I'd never rode a bike further than to the next neighborhood over before I embarked on a cycling trip that would take me across a country I'd just moved to, with people I'd just met. The barometer with which I measure my decisions, I’ve learned, is outrageousness. I’m less apt to agree to anything less, and anything more prompts more careful consideration (like hiking Fuji in the middle of winter when the official trail is closed and all professional websites warn of imminent death). Usually, if I can’t propose an idea without laughing, or drawing a look of disbelief on someone’s face, I know I’m making a decision that aligns with my core values. This logic is what led me to work as a club promoter in Italy for a summer, to sign up for a marathon with only four weeks of training, and ultimately to ride a bicycle across a country where I’d just arrived, with someone whose last name I did not yet know.
65
W
e need to eat something every hour, or all of the sugar will deplete from our muscles and we’ll do this thing called bonking -- it’s like -- it’s when you just die, basically,” Matt said as he guided his bike by bracing the frame with his thighs, hands unwrapping a Binch cookie and passing it to me. For me, in the beginning, even lifting one hand off my handlebar to receive the food he had so confidently prepared for eating made my whole body ossify. But everything was harder in the beginning. I joined this 550+ kilometer bike trip across Korea over a vodka-infused conversation within an hour of meeting Matt a few weeks earlier. His presentation of the trip was so laissez-faire -- “Yeah I think I’m just going to go on this bike trail for a few days” -- that I was repeatedly shocked when he later swapped the word “biking” for its uppity cousin, “cycling,” referenced sport-specific vocab, and traded the Drake t-shirt I met him in for a singlet and shoes that locked into his pedals.