This, my friends, is a general understanding.
We are not ones to rise at the earliest hours of the morning to ascend our local canyons. We have not once worn those thinly threaded jerseys with vibrant colors and skin-tight fits. Our touring bikes’ tires? They haven’t quite shred their tread to a bare layer of rubber niblets.
In fact, the longest journey on which we’ve each embarked was a mere 30 miles, driven solely by the desire to consume a cup of coffee from a Downtown Los Angeles brewery. It was delightful, the coffee… and the ride was quite pleasant, as well.
Despite our inexperience and our inability to cycle down a bike path without self-destructing, here we are. Two noobs preparing for a 12,000 mile ride across 5 continents. The muscles on these thighs are eager for exploration. The determination in our eyes fueled exclusively by an undying curiosity to experience the world.
Our strategy is simple – get on the bike, early every morning, and ride in a specific direction for approximately 6 hours a day. Stress? Expected. Sleep? Eventually (and most likely in a tent behind a bush in a discreet part of the countryside).
With hours of training equivalent to those spent by humans walking on Jupiter, our gluteus maximi will certainly throb like the angry end of a platypus. We know.
But how hard can it be? Just one pedal push at a time. Just a few million revolutions of a tire. Easy. Right?
Well… we hope not.
As crazy as it may sound, we want this to be the single hardest thing we ever do. We hope to encounter the most grandeur of speed bumps and we hope to learn and grow from every ounce of struggle. We hope that the vast diversity of this experience makes us the most cultured, understanding, resourceful and well-rounded individuals we can be.
In the end, if it ever ends, we wish to look back at this journey as the single greatest accomplishment of our lives… the experience that defined who we are and who we’re going to become.
At the moment we may not be cyclists, but cycling we’ll be.
I’ve been doing these long-distance bike tours for more than 14 years and I still don’t think of myself as “a cyclist.” You may find that you feel the same way… even after cycling all the way around the world. I look forward to following your adventure.