Day 53: Chimbote to Huacho

170 miles

I’m trying my hardest to stay positive and enjoy the incredible spot that I’m in, but I’m going to be real for a second: I’m not having that much fun right now. It’s not just the wind. The wind is setting me up for a baseline that’s really low, but there’s a lot of other things that are making this really difficult as well. For the past seven weeks I’ve been waiting for this ride to get miserable day after day. I had a little taste of that in Texas, and another taste in central Mexico, but even then I kept saying it’s going to get worse. I expected it to get worse. I expected to be miserable for days on end once I got into South America. I don’t know if I’m truly miserable right now. I’m certainly not having any fun, that’s for sure. But at the same time, I’m so apathetically resigned to my fate that I don’t know if I’m truly miserable. I just get on my bike and keep riding. The wind sucks but I’m used to it by now. It can—and does—still get me frustrated, but it doesn’t make me outright miserable like it in Texas. In life not every day is meant to be fun or easy. This trip is just life on the extreme so I certainly don’t expect it to be easy and fun every single day. Of course I want it to be fun and enjoyable, but that’s not reality of what I’m doing. Without that misery and suffering I wouldn’t really be growing either. Perhaps that’s not true. I learned a lot in the Andes while having so much fun and I derived lot of enjoyment from the riding there while also feeling like I grew as a person. I wish every day of this trip was as enjoyable as my time spent in the Andes, but I don’t think I would end up growing as much as a person. I wouldn’t be challenging myself. These miserable times are kind of necessary. In a way I look forward to the miserable times. They’re good opportunities to prove myself and learn. It’s easy to say that in retrospect or when you’re gearing up for a miserable time, it’s easy to act all gung ho and hoo ha, but when you’re actually out there and things suck, it’s a lot harder to stay positive. I can stay positive and excited through even the most painful physical experiences but from a mental perspective—like I’ve talked about before—I just don’t enjoy the outright suffering as much. Our brains are kind of hardwired to avoid misery. I think there are definitely people out there who can truly enjoy the mental abject misery that a trip like this provides. The popular personalities in our society of the likes of David Goggins, who preach suffering for the sake of suffering. Suffering just to become tough. People like Goggins want to suffer just so they can become hardened, “the hardest man in the world.” I’ll admit that a lot of times I find myself resonating with some of the things that David Goggins says. There is absolutely power in suffering. People should know how to suffer. Voluntary suffering teaches us lessons and gets us ready for whatever life has to throw at us. But at the same time, I think there’s a glorification of this extreme suffering just to suffer mentality. A lot of times that feeds into toxic masculinity and all the problems that I believe that has on our society from degrading relationships, leading to close minded thinking, and promoting this otherwise that leads to sexism etc. Regardless, I don’t really see the point in suffering just to suffer, suffering just to become hard. It has its value, but not every day all day. I’m a firm believer that people should do whatever gives them meaning and satisfaction in life, as long as it doesn’t come at the expensive others. If the likes of Goggins get their meaning from life by crucifying themselves mentally and physically in a dark room just so they can suffer for the heck of it, then kudos to them. If there is someone else who gets meaning by counting the blades of grass in their front yard every single day. Kudos to them, they should go do that. But I’m not David Goggins. I enjoy the suffering a lot, but I’m not going to sit here and glorify it. mental and physical suffering have absolutely turned me into who I am and I’m grateful for that, but there is absolutely a limit. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing no matter what that thing is. I don’t want to be a machine. I don’t want to be the “hardest man in the world.” I want to return from this trip and be a college kid again. I just want to be a little kid who likes riding his bike. I want to run around and be happy and give all my friends hugs. I don’t want to be angry at the world or think that I’m better than everyone else because I did something crazy and borderline stupid. That’s not why I am out here. I say this with the utmost respect for people who do suffer for the sake of suffering. There’s no doubt that Goggins is an incredible athlete and a mental stud, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with everything he says. I don’t agree with a lot of what he thinks about relationships and how suffering affects relationships. It’s possible to be a great cyclist and a good friend and a good partner and a good human at the same time. I can be happy and also bike fast. I can enjoy myself on the bike and bike fast. I can balance the good times and the bad times and make my own equilibrium, which looks a lot different than David Goggins’ equilibrium, and it looks a lot different than the person back home who’s never worked out in their life. That’s fine. Everyone is unique and people should pursue the equilibrium that works for them. I’m not going be like David Goggins and tell you to get your ass up.

I believe that I enjoy the mental and physical suffering more than 99% of the population, and I like to believe that I’m at least decent at handling it. I only want to suffer if I can see a tangible promise at the finish line. If I’m making myself better in some way. There’s certainly a cap on that suffering. And instead of working out for 15 hours a day, it probably be more beneficial to work out five hours a day and then go to other things to enrich my life the other 10 hours of the day.

At times I do enjoy that misery, but it gets old after a while. There’s a big difference between the misery that I’m going through now any type of mental and physical misery that I can put myself through back home. Even the hardest training weeks of my life pale in comparison. It’s impossible to replicate these conditions pretty much anywhere else. The cumulative fatigue is mind numbing; literally, I feel my mind going numb. I’m slowly loosing my edge. It’s not that my suffering is worse than anyone else’s suffering, it’s just very unique. I have no doubt that there are a lot of ways to voluntarily suffer worse than I’m doing right now, but my set of challenges are hard to replicate. There’s only a handful of people who have ever done the Pan-American solo in under 100 days. Two people to be exact. It’s cool to think how unique our experiences are. That helps take away a little bit of the misery. At the same time, my experience is definitely different than theirs and I don’t think it’s unfair to say that my experience is significantly more painful and miserable than theirs simply because it took them 95 and 97 days to do this and I’m on track to go about 30 days faster than them. I’m undoubtedly pushing way harder.

I didn’t have a super rosy start to my day. The wind never dropped below 8 miles an hour last night so at five when I left my hotel, I picked hammer and chisel back up and started carving away at the wind once again. I was on the official Pan-American highway, as I will be my entire way through Peru. At times it’s a two lane divided highway, but through cities it commonly shrinks down to one lane in each direction. I was in the south end of Chimbote, and even though we were out of the city, the road had not expanded again. I was right along the beach, although I couldn’t see the ocean since there were still almost a mile of dunes between me and the coast. I had my blinky light on and my front flashing light as well. Every driver honked me as they passed. The drivers here just love honking. I can never tell what their intent is. In some countries like Nicaragua the drivers always honk at me, but they were being friendly and saying hello. In the US honks usually mean that drivers are pissed. In Peru I think they honk just for the heck of it. I’ll have cars that beep at me 10 or 15 times. They keep honking after they pass me. Some of them are certainly mad, some of them probably just want to let me know that they are coming, and there might be a couple that are saying hello. It is a telltale sign that someone is really mad at you if they lay on the horn for several seconds in a row. Two quick honks is usually a friendly sign. When biking in the United States if you hear two honks in rapid succession, that’s always a hello. If you hear one normal honk means the driver is perturbed, but you don’t really have to worry about them. If you hear two long honks that means the driver is pretty upset and you should probably look over your shoulder to make sure that they’re going to give you enough space. If you’re in the United States and you hear someone begin their honk from a long way back and it continues for about four or five seconds, then you better get on the shoulder they’re coming for you. And finally come if you’re in the US and you hear a truck behind you—either a semi or a pick up—and you hear them lay on the horn for five or six seconds and you turn around to see that it’s a truck, you better get on the shoulder, jump off your bike, get on your knees and make peace with the world because they’re about to run you off the road, cuss at you, pull a gun on you, then probably run you over multiple times just for fun. That’s just the etiquette in the United States though. Different countries have different standards and I haven’t figured out Peru’s honking standard yet. No matter what it is, it’s incredibly annoying. Essentially every other car honks at me and there are a lot of cars in the road. All I hear all day is the sound of the wind ripping past me and cars honking at me. I made my way down this road as cars kept beeping at me. I just tried to put my head down and resign myself to another long rough day. I heard a car honk at me and then as it was passing, I felt a sharp pain in my arm as it was ripped off the bar. This car had come so close to me that its side view mirror had slammed into my arm just above my wrist. Luckily, since my arms were bent at an angle, it just knocked my arm off the bar instead of jamming against my bar. If the mirror had been a couple of inches lower it would’ve hit my bars and my wheel would’ve been twisted and I would’ve been on the ground before I knew it happened. If the mirror had been just an inch or two higher it would’ve slammed into my elbow, probably shattering my elbow. It also would’ve jerked my whole body since my upper arm was at a more vertical angle. I definitely would’ve hit the ground if it had hit me on the elbow or above. If the car had been about 2 inches closer to me then the entire body of the car would’ve slammed into my thigh and that would’ve been really ugly. I know the driver saw me because he honked at me. He probably just meant to buzz me, but he had misjudged the distance and ended up slamming into me instead. I guess that answers my question about these honks being friendly or not. They clearly are not friendly honks all the time. When it slammed into me it hurt like hell. It felt a very sharp pain and at first I thought something might be broken. Luckily, the only thing that broke was his side mirror. A piece of plastic cracked off and fell to the ground. I was obviously very mad at this dude, but there wasn’t much for me to do about it. He definitely wasn’t going to stop and say sorry. I watched him drive off and then about 2 km down the road he pulled over and jumped out of his car. I knew he wasn’t stopping for me, he wanted to inspect the damage to his side mirror. Nonetheless, I started sprinting towards him. I wasn’t really sure what the game plan was if I caught him. I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. Before I was within a kilometer of him he hopped back in his car and continued driving. It’s definitely a good thing I didn’t catch him. That would’ve been a completely pointless. Over the next 5 hours the pain receded until I was left with only a dull flicker of pain and a nice bruise.

As the sun came up I began climbing up and down. The climbs were not long and generally were not that steep, but the wind made them feel brutal. It is hard to go much more than 5 or 6 miles an hour up these things. The mountains all around me looked to be just as steep and fluted as the ones that I’d seen yesterday, but there was so much sand in this region of the coast that the wind filled in most of the valleys. Everything between the ridges and above  was the color of sand. There was no contrast anywhere. There were some low lying clouds inland, and I could see some huge mountains once again about 20 miles to the east of me. There was light fog coming off the coast too, but the sun immediately burned it off. I wonder when the last time it was that it rained here?

As I went through the town of Casma a little bit before eight in the morning, I finally found myself some good street food. I think the vendors in Peru are specific to the meal period. So perhaps the reason I’ve been having so much difficulty finding food is that I have been coming through towns at eclectic hours, not during breakfast, lunch, or dinner, but the hours in between. Maybe I’m wrong and I just haven’t been looking in the right places for the street food. Anyways, for about $2.50 I got four breakfast sandwiches, a maracuya (a fruit), and a huge mango. I had one egg sandwich, one chorizo, one chicken, and one cheese. The mango was perfectly ripe, and I gobbled down on it as I climbed out of town. Before long, my hand and chin were covered in mango juice, and my bike was a sticky mess from all the drips that had fallen off my chin. As I worked my way out of town, a bus passed me and honked at me. I of course, didn’t give any mind because half the cars on the road honk at me, this bus wasn’t out of the ordinary. We got to a series of speed bumps and traffic, and I passed the bus and made my way out of town. I was climbing out of town having just finished my mango when I heard the bus come up behind me again. Of course it was windy so I was only going about 6 miles an hour up this hill. The bus laid on its horn and then came to a grinding slow. It pulled up right next to me and matched my speed, I looked over and the driver was staring right at me. While he was staring at me, he proceeded to turn straight into the shoulder. He ran me right off the road. Since we were going at such low speeds, both he and I knew there wasn’t much danger in this maneuver, but I was going to have to stop and put a foot down, I was livid at the driver. I couldn’t help but feel like I was just getting bullied out here. I’ve got hand it to this guy. In my almost 15 years of road cycling I have encountered a lot of asshole drivers, but he was probably the most brash and unbothered asshole I’ve ever encountered on the road. He was so cold-blooded he had slowed down just to stare me down and then run me off the road without even looking. It’s like he had just drained and no look three-pointer right on my head. That takes a lot of confidence in your ability as a bad person. I respect him a lot more than the guy who hit me and kept driving like nothing happened. At least this guy was an asshole and he knew it. He was owning up to it, and he was even proud of it. He wanted to make sure that I saw who was inflicting damage. That’s some cold blooded stuff.

I really do feel like I’m getting bullied a bit. The wind is just an ever present factor that I’ve accepted a little bit. It’s not bullying me, it’s literally just hot and cool air mixing. It’s just the laws of thermodynamics in action, it’s not anything more than that. But the people here definitely are bullying me a bit. The drivers are just assholes. In Mexico I had a lot of rude semi truck drivers, but it was just semi drivers on the stretches in between towns. Here it seems like even the personal vehicles and taxis are out to get me. The wind has me starting at a baseline level of frustration that I can’t tamp down no matter how hard I try. From there, I am much more susceptible to other small things bothering me as well. I feel like a spring that’s been wound up over and over. I have so much potential energy. I’m so feisty and ready to spring and snap at any moment. When I try to fight the headwind, it’s like I only wind the spring tighter. The wind is so strong even the fastest cyclist in the world would look slow and its face. It’s a losing battle that I can’t fight. Knowing that I can’t fight the wind and I just have to accept, that makes me even more mad. Every single time I pedal it’s like winding the spring a little tighter. I can’t help but fight the wind, but I’ve lost the battle before it has even begun. The drivers come along and pester me. It’s like they know that my spring is wound up tight but I know also know that I can’t do anything about it. I could snap them, but they can just drive off. I can’t actually do anything. I’d hoped it left all this pent-up frustration and anger in Texas, but it seems that it’s come back to haunt me again. Or more accurately I’ve given it space in my head and allowed it to makes its home there and thrive. I had hoped that I’d gotten myself in a good enough headspace that this wouldn’t be an issue again. I’d felt so neat and tidy coming out of Ecuador, but I seem to have regressed quite quickly. Now it feels like I’m a big elephant in my own head, moving around, knocking things over, causing damage. I have none of that grace left. I’m letting myself be a product of my landscape and I’m finding it difficult to find any grace in the land here. It’s unforgiving and relentless, just like the wind. I’m becoming unforgiving and relentless to myself. I have to find a way to separate myself from my position. Every afternoon and into the evening I hate myself for being so pouty and angry. I hype myself up and pretend that everything is about to change and I’m bout to kill it and tomorrow’s going be different. Then I wake up at 4 the next morning, and feel like I can’t move. I just want go back to sleep. I don’t want to fight again. I force myself out of bed and onto the bike and I’m invariably met with a headwind. My ass hurts on the saddle, my legs are tired, my mind is spaced out, a lot of my gear is not working well. It takes me hours and hours to warm up and by the time my legs feel good the wind has picked up enough that it doesn’t really matter how good I feel anymore. I wallow in my own misery for a couple of hours and then I stop for a break and when I get back on the bike, the process repeats itself all over. it doesn’t feel that healthy. It feels like I’m suffering for the sake of suffering and I’m not really getting anything out of it. I don’t feel like I’m getting stronger, I feel like it’s just breaking me down. At the same time, I feel like I’m a long way from my limit. I’m also a long way from Ushuaia, but I’m not that far. I’m less than 8000 km from the finish now. I say that like 8000 km which is a really long way, but that’s only about 30% of the ride. I’ve come about 70% of the way. In my mind, I know that and even though it’s a long way and it could be up to three or four weeks from now, the light the end of the tunnel is there. Mentally I don’t think I’m capable of breaking anymore. I’m going to get really frustrated and angry and wound up and I’ll be miserable for a long time, but I’m not going to actually snap. The light at the end of the tunnel is far away, but it’s overpoweringly bright. I know I’ll get there. There are lots of hurdles in the way. Maybe it’ll get better, maybe it won’t. Either way, it’ll all be over soon enough. I hope it gets better so I can start enjoying my journey a little bit more. It really is a quite remarkable landscape. It all starts looking the same and it’s not like I need to enjoy every single second of it, but it would be nice to be a little bit more in touch with where I am. The good news is that the landscape is going to look like this for the next 2000+ miles so I’ve got plenty of time to get acquainted with it.

I had a lot of climbing throughout the first 8 hours of my ride, but I kind of spaced out. The road was smooth and 2 lanes wide so I didn’t have to worry about traffic as much. I just started at the white line and pedaled on all afternoon. By late afternoon the road flattened out and I started to pass by fields of sugarcane and corn. Everything here is irrigated of course. While it practically never rains along the coast, the mountains inland do get some precipitation so everything that falls west of the Andes flows through the desert to the pacific. The rivers are few and far between and most of them are dry. The ones that do flow have been so exploited by humans that they smell acrid and are choked off by eutrophication-induced algae blooms. I’m not sure how anything grows in the sandy soil here. The farmers must have to use copious amounts of fertilizer, hence the unhealthy state of the rivers.

I was feeling pretty glum and tired out. The wind had really hampered my progress so I resigned myself to falling short of my day’s goal, once again. I figured it would be best to stop about 40 miles short of where I had planned to. Hopefully I could just wake up earlier when the wind was quieter and I would still make it to the shop in Lima around 10:00am the next day. In theory it would all line up just the same. About 5km from my hotel I got a flat. Flats are always frustrating, but getting them right before I’m about to stop for the day is particularly annoying, and getting them in the dark is slightly un-nerving from a safety persoective. I was out of new tubes with 80mm valves for my rear wheel, so I patched the tube and threw it back in. I rode another couple of kilometers then exited the highway to make inroads towards a hotel. The road was unpaved and I immediately got another flat, this time in the front. I grumbled to myself, but threw in a new tube and got ready to ride again. I mounted my bike, but realized that the patch I had just put on the rear had blown. That was infuriating. I took off the wheel and decided to out in a new tube with a valve extender. As I pumped up the tube, the extender snapped off inside my hand pump. At this point I wasn’t even made. I was just 2 kilometers from a hotel and here I was sitting in the side of this dirt road with seemingly no way of fixing my bike. I checked to see if there was a shop nearby if I needed it for the next morning. There was. Knowing that I wasn’t totally screwed, just majorly inconvenienced, I sat back down and went to work trying to fix my bike. After an hour and a half of tinkering I got a tube pumped up to an acceptable psi. My hand pump is broken, but I was able to finesse it just enough to get the tube pumped. If the patch didn’t hold overnight then I would just sleep in and go to a bike shop here. I was so tired I just accepted my fate. What should’ve been an early bedtime was now a later than usual one. So life goes.