THE RIDE OF A LIFETIME
In june of 2023, I started biking again after a couple year hiatus of biking anything relevant. I would say i was a casual rider up until that point with my largest cycling coming from my time living in San Diego, almost a decade prior. At that point in my life, the longest bike ride i ever did was just shy of 35 miles. i collapsed from cramping toward the end of that ride because i tried to power my way through that ride instead of grounding myself with nutrition and training. little did i know i would push the envelope so much harder over the past year than i ever had biking in my entire life.
over the course of the past year, i completed my first 50 mile, 100 mile, 150 mile, and 200 mile day rides of my life. it all progressed rather quickly. within my first week of biking 10 mile mornings, i decided i wanted to bike my first century ride (100 miles). by midweek, i committed to biking my first century, and by the end of the week i completed my first 110 mile ride. ironically, i rode my first 100 mile ride before i did a 50 mile ride. this was not out of the norm for me as i have a very manic and obsessive personality with most everything i do in life, but this had nothing to do with the biking, and everything to do with the mental health aspects of riding. the story does not start here, you have to go back in time a ways to truly understand what put me in this position and why i pushed myself so hard over the past year to eclipse my limits. i am going to share some of the reasons why i put so many miles in on the bike, the lessons i learned along the way, and the ways in which i continue to push myself forward for the sake of mental health.
FIND YOURSELF IN HELL
Most people believe that hell is a place that is relegated to the afterlife, however, I can attest that it is a very real place that one can exist in physically, mentally, and emotionally during multiple times in their lifetime. The dark night of the soul has many different interpretations and meanings, but to me, it is bringing your darkness into the light. When the night completely consumes you and you feel like you can no longer escape that which you have been hiding from, your soul must rise in order to deal with your demons. I have been blessed enough to have two such nights in my life, the first happened at 18 on a night I was going to commit suicide and my dad walked into the basement. The second happened about a year and a half ago and it is the genesis of this blog, which I will share thoughts, examples, analogies, and anecdotes from the adventure that night spurred. The dark night of the soul is not about being buried in the ground, it is about facing the harshness of reality, in order to burn off the old portions of yourself to be reborn, and ultimately undergo a phoenix transformation. the person you were can no longer exist in order to become the person you are meant to be. There were a lot of aspects of my life that I needed to ground in discipline and routine in order to change my life drastically over a short period of time and I will try to share insights into some of them. For anyone struggling right now, I hope this story shows you the strength that you have within you to endure, address your shortcomings, and rise from the ashes to turn your life around as I have. There is always hope with the light inside of you, if you are willing to shine it in those dark corners where the demons hide in your life.
DARK KNIGHT OF THE SOUL
It was a cold, dark, snowy night in November of 2022. I had recently come to grips with the fact that my endeavor in my nature photography business failed and the rest of my life was seemingly imploding more and more every single day. I had no job, no money, and no one around me. I had a bunch of ancillary shit going on as well that I won’t delve into, but basically this was rock bottom for me and I didn’t see a way out. I will never forget sitting in the corner of the dark room crying into my hands, feeling hopelessly helpless. I did not know how I was ever going to get out of my (then) current situation or how I was going to turn my life around. My mind went off the fucking rails like a freight train flying off the track and my thoughts went in every single direction they could. My mind replayed everything that had happened the past few years and then kept going further and further, showcasing my life over the span of a couple minutes, then one thought stopped me in my tracks… suicide.
The reason the thought of suicide pulled me out of my pity party instantly was because I had been there before. I dealt with suicidal thoughts a lot over my late teens and early 20’s due to a plethora of reasons, and in my mind, a predisposition towards mental health issues. But I hadn’t thought of suicide in well over a decade, the point at which I had started going to therapy in my late 20’s. When I was younger I probably would have entertained the idea, even if I wouldn’t have followed through with it, but at this point in my life everything was different. This was the first time I felt dissociated from my body, like I was looking at myself from 10,000 feet in the air. I realized that my mind wasn’t trying to do something that was going to protect me, it was looking for the easiest way out of my situation. I often say that the ego is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a lot of times you will think it is trying to protect you, but in reality, it is just trying to protect itself. Once I saw what was happening at face value, I stopped ruminating in thoughts of the past and realized that I was the one that put myself in that situation. I made the decisions that landed me in that place, and I was ultimately the one that was going to have to pull myself out of it. I have never been a fan of the victim mentality because it justifies where you are in life and doesn’t provide a path towards a better future. I knew if I was going to change my circumstances that I needed to take accountability and blame for all of my actions and everything that happened to me, regardless of whether it was 100% my fault or not. I like to say that this is the night the monster awoke inside of me again, that beast that I have let out at certain points in my life, and let lie dormant in others. I have had the unique ability in my life that when all the cards are stacked against me, when I have been buried and left for dead, I rise out of the ashes to a greater plane of existence, and I could not have had more of a fire lit inside of me than that night when i faced the demons that haunted me in the darkness.
am i illiterate or did i have a meaning behind calling this section “Dark knight of the soul”? of course i had a purpose. I grew up a huge batman nerd, most certainly as a way to escape reality, but one of my favorite comics ever written was “Knightfall” in which the villain, bane, breaks batman’s back and leaves him for dead. the 3rd movie of christopher nolan’s batman trilogy, “the dark knight rises”, is loosely based upon this comic in which batman is thrown into a pit in the middle of the desert after bane breaks his back and leaves him for dead. After facing insurmountable odds, batman has to look deep inside of himself to heal himself physically and mentally, face his fears in order to get out of the pit, and finally defeat bane once and for all. this is exactly how i felt on this specific night. i knew i needed to overcome insurmountable odds in order to face my fears and create the best version of my life possible. inspirational examples that you can tie to your life, fictitious or not, always give you a higher plane of existence to strive toward. i also had the added experience of having broke my back in 2005, and watched myself come back from that hell, so i knew i could do it again. only this time around it was a hell of the mind, not the body.
FORM AN ESCAPE PLAN
i have always believed in the mind, body, and soul connection. i grew up working out but between COVID, traveling, and running my art business I had completely stopped working out for a few years. i was out of shape and felt like shit from the depression, anxiety, and stress of life, so i knew if there was one way to get things rolling in the right direction, and it was through working out. i had a gym membership that i had still been paying for over the years through 24 hour fitness that i remembered so i decided that very night that i was going to start going to the gym 6 days a week, and do a half hour of weight lifting, and an hour of cardio. i have hated cardio my entire life so i knew by doing something hard that i didn’t enjoy, it would help me grow in a positive direction. most of my cardio consisted of walking at an incline but it was still enough to push me and get me to lose some weight, in fact, i lost 20 pounds over a 6 month period in going back to the gym which obviously made me feel infinitely better.
next came the mind, during my cardio workouts and in my free time i started listening, reading, and writing as much as i could. i listened to motivational speeches, inspirational examples, and philosophies on life in every attempt to give me something to stride towards. i started reading about every self improvement and psychology subject that i could, especially those subjects surrounding attachment, emotional regulation, and body dysregulation. i also started writing all my goals down and articulating myself in different ways to continually process the ways i was thinking and the direction i was going in life. i became very big on manifestation during this time and i had the goal of turning my entire life around in 6 months, something that i accomplished.
FROZEN IN THE DARKNESS
the 6 months that it took for me to turn my life around were fairly mundane and boring. i picked up a bar tending job at a brewery south of Denver that is now defunct. i had a very small circle of friends and family that i surrounded myself with, and by and large, i never told anyone how bad everything truly was in my life. i focused on the day in, day out of working out, going to work, focusing on my self improvement, and in my free days, going into the wilderness to find myself again. ironically, this was in the heart of winter, somewhere that i had always loved, but this was the hardest winter of my life and it pushed me into the frozen darkness more than it ever had in my life.
i started doing the longest and hardest hikes of my life that winter. i pushed myself towards 20 mile winter hikes, snowshoes through treacherous terrain, and pushed through 70 mile per hour winds over ice and snow for some of my outdoor adventures. i found ice formations in the winter to shoot for the first time and i really found a way to embrace the darkness during those times. there is a funny thing about pushing yourself to your limits, you always find so much more within yourself than you ever imagined. hiking in the woods, disconnected from the world and people, stuck in a place where all you can do is think, is where you can find your white space to completely process your thoughts, emotions, and feelings. if you are willing to look inside, face your demons, fears, and insecurities, you can process a lot of emotional pain and trauma you never wanted to face. carl jung had a famous quote in reference to this, “what you most want to find will be where you least want to look”.
i had an enormous amount of emotional pain and trauma that started coming to the surface during this time. in particular, a ton over the past few years, but the deeper i dug into that, the more i realized a lot stemmed back to my childhood as well. i knew that if i truly wanted to help others then i needed to address my own issues that i had first. i had the joy of finally seeing jordan peterson speak a couple of months ago and he said something that has stuck with me ever since and goes back to looking inside of yourself. he said “if you have a truth to say, and you don’t say it, you are making the world a worse place”. this is remarkably true in the sense that as we get older, more and more starts happening to us, and instead of addressing the issue, we just layer more shit on top of it to mask it. we have tons of dis empowering ways of distracting ourself whether thats food, sex, drinking, social media, relationships, the list goes on and on. but to live in blissful ignorance, or willful blindness, will only lead us to conscious delusion, and that is a hell you can find yourself in that you don’t want to be in. we try to hide so many things from ourselves in the shadows, but it is only when we bring our light to those dark corners that we can truly heal to become the best versions of ourselves and let our souls shine as bright as day for the world around us.
i took the photo of this section of the rock frozen under the ice during a time when i was right in the thick of all the shit and during my phoenix transformation. my buddy Matt, a fellow nature photographer, came out from Florida to shoot with me after he saw some of my ice photos. i shot this as we were walking over a frozen lake on the way through our snowshoe adventure. this photo would become symbolic of my life and it helped me develop a saying within myself that propelled me to a whole different level. i started a saying to myself, “do you want to see where monsters are made, bury me in hell (or frozen in ice), and watch me dig my way out”. there’s a side of me that no one ever gets to see and it’s where the hard headed, stubborn, angry monster lives inside of me. it burns dark matter to create light and it is an endless source of energy for me. i decided years ago that no matter what i go through, i will never stop living with a soft heart and a gentle soul. but you also always have to have the ability to be stern and protect yourself from the people that are willingly wanting to take advantage of you. there is a biblical saying “blessed are those who have swords and know how to use them, but keep them sheathed; for they shall inherit the earth”. i loved the process of going through hell while not letting most people or the world around me know any of it, it’s what helped propel me back to the top in record fashion.
A NEW REALITY
within a couple of months of this 6 month time frame, my old job as a regional sales manager in the beer industry opened up again after the person that replaced me left. i started interviewing for a couple of months and right around the 6 month mark of going through hell, i got my old role back. this helped establish a very good baseline for me, and talking to my mom about everything later she equated my story to the story of Jonah and the whale from the bible. i was very grateful to be back in a good place but i still felt like i had so much more to do processing everything i had been through and all the emotional pain and trauma that had been plaguing me. it was the start of summer for me at this point, which is typically a heavy season of hiking and storm chasing, but i knew i wanted to push myself in a new way that was challenging, yet rewarding as well.
i decided i wanted to get into the best shape of my life physically, mentally, and emotionally as well at this point. i pulled out my $300 Walmart road bike that i had purchased a few years prior but had barley even ridden at that point. it was called the “vilano”, and it was a heavy bike that really is not ideal for riding long distances. i started out biking my neighborhood 10 miles every morning, but it already felt like i wasn’t pushing myself hard enough. i remembered saying to myself in my 20’s that i wanted to do a century ride one day and that thought instantly popped into my head on a ride that first week back. i knew in my mind that i was going to accomplish this even though a few people i mentioned it to said i would never do it because my body wasn’t made for biking.
there is a book that i read years ago called “can’t hurt me” that inspired me beyond belief. The author, David Goggins, is an ex navy seal that grew up with a painful childhood but harnessed that pain to become a great endurance runner and an inspirational example of pushing the human body and mind to its limits. he also broke the pull up record in 2013 by doing 4,025 pull ups over a 24 hour period. the best part of David goggins’ achievements is that he was doing all of this for the mental and psychological aspects of it, along with the processing of pain and trauma, not for the physicality aspect. i related to this instantly years ago, but i never had the desire to run, so it took me a few years to put this into place, but i decided that i was going to apply this philosophy to biking.
my first century ride (110 miles) on june 25th, 2023
START PEDALING
my first 100 mile ride went relatively well in june of 2023. i biked up to fort collins from Westminster, co which was pretty close to 50 miles each way. it took about 4 hours each way which gave me plenty of time to get into that dark space and think about everything mentally and emotionally that i desired to be in. biking long distance has fewer distractions for me since i am not trying to shoot photography like i am in the wilderness either. the hard part is that eventually all the little aches and pains start adding up and it really pushes you into that dark space even more, which you need to get through the ride in the first place. my iliotibial band, or it band, (which runs down the side of your knee) started burning about 80 miles in, which caused excruciating pain for the last 30 miles of the 110 mile ride. I also learned the hard way that i needed to keep alternating the position of my hands on these rides. i was pushing down on my hands so hard that my arms were going numb and it resulted in my thumbs twitching incessantly for the next week after this ride. the joy of these long rides is not when things are going well, it’s when the pain really kicks in and you have to do everything you can mentally to not quit, even through the pain and exhaustion. i fell in love with this head space and right when i got home, after one of the most exhausting days of my life, i knew i wanted to push my limits to a 150 mile ride.
i immediately asked my buddy Gerard if he would do a 150 mile bike ride with me. he was the only friend i had that was crazy enough to say yes, which he did without hesitation, even at his age of 49. Gerard is a huge mountain biker and at that point had put in way more miles on the bike than i ever had, so i was not even remotely worried that he couldn’t do it. it was going to take me a few more months of training and getting my it band into shape for this ride but, by and large, i felt pretty good about it. We agreed on a date in august of 2023 and set course from Westminster to fort collins and back, with a few more miles thrown in between.
the 150 miler had way more hiccups than i was used to on a ride. the first 70 miles were relatively smooth as we rode out at sunrise from Westminster to meet up with some friends and family at Odell Brewing in Fort Collins. We were about 5 miles away from the brewery when Gerard pulled in front of me from my side and took out my front tire. i swerved a couple of times and tried to save it but i ended up going down hand to knee to shoulder to head right on the side of the road. thankfully, there were no cars around, but it hurt like a son of a bitch. i also would come to realize later that i tore some cartilage in my rib cage on that fall. the injury took forever to heal and was one of the most painful injuries i have ever had in my life. the rest of the ride was painful with the injuries that i had sustained, but just like before, i would learn to push through the pain and go into that dark space to make it through. the fall also resulted in a front tire that fell out of balance and a rear tire that completely shredded at the seam. after hanging out with our friends and family for a few hours we went over to a bike shop nearby to get those fixed. when we were in the bike shop the owner looked at me and said “i cannot believe you are riding 150 miles on that (piece of shit) bike, now that is impressive”. little did i know how terrible this bike was until an upgrade later on.
right after i fell around 70 miles into our 150 mile ride on august 19th, 2023
