Day 55: Lima to Ica

181 miles

Things have seemingly taken a turn for the worst. I once again find myself in the throes of illness, this time significantly more desperate and painful than the last time. It seems I can’t catch a break here in Peru. I can only hope this illness will pass quickly. it is similar to what I had in Central America and Colombia, but this time around it is a little bit different.

I woke up significantly more tired than expected. After a short day of riding yesterday and a solid 6 1/2 hours of sleep—I say solid because that’s more than I have gotten in over a month—I expected to feel well rested and ready to tackle the next section of my journey. Instead, I was groggy and despondent. The hotel room I was in was quite nice, but I managed to get myself out of bed without too much trouble, despite my difficulties physically. Mentally I was prepared to get after it. Lima is a big milestone for me. In fact, it’s probably the biggest milestone of my trip. It’s important for a number of reasons. First of all, Lima is the last large city that I go through where I am really concerned about theft. There are a lot of smaller cities, that are probably still dangerous for my theft perspective, but I’m out of the corridor I always talk about being dangerous. That corridor from the US Mexico border through Central America, through Columbia, Ecuador, and lima. 5 mile stretch was always the most dangerous in my mind. I’m super glad to have made it out of that with not so much as a close call. Perhaps the primary reason why lima is such an important landmark for me is that throughout my planning process? I always pegged it my maker break city. In my mind, if I could make it to lima, then I would make it all the way to Ushuaia. From out of Lima, I only have 4000 miles left. Not that I’ve covered exactly 10,000 miles, the route is more or less 14,000 miles and I have less than 4000 to go, so in my eyes I’ve gone roughly 10,000 miles give or take a little bit. 4000 miles is still a very long way. I’m obviously not guaranteed a finish much less world record, I feel confident that I will get to Argentina at some point in somewhat near future. Today being day 55 with 4000 miles left means that I have to average 131 miles a day to break the record. on paper, this is quite easy and very doable. Excluding the days I had to stop early due to mechanicals or Bike stop shops, my lowest mileage day has been 137 miles which I also rack up 17,000 feet of elevation gain in the Andes with a 30 mile headwind. That being said, I feel like I’ve been falling apart the past week and catastrophe could strike at any second. Particularly now that I’m sick as a dog, it feels stupid to be talking about how easy it is to 130 miles a day. I will likely have a headwind for all 4000 miles And I’ll be in some really remote places so things do or when things do go wrong, I’ll be on my own. The final reason why lima was a cool mile marker for me is that just a little bit south of Lima the south most point that I’ve ever been. I am now further south I ever have been before.

When I pulled the bed sheets back, I was disappointed to see that the road rash from my encounter with the tuk tuk yesterday that I had dismissed as little more than a scratch is apparently a much deeper wound than I thought. It had bled all night long and the sheets were covered in blood. I felt bad about it. I’m sure they will charge me for it. I should’ve thrown some duct tape over the wound.

I was riding before five through the streets of Miraflores and Barrancos. I found my way back onto the Pan-American and back into the traffic as I continued my journey south, right down the coast.

From the get-go, I had a very bad headache. I generally handle physical pain pretty well, I can block most stuff out. Headaches are my Achilles heel. As a little kid, I used to get really bad bouts of headaches that would reduce me to tears. I’d rather endure the pain of a broken bone than a severe headache. For some reason, I just don’t do well with headaches. After less than two hours of riding, I stopped at a store to try to get some food and take a break in hopes that my headache would abait. my rest didn’t seem to help so I got back on the bike. The landscape was incredibly flat. It was foggy so I couldn’t see very far, but there wasn’t much to see anyways. The road was heavily developed on both sides for the first 100 km south of Lima. Beyond that, there was only sand to look at. My headache was getting worse, and I soon realize that it was the first symptom of a pretty bad sickness that I was coming down with. I found myself stopping every hour to use the bathroom. My stomach begin knotting up, and my leg started to feel weak. No matter what I did or how many times I took a break things kept getting worse and worse.

At around 2 o’clock, I took another break as the sun finally parted through the fog. With my incoming illness combined with the fog, I once again seemed to be replicating the landscape around me. I was totally spaced out. I had no concept of time, direction or distance. On one hand it felt like I’d been riding for 10 hours, but at the same time since the sun was just breaking through the clouds, my body thought it was still early morning. The dense fog had played all sorts of tricks on my worn out mind. I pressed on under the intense sun. The wind beat me back as I crossed flat open plains. Soon I found no reason to keep stopping for food and water. Everything that I ate, I would immediately throw back up. By late afternoon, I was stopping every 30 minutes for the bathroom. Nothing was appetizing. The only thing I could drink was water. No matter how much I drank I was incessantly dehydrated. I couldn’t keep up with my bowel movements or constant vomiting. About an hour before the sun set my headache turned into vertigo. All afternoon I’d been suffering, increasingly vivid, and scary hallucinations, and my mind was ran through with bouts of delusions. The hallucinations were not dissimilar from many of the sleep deprivation hallucinations that I have experienced in the past during long overnight endurance events, but these hallucinations were dark. My hallucinations are usually kind of fun, like a tree stump will turn into a bear that is dancing, or the stars will turn into twinkling fireworks. Now my hallucinations were much more dramatic and scary. I kept seeing people running up next to me, arms raised like they had a knife. They would flash out of the corner of my eye. I would flinch and swerve out of the way just to turn my head to see that nothing was there. My head seemed completely empty. I couldn’t really think of much. I just kept peddling and staring at the ground.

As the sun was setting, I stopped yet again to go to the bathroom and try to get some more water. My dizziness and vertigo was getting to dangerous levels and now I was fighting full body chills as well. I unclipped one foot and as I swung my other leg over my bike, my world turned upside down. My vision became blurry. I felt like I was about to pass out. I couldn’t tell which way was up. I started to fall over. Luckily, I hit a wall of the gas station and managed to stay upright. I didn’t want to stop for long. If I followed my rate of decline throughout the day, I estimated that I only had about an hour and a half left before I became completely incapacitated. The town of Ica was 30 km up the road, so I knew I had to lock in for just a little bit longer.

Even during my 10 minute break, my rapid decline was immediately obvious when I got back on my bike. My dizziness and vertigo was so bad that I found it hard to ride in a straight line. After 10 minutes of riding in the dark, I felt my stomach contract again, and I knew I was about to throw up. I tried to clench my teeth and hold it in for a second, but the pressure was too much and my efforts to suppress it only made the vomit shoot out of my mouth with increased velocity. Right before it came out I tried to turn my head to the side, but tilting my head off center even a couple degrees racked me with such intense vertigo that I knew I was about to pass out if I didn’t keep my head straight. Not really thinking about what I was doing, I looked straight ahead and let it blow. Vomit projectiled out of my mouth all over the cockpit of my bike. It ran down my chin and onto my chest, sprayed onto my legs and into the mesh of my shoes. It covered my bike bags and my cycling computer. It dripped off my aero bars onto my wheels and splattered up. Over the next 30 minutes I threw up several more times. Each time I didn’t have enough warning to stop and I just threw up all over myself again and again. I knew I couldn’t turn my head or else I would pass out and crash and potentially get run over. I don’t know how I had enough food in my stomach to be continually blowing chunks. I’d been throwing up for five hours yet semi-solid gunk was still coming up. My mind felt as if I were wearing a helmet of daggers piercing my brain. My stomach was turned into knots. My legs feel weaker than perhaps they ever have before. It felt like I just finished the hardest race in my life, but they were also in a way reminiscent of the fatigue that can only be achieved by a 500+ mile ride. My legs were drained in a way, which I’ve only felt a time or two before. I tried to lean into that pain in my legs. I tried to make that the focal point of my attention. That pain is a good pain. I have conditioned myself to love that pain because it means that I’ve accomplished something great. It’s a very specific pain that very few people have ever experienced. A good ache. It was the only part of my body that felt healthy. It didn’t feel normal, but I could pretend that it was a good pain.

Ica is a very large town and with 15 km until my hotel I found myself in heavy congestion. The autopista ended and even though the road remained two lanes in each direction, the pavement gave out to bumpy and potholed roads. My stomach had been cramping all afternoon, but as I entered the outskirts of Ica, it twisted itself into a knot and sent a spasm of cramps through my entire abdomen. My body writhed in pain and every muscle group contracted. I couldn’t pedal and as the vomit shot out of my clenched teeth, I closed my eyes and hoped that when I opened them back up I would still be upright. I lost all control of my body. Cramps sent spasms down my back and through my muscles. Vomit mixed with tears as I lost myself in a fit. I finally had nothing more to throw up, but contractions kept coming as I dry heaved over and over. I was bent double on my bike. I was racked by full body contractions and shaken by uncontrollable sobbing. The tears were no longer flowing, but my body kept breaking down in these weird heaves. It’s like the chills, the cramps, and the contractions all played into one sobbing-esk breakdown. I couldn’t tell one pain from another and my mind was too muddled to really care. I thought I was about to pass out, but luckily, I came around. I only had about 5 miles to my hotel. I knew I could make it, I just had to get a grip. I put my earbuds in and flipped on some classical music. My mind was too far gone to really process much, but I had a certain satisfaction in all of my pain. Somehow, someway, I had managed to bike over 180 miles in the face of a staunch headwind while being violently ill. As it turns out, all day while I had been spaced out with my head glued to the ground, my legs had been pounding. I had actually made great time. Sure, ideally I would’ve done well over 200 miles today, but looking at the circumstances what I did was something to be proud of. In all of the pain and all of the misery, I tried to focus on the good pain. I tried to zone everything out and exist in the world that was detached from the reality of the hell I was in. I found myself in some of the most chaotic and dangerous traffic that I have ridden through in my entire life. Through blaring horns, screaming, drivers, shouting vendors, yelling children, barking dogs, and the general commotion of a big city I rode on. Weaving between cars, buses, moto taxis, motorcycles, and semis, I rode on. Jumping over speed bumps, dodging, potholes, and swerving vehicles, I rode on. I turned on my music and put the volume all the way up. I blocked everything out. Amid a piano cover of Aphex Twin’s Avril 14th, I rode on. As I lane split between large semis I would start to loose balance on my bike, but I could lean my shoulder against the side of the trucks. They were like my training wheels. I felt like I couldn’t crash with them there. Of course I could have. It wouldn’t have been hard to find my way under their wheels, but I didn’t think about that. I followed the little line on my map and somehow made it to the door of a hostel. The first two places turned me away. All of my gear was covered in vomit, tears, and perhaps even a little evidence of my bowel movements. In my last fit of cramps and contractions, I had lost total control of my body, yes, that means what you think it means in terms of my bowel movements. I really was on my edge. I can’t ever remember being so far out of control and yet I had managed to keep biking. At the third hostel the man stared at me for a couple of seconds and begin to say no, but I gave him a pleading look and offered to pay an extra 10 soles. I think he felt bad for me, and he gave me a room.

I thought it was pointless to even try to eat. I would just be giving myself fuel to throw up again. Nonetheless, I housed a sleeve of cookies, a can of cold beans, and a can of cold salchicha (sausages, think spam in mini hotdog form). Even though I was off the bike, my condition wasn’t getting any better. I stumbled in the bathroom to get in the shower, but I was rocked by such intense chills that when I realized there was no hot water, I accepted my fate and fell into bed. I fell asleep without even taking any of my clothes off. I lay there in a wretched state. I woke up 30 minutes later with a strong desire to go to the bathroom. I managed to splash myself with some cold water and take off my clothes. I was still shivering and was afraid that a cold shower would send me over the edge, so I stripped down and got under all the blankets I could find and went back to sleep. I wasn’t sure where one day ended and the next began. By my 4th or 5th trip to the bathroom I stopped looking at the time. The bathroom was so small that there was only about a foot between the edge of the toilet bowl and the wall. As I sat on the toilet I could lean my head forward against the cool tiles of the wall. I put the trash can in between my legs so I could take care of business on both ends at the same time. Multiple times I awoke with a start as my head slipped down the wall. I kept dozing off to sleep while sitting. It was a miserable night and I didn’t truly fall asleep until 5:00am when the first roosters were announcing the arrival of a new day.