Shrinking the Distance Between 'Never' and 'Someday'

I’m guessing it was about mile 62 for the day. I crested what I thought was the huge climb J had warned me was coming (and smugly thought, psshhh, that wasn’t bad at all). Below, the desert dipped into spiraling ledges. The sun was sitting on the rim of the canyon, moments from plunging into the quick dark of a winter desert night.

A thousand tiny pools of water glittered in the rock far below. One refracted so blindingly—and I was so bone-shaking exhausted—I convinced myself it was the mirror of J’s motorcycle. That he was signaling to me that I had arrived. Camp was just ahead, and I would make it before dark.

I let out a massive sigh of relief.

As I wound down the switchbacks and rode past the pools of water, I realized J was nowhere to be seen. The light drained from the puddles as the sun slid below the ridge. I pulled out the map on my phone.

At least eight more miles until camp.

“FUCK!” I shouted, shoving my phone into my pocket and racing along the trail. Within minutes, the sun disappeared behind the edge of the canyon. There was only a hint of lingering daylight.

I started singing the only song I could think of singing. (The song that carries me through every tough time).

“There’s no race, there’s only a runner,” I eked out between pedal strokes. “Just keep one foot in front of the other.”

The red desert turned indigo in the twilight. Any time the trail dipped into a descent, I pedaled as hard as I could, racing the waning light. A few miles later, I hauled up another climb that I thought was THE climb, only to see another steep wall of rutted dirt trail above me.

“One, two, three, even when you get tired, just keep one foot in front of the other,” I hummed under my breath. “There’s no race, no ending in sight, no second too short, no window too tight.”

I hopped off my bike and started pushing. The wall was so steep that my handlebars were over my head. The weight of my gear strapped to the front of the bike threatened to tip me backward off the cliff.

Night was settling in. If our permitted site was further past the top of this ridge, I’d need to stop and attach my bike lights. Dig another layer out of my frame bag. Prepare for the defeat of peddling frantically through the dark.

If I didn’t make it to camp by 6:30pm, I told J to hop back on the motorcycle and come find me. It was a few minutes past 6pm.

I put my head between my hands and pushed harder, staring at the ground beneath the bike, not daring to look up at how much further I still had to go.

Twenty minutes later, I heard a Wooooooooo! above me. I could see J perched on a rock at the top of the ridge. He ran down the hillside, grabbed my bike, and helped me push the last hundred feet to the top of Murphy Hogback—the steepest climb on White Rim. Our campsite was within view.

“I kept looking for you when I got to camp,” J said, pointing to the thin line of the White Rim trail miles and miles away, far below. “I was so worried I was going to see a bike light turn on wayyyyy out there and have to ride out for a rescue. I must have missed you when I was setting up the tent.”

I was similarly surprised that I was laying my bike down in the dirt, digging gear out of my bike bags with still a hint of twilight hugging the horizon. I’d ridden about 70 miles over the last 10 hours with several dozen pounds of gear and water strapped to my bike. I was exhausted—but not I’m never going to survive this exhausted.

The stars poked holes in the sky as we boiled water for freeze-dried dinners. The Milky Way faded slowly into a stream above our heads. I was cold and a little nauseous as I sucked down electrolytes and waited for my bag of pad thai to rehydrate. I could not walk normally from the cookstove to my tent. My quads rippled with cramps and complaint.

But by the following morning, I was back on my bike, unfazed, ready for the last 30 miles.

Do Impossible Things

About 10 years ago, J and I drove from Boulder to Canyonlands over a brutally cold February weekend. We hiked a long sandy trail high above the canyons, the landscape below unfolding into mesas and ridges and so many layers.

He pointed to a thin line etched along the rock far beneath us.

“That’s White Rim,” he said. “My friend and I biked it in a day.”

He may as well have pointed to Everest.

At that point, I’d never biked more than a dozen miles—and mostly tame crushed limestone rail trails back East. The idea that someone could ride 100 miles of technical desert terrain in a single day felt absolutely fictional. Like something reserved for a different species of human that I was simply never going to be.

I tucked the comment away while quietly admiring J’s lean, muscular frame and wondering if I’d somehow missed my window to ever be athletic. I’d had a thoroughly unremarkable high school and college sports career (read: none), and becoming “an athlete” felt about as plausible as becoming a NASA scientist.

Not my thing. Not my life. And yet.

A year later, at 23, I bought my first mountain bike. Up to that point, the most athletic thing I’d done was run a few days a week, with a big run topping out at five miles. I did not know what it meant to truly push my body.

At first, I stuck to the bike park in town—which a very mean person told me wasn’t real mountain biking—practicing on small rocks and pump tracks and generally feeling bad about myself for not “actually” mountain biking. When I ventured onto nearby trails, they felt crushingly hard. I cried on nearly every ride.

Over and over again as I learned to mountain bike, I rolled up to technical features and thought, Are you fucking kidding me? I am never riding that! Who rides that?! It was so frustrating knowing people did ride it. My legs burned. My lungs heaved. My hands trembled. And I felt like a garbage human with no natural abilities whatsoever.

But over time, something in me shifted.

A year later, I was riding the very things I’d declared impossible. A year after that, I was riding things that once would have sent me into tears. My internal voice slowly changed from I’m NEVER riding that, to maybe someday.

And over time, that voice extended to many things beyond biking. I quit a job with nothing else lined up. I moved across the country in the middle of a pandemic. I lived in a camper with my partner for a year. I argued I WAS ready for that promotion. I learned to scuba dive and then went on my first ocean dives by myself. I bought a horse.

Before mountain biking, I didn’t attempt things I wasn’t fairly confident I could succeed at. I’d done some hard things—navigated big breakups, learned instruments, gone to grad school—but those challenges didn’t carry the immediate possibility of failure. I made sure to never reach too far so that I would always land on my feet. Literally and metaphorically, I ensured that I would never end up ass over teakettle.

But that meant an awful lot of life was unavailable to me.

There are still plenty of features that scare me—on the bike and in life. But the phrase I’m never going to do that has mostly disappeared from my vocabulary. I’ve proven it wrong too many times. Uttering that phrase now means it’s just a matter of time before I’m eating crow.

It’s not a race. And I just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

I still think becoming a NASA scientist is unlikely. But the distance between what’s possible for me and what’s impossible is much smaller than it once was.

One impossible thing begets another. And another. And another.

Shrinking The Distance

The hardest part of day two on White Rim was pulling on the same cold, used chamois from the day before. Otherwise, I felt surprisingly strong and upbeat. Other than one horrendous climb, the trail tended toward descent, crawling down to the Green River.

Within four hours, I was at the base of Mineral Bottom, staring up at a 1,000-foot climb that switchbacked a dozen times over two miles. My car was just a few miles beyond that canyon rim.

J wished me luck before zipping up the winding road on his motorcycle. I started pedaling, fully expecting to get off and push within a couple hundred feet. But then I went another hundred. And another. And yes, I had to stop for a refuel of nerd gummy clusters halfway through, but I rode all the way to the top without once getting off my bike.

By 2:30pm, I was back at my car. A perfect 48-hour trip, driveway to driveway.

The distance between ‘never’ and ‘maybe someday’ shrank again. Another impossible thing made possible.