How to Eat an Elephant

This is all Roger’s fault if I’m being honest. I’ve been around. I’ve done a couple of things in my time, but the seed that started this whole process was planted in approximately 2000 when a former colleague informed me that he was going to ride a bicycle across the country.

His blog was a practical sort of thing, in that he simply wrote in a regular journal, and then when he got to places with internet, he would post pictures of not only the things he had seen, but pictures he took of the pages in his journal. Maybe I’ll try that….maybe. But probably not because I find that my internal monologue comes out best when I am typing on a keyboard.

So I did what any rational person who wants to ride across the country would do. I researched my routes, thought about hauling all that additional weight in panniers, and decided the right thing to do would be to convert a van into an RV. You see, I associate with a Bunny and a Poodle, and neither of them share the desire to spend hours on a bicycle for days on end. If I want them to come with me, and I assure you that I do, I needed to make that possible. So…..van. Also, this meant not carrying a bunch of gear on the bike and that I could have tasty meals on the regular. You do the math.

Making that van took all of my attention and time until the fated day arrived when it was time to begin eating the elephant riding a bicycle across the country. So I’ve been feeling a significant amount of ‘performance anxiety’ around whether I could actually do the riding at the required daily distances.

As mentioned previously, I’ve done some things. I’m not unfamiliar with ‘pain caves’ and the discomfort of endurance athleticism. It’s just that I haven’t done any of that sort of stuff for more than a decade and my body kind of shows that. So….anxiety.

But there’s no point in 'shoulding' on myself, and the van is pretty much ready, so the Bunny and I loaded the Poodle into Ellie (that’s the van’s name), and headed out to La

Push, Washington to begin a West to East traversal of the Great American Rails to Trails.