Ride slow

Ethan and I went to see The Divide at the Boulder Theater a few weeks ago. It’s a one hour documentary that follows Lachlan Morton as he rides the Continental Divide bike route at a record-setting pace.

I’ve never really known much about Lachlan Morton and I’ve always been a bit averse to him (which isn’t fair.) But it’s not a him thing per se; I’ve always been annoyed at people who ride bikes fast. When I first heard of Lael Wilcox it was one of my guy friends telling me, you’ll love this chick she broke the record for the Tour Divide by like two days! I appreciate that this friend saw qualities in me that made him think that I was someone who would be interested in Lael Wilcox. I also bike tour and I am also a woman. But I wasn’t really that interested. Many years later I listened to this podcast on RadioLab and unfortunately it left me–still and against popular opinion–underwhelmed by Wilcox.

Yes probably a big part of this aversion is jealousy. Sure. I will never in my life even if I sold my soul to the Devil Herself be able to ride anything as fast as any of these people. But I think it’s more than jealousy. These really fast people aren’t relatable; they get paid to ride bikes and do these trips and that just doesn’t resonate. Also I don’t think speed is that interesting. On long bike trips I want to know where you’re sleeping and how, what kind of bike you’re riding (Alexandera Houchin is a fast person who rides an interesting bike), and what happens when you get lost.

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In September 2022 I rode a segment of the Colorado Trail. I wanted to ride it ever since two hikers near Buffalo Creek found me on my Long Haul Trucker and asked me if I was riding it. No, I wasn’t then, but I’d love to see someone take an LHT on the CT one day.

The Colorado Trail goes from Denver to Durango. It is 539 miles long with 72,500 feet of climbing. I was planning to spend two nights out there on the segment from Copper Mountain to Buena Vista. Many people told me this was the best section. That was my favorite segment! They said. Oh yeah that’s the easiest section. And so pretty! They said. Great choice! Oh you’re taking three days? That’s plenty of time! They said. I did that segment in twenty four hours and I didn’t sleep! That’s what the guy who owns the bar next to the bike shop told me.

This all sounded great to me. I was planning on sleeping and two nights in fact! And I planned on stopping for snacks and for lunch in Leadville and maybe at a hot springs and if people could finish this section in twenty four hours then three days and two nights would be plenty. I did not look at the milage or the elevation stats before I went. (It was about 93 miles and 17,500 feet of climbing based on rough estimates from the internet.)

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When I cycled the West Coast in 2014 I stayed with a family somewhere in Washington State. They were friends of friends whom I had never met before. They had two young kids. I remember being about to leave, my bike out in the driveway, really just trying to say goodbye and the dad said, Go slow out there. Here we’re always rushing, always somewhere to be. I was surprised to get this advice. I just met this guy yesterday after all and he seemed like a basic dad: eating off of his kids’ plates at dinner, chasing them up to bed, flipping the TV on after. That moment in the driveway was like one of those scenes where a person is possessed and their voice isn’t their voice for a second and when the moment passes it’s like they don’t realize it happened. He never biked across the country, what did he know?

But for some reason I never forgot his advice. And it turned out to be harder to execute than I thought. It was hard to throw off the shackles of a society that said things should be orderly, should be done in certain amounts of time, that you should be doing something, never nothing, that life is in fact, a race.

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Turns out the route that the bar-owner next door finished in twenty four hours I could not finish in three days. On the third day I left the trail to take an easy, flat, gravel road into Buena Vista just in time for dinner. Dinner was really good. I was so hungry. I was also mad. Multiple people told me it would be easy and actually, those three days nearly wrecked me.

It might be a Colorado thing. Out here people are so capable and ambitious that our expectations of what can be done have warped into something borderline mythical. And maybe I could–knowing what’s ahead, planning and training–maybe I could do that segment in two days or twenty four hours and not sleep. But that’s really not the point.

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At the end of The Divide screening Lachlan did a Q&A with the audience–the place was full, standing room only. And I can’t remember the question. Something like how long would you have taken to do The Divide route if you had as much time as you wanted. Lachlan said, “Like six weeks or something like that.” And the audience gasped. And laughed. I loved it. I think Lachlan won me over right then. He said, “You don’t really get to see much when you’re going that fast. There’s so much to see and so many people to talk to. You miss it going that fast.”