Once I put the jersey on, everything else starts falling into place. The shorts go on my legs. The gloves go on my hands. The socks go on my feet and the shoes go over them. I fill up my water bottle, grab an energy chew, and turn on my laptop. Turn on the A/C and the fan. Connect my watch. Clip in. Time to bike.
Getting on the bike is difficult like any routine is difficult. For me, the concept of ‘routine’ has always been a pipe dream. I am impulsive, quick to jump on any topic that turns my head. I am not disciplined. After years of fast-paced deadlines and packed schedules, I have still not learned how to work with structure, plan ahead, and commit to routines. Instead, I have perfected the art of lazing about in a sedated, disassociated state until the last minute, when I push myself into a frantic and frenzied period of work. This blaze of glory usually exhausts me to the point where I fall back into my stupor until the next deadline.
Complacency has always been my specialty. Beyond schoolwork and projects, my lack of discipline has killed many of my personal goals. More specifically, I have never been able to sustainably improve my physical health.
I have a very complex, and often warped, view of my body and fitness levels. I’m sure most people who have grown up in the digital age also struggle with their own body image. Since I was about twelve, I have gone through endless rinse-and-repeat cycles of fad diets and workout routines. These have all inevitably crashed and burned due to their unsustainable nature and my lack of discipline.
I have two traits that make for terrible goal-setting: high ambition and impatience. I set very unforgiving, all-or-nothing goals for myself. If I don’t see results soon, I’m giving up. I struggle to conceptualize “the long haul”. My deepest desire has always been to be extraordinary. I wanted to achieve things that others could not with ease. I did not know how keep up a commitment to working hard over long periods.
When I went to college, I was amazed that so many of my friends had fitness habits that they’d stick to. Gym every evening. A run every morning. Protein shake each day for breakfast. What? The idea that people could stick to these habits and see change to their bodies was so foreign to me. Even now, I still have trouble grasping it.
When school shut down, I told myself I’d do Chloe Ting workouts until I had abs. Getting 11-line abs had been a favorite fantasy of mine for years. I summoned up the discipline to finish her 2-week shred challenge, deflated at my lack of glorious ab lines, and took a rest week which has stretched into four months.
I had no idea how I would do the summer ride. Previously, this truth didn’t bother me. I usually push myself into situations way over my head, and Texas 4000 is one of the most over-my-head commitments I’ve ever made. But I knew that I would be able to do it. I would have the beautiful outdoor scenery. I’d have the training miles behind me. Most importantly, I’d have my teammates with me. If they could do it, I could too.
Then school shut down. My fitness training, which I had worked so hard to build up in February, completely stopped. At home by myself, I had no motivation to bike alone or do circuit workouts. I did not see my teammates, outside of weekly Zoom meetings where I was muted. I lost my support and my motivation. As the pandemic worsened, I lost faith and trust in this organization. There was a lack of timely communication, lack of leadership, and general dissent, all of which boiled down into a month-long virtual summer ride with low participation.
I was dreading going into the summer ride. I hadn’t worked out since March. I felt hopeless about our mission during the pandemic. I kept thinking about one of my teammate’s journal entries about the cancellation of the summer ride. She wrote that we were “the team that never left the parking lot”. That got to me. We met at the CPE parking lot at the beginning and end of each ride. It was our home base. Now, it felt like an anchor tethering me to the floor. We were stuck. I didn’t know how to move on from the dreams I had built for this summer. I didn’t know how to accept the fact that our summer ride had been distilled down to four weeks of lonely biking at home.
Being in Texas 4000 was often a lonely and difficult experience. But I knew it would be worth it because of the incredible summer we had ahead of us. I had often fantasized about the endless fields and clear blue lakes we would bike past. I dreamed up late-night tent talks that would bring me close to my teammates, the kinds of conversation that would have us dedicating captions to each other on Instagram. I thought of the thrilling fear of slowly opening yourself up to others, and my heart warmed at all the new things I would discover about my teammates over our 70-day journey.
I scrolled through previous teams’ pictures and watched their videos, mentally inserting myself into them. I made note of the most breathtaking views, and planned out where I would take the most beautiful pictures, make the most beautiful memories. I imagined myself, standing in an endless lake framed by mountains which pierced the sky. I imagined the grounding knowledge that I had biked through the Rocky Mountains and across two countries. After that, what on Earth could stop me? What on Earth could I not achieve?
My want was a pulsing, heavy thing, and I carried it with me throughout training.
Sometimes, I allowed myself an indulgence: I imagined myself on day 70, crossing the finish line. Would I have new scars on my body? New muscles where soft flesh once was? How bad would my tan lines be? Would I be holding someone’s hand as I biked past the finish line? Would I have made new best friends? What stories would I have carried all that way? Would I be braver, kinder, better? Would I have changed? Always, always, the question: Would I have changed?
I watched footage from previous team members running towards their families waiting for them on the other side. I could see myself running into my mother’s arms and crying. I would tell her, “I did this for you. Look what I did for you.” And I would show her 老爷’s name written on my leg: 芦明德. And I would say, “Look. I carried him all this way for you.” And our relationship would approach something like healing.
But healing doesn’t look like that anymore. Healing now is my lone bike on a borrowed trainer in our garage. It’s pedaling and pedaling while you’re still looking ahead at the same wall. It’s being alone, without anyone ahead of you to call for potholes in the road or stop signs ahead. It’s sweat, gallons of sweat, more water than you ever thought was in you, because there’s no wind or coasting when you’re biking indoors. It’s just pedaling. And more pedaling.
I had no idea how I was going to do it. But I did it. I made a commitment to this organization, and I decided I had to honor it. It seemed impossible, given my countless failures at committing to a routine. I did not want to do it. But I knew I would feel worse if I didn’t try.
So I got on my trainer. I biked every day for the past month without getting anywhere at all. I only had two jerseys, so I would bike three days in each one before hand-washing my kit. I made a makeshift laptop stand and binged hundreds of hours of Futurama. I drank way too much Nuun and ate way too many Clif gels. I helped my teammates put together a virtual programs video, as well as a series of programs events about healthcare inequity. I biked a full century, and I never doubted my ability to finish it. When I was tired and aching, I still got on the bike and pushed myself. Regardless of how bad it hurt at first, it always got so much better after the first half hour.
It was much easier for me to get into a routine because we had a leaderboard where people logged miles. I doubt more than half the team used it – most of the cells are full of zeroes. But I logged my miles every day and hungrily watched them start to climb. I set goals – be in the top five. Then the top three. Then, finally, after my grueling century: number one. I was number one. Dazed, I floated that idea in my head. I was number one. And I was deeply satisfied. But I was also terrified of future goals, where I wouldn’t have others to compete against. Where I couldn’t look to someone else to set the bar. Where I had to be utterly and completely responsible for myself. I still do not know how to do that.
It’s now July 16th, half a month after the summer ride. I began writing this post two weeks ago, but I had to stop and revisit it later. It’s hard to understand my feelings about this summer ride. Biking every day was not something that came easily, and I can too easily see myself putting the bike away for much too long now. It’s much easier for me to keep up a routine if I do it every day, but once the streak is broken, my motivation ends. (I also have to return my borrowed trainer, so my next ride will be outdoors. The fear of an accident while I’m biking alone is still something that keeps me from biking outside.)
I do not think this month has necessarily improved my fitness. I see no changes to my body, and I feel the same as ever. I was not expecting miracles, but a little more leg and arm definition would be nice. The biggest difference was that I was constantly exhausted when biking. I often slept 10 hours and still had to nap throughout the day.
And I do not know if this bike ride has helped me heal, in the ways that I thought it would. I took the news of the cancellation pretty hard. I’ll be mourning the loss of our summer ride for a while. This virtual ride has exposed so many deficiencies from our leadership and staff. I think they are pushing benefits, such as leadership, that should not be the focal point of this organization. (Ex: They wanted to purchase “leadership style” tests for each person on leadership. They were $80/person. We are supposed to be granting as much money as possibly to our mission.)
But that doesn’t really matter anymore. What does matter is that my mom came into the garage to check on me almost every day while I was biking, and she told me she was proud of me. And I guess that’s something that could never have happened during the actual, 70-day ride.
It’s okay that I’m not sure how I feel about this experience. I know that we have worked hard to spread our mission virtually, and I am proud of some of the work we have done on the Programs team. We have shone a light on issues that Texas 4000 has never talked about before: racial inequality on the bone marrow donor registry, how people struggle to afford access to treatment, and how the pandemic has affected cancer care. I hope we have inspired others to become better advocates and friends.
I’ve seen so many of my teammates end their reflection posts with a variation on “To Alaska, someday”. Throughout our ride, we have continued to perpetuate this idea that we are “moving on to our next Alaska”. That we will “get to Alaska one day”. I understand the sentiment behind these platitudes, but they still irritate me. Alaska is not a metaphor for every other goal in our life. It is a dream that we will not achieve. And I disagree with the implication that anything else can represent the magnitude of what Alaska meant to me. What it meant to our team.
Our team will not be biking to Alaska, ever. Some of us will bike to Alaska on different teams, next year or the year after. Some of us will visit Alaska on our own time and cheer on later teams. All of us will mourn the journey that we will never have. A heavily structured period of our life has ended. I don’t think I’ll ever train this much again. In the worst case scenario, I may never be this fit again.
But it’s okay. We have made a difference in the fight against cancer, and I have met some of the most inspiring people in my life. My teammates’ reasons to ride will stick with me, just as I hope mine will stick with them. And perhaps that is the most beautiful thing about this organization. We tell each others stories. They live on. Two years ago, the only people who knew about my grandfather on this side of the world were my parents, my brother, and me. Now, I’ve shared his story with so many others. He matters. They all matter. And we didn’t forget them.
It’s been a hard, strange, and emotional period of daily biking. Gratitude and frustration are linked together more often than I’d like. Hope heals in ways that are difficult to understand. But there are always so many more people to love and reasons to fight. And cancer fucking sucks.