A Year Ago Today!

 One year ago, in the parking lot at Cape Reinga, I assembled Booster, filled her water bottles, and took the above photo. Then I started riding south on the Tour Aotearoa.

I knew it was more than I could handle. The Tasmanian Trail proved that. Initially the deal I made with myself was this: The TT is your test. Pass the test and you get to ride the TA. Well, I failed the test. Hard. But I attempted the TA anyway, and man, I’m glad I did.

Hindsight being 20/20, it’s fair to say that bringing my bike and camping gear down to the bottom of the world is one of the best decisions of my life. Sometimes in life you bite off more than you can chew. Sometimes the thing you bit bites back, and it starts chewing on you. With the Big Ride, the whole point was to bite off more than I could chew, knowing it would chew me up, and that’s exactly what happened.

The Me who rode two days into the wind on Ninety Mile Beach could not have fought through the four days of unrelenting headwinds that greeted the Me of a month later, on the north end of the South Island. Three days into that onslaught, a heartbroken Me gave away his ukulele because it caused too much drag. (It took nearly a year for me to pick up the uke again.) That Me could not have climbed the Crown Range in a single push, and the Me who ultimately made that climb wouldn’t have had to surrender his ukulele.

The long and short of it is, the Me who started the TA didn’t have the mental or physical fortitude to finish it. The Me of today seems to have kept that mental fortitude from the Big Ride, and he’s testing his leg strength later this weekend with a sixty-mile ride from Yellow Springs to Cincinnati to enjoy the fall colors. If I make it, it’ll be my longest riding day ever. (My max on the TA was 42 miles.)

Anyway, the upshot is I’m stronger and hardier than I used to be, in every way worth measuring. That means the Big Ride is up there with my PhD, my black belts, and my novels as a major milestone in my life. I try not to let pride play a big role in my life, but I gotta say, I’m proud of this one. In fact, I’m so proud of it that I commemorated it with a tattoo. (My first!)

I love it. It says Not all those who wander are lost, which is the second line of The Riddle of Strider. I’d tell you that’s the poem Bilbo Baggins writes about Aragorn, but obviously you already knew that. If anyone had any doubt that I’m a mega-nerd, a tattoo in Elvish surely dispelled it.

I knew it had to be a circle, because rings are a thing with Tolkien nerds and because that’s the only way I could think of to make it upside right to everyone. (I don’t like the idea of a tattoo that’s upside right to everyone else in the world, because that means it’s upside down to me. It’s mine and I deserve to see it upside right.) The fact that the big swoopy lines resemble Booster’s spokes makes it even cooler.

I have just one regret from the ride: when I finally reached Bluff, I was so exhausted that I completely forgot to get myself a medal. Someone sells them down there, and past Me knew that. But the Me that reached Bluff, stronger though he was, was as forgetful as ever, and on top of that he had long since run out of ADHD medication, plus he was tired as hell. So no medal for Steve, but a tattoo is pretty damn good as a substitute.