina and they would be blown away. They typically thought that that was impossible. I guess that means I’m getting somewhere. I have a long way to go, but it was still cool.

The headwind was railing me, but I managed to keep up a pretty good speed. Soon I got out of the flats and came into some bigger cities. In Chiclayo, I got my first taste of a true Peruvian megalopolis. I hadn’t quite gone through Piura, I kind of skirted the outside and Sullana hadn’t been that big. Chiclayo was huge. I accidentally found myself off the main road but was happy because I made my way to the Plaza de Armas on accident. It was the first architecture I’ve seen in Peru that I actually thought was pretty. Most of the buildings here are just ugly squares.

As I left Chiclayo, I begin to see my first mountains. The road started to go up a low-grade climb, and even though things were just as desolate as before, if not even more so, the mountains far away in horizon gave me a little bit of motivation. I rode through the dark for two hours before getting to Chepèn where I found the perfect hotel with a supermarket across the street. I haven’t been to a supermarket in a long time. They just were not easy to come by in Ecuador. I got a lot of food, but sadly realized that my stomach is not as big as it once was. I can’t even come close to eating as much as I did in the USA. My stomach seems to have shrank. I’m shrinking too. I’ve finally started to notice big differences in how I look. I’m not that worried about it, but I’m definitely loosing weight.