Four years ago, I rode my bicycle across the US. In 26 days. That meant an average of 135 miles a day, no rest days. When I think back on it now, it seems like the craziest thing I’ve ever done, and it damn well might be. How did I end up on a trip like that?

Several things happened in the year or two leading up to that. One was that I began to have my heart condition handled. Another was that I successfully finished a weeklong mountainous trip in Colorado the summer before, and it wasn’t the torture-fest I thought it would be for someone with a history of hating climbing hills. The third was that two years before, my best friend Lori had been killed in a base-jumping accident. There are defining moments in one’s life, and that was one for me.

If you see Lori’s memorial page, you can see that she really strived to live life to the fullest. I often regret that I didn’t learn that lesson while she was alive, but I got it clear as a bell when she died. And one thing I absorbed was to take on things that scared me. And holy crap, this trip across the US was that.

The year before, Lori’s husband had given me her carbon fiber bicycle after her death, and she had, 8 years before, gone on the same trip with this same company, PAC Tour. Their trips are billed as the hardest in the world, and they certainly don’t disappoint. It seemed appropriate to do the same trip with her bike, so having zero idea what a trip like that entailed, I signed up. And then spent the months leading up to that training, thinking somehow that I was doing the right thing.

I showed up in Everett, Washington, outside of Seattle, and was immediately intimidated. It seemed like everyone knew each other, and they had all ridden with PAC Tour before, and then I got the shit scared out of me at the pre-ride meeting the evening before, when Lon Haldeman, the co-owner of the company with his wife, Susan Notorangelo mentioned things like: if you make it to day 5 without trouble, you’ll probably be OK, and that the hardest days were Day 2, Day 10, and Day 24. Mention of Day 24 was so far off I couldn’t even imagine that, and Day 10? In the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming? Arrogant me said to myself, “I’ve climbing some of the hardest stuff in the US – it’s probably just like that” so that left me just Day 2 to focus on.

And when I started the next day, I promptly started to have my ass handed to me.

(Read Part 2 and Part 3)