by Homer, Jill
Mornings always were better, marginally, and only because I’d spent six hours drifting in and out of consciousness, resting my legs and clearing my lungs. But if I looked for a pattern, I could easily track how my health was deteriorating with each passing day of the Tour Divide. I was wheezing sooner on each hill, taking more stops to catch my breath, and shutting down earlier each night. Decreasing stamina is a given in endurance racing, and a big part of the challenge is figuring out the best way forward. My condition was never so bad that I couldn’t manage, and so I viewed quitting the Tour Divide as exactly that — quitting a race I could manage. I did not want to quit. The Tour Divide was my race, my greatest accomplishment to date. By 2015, I’d practically become one of the old guard in this burgeoning sport. People looked up to me. In a way, I couldn’t bear to let them down.
Although I wasn’t willing to admit this to myself, the Tour Divide had become a piece of my identity, and quitting the race was the same as quitting myself. What my mind also wasn’t willing to accept was the reality that pushing my body so hard while I was clearly sick with bronchitis also was a way of quitting myself. I was doing something so prevalent in endurance sports that I should have been able to recognize it instantly — sacrificing my body in favor of my ego. There’s a fine but important line between mental toughness and reckless stubbornness, and I had long since crossed it.
Still, at the time, this was difficult to conceptualize because my head was so addled by oxygen deficits and fatigue. My primitive mind spent more time in the driver’s seat. And primitive mind, which can still remember what it was like to be stalked by tigers, understands only that forward motion takes priority over all. When I was facing the North Wind in Alaska, this was true. I needed motion to survive. But the Rocky Mountains are a more subdued wilderness, and my route was a long series of dirt and gravel roads. There was shelter, water, and food at regular intervals, and the summer sun allowed long, rejuvenating breaks. Forward motion was physically unnecessary. What I needed was to stop. Eventually my body forced this when I experienced my first asthma attack while climbing steep pavement in Grand Teton National Park. Hyperventilating for several minutes was a scary experience, but as soon as it was over, I chalked it up to pushing too hard.
“Take it easy,” I said aloud. “Don’t rush.” I took a fifteen-minute nap on a picnic table as a precaution, only to wake up with seventeen new mosquito bites and still-ragged breaths.
That night, again, I scarcely made it to somewhere safe before I collapsed. It was at the top of a pass, in a frigid picnic area near ten thousand feet. I stashed my bike in an outhouse to deter curious grizzlies while subconsciously hoping the bear would come and eat me instead. The strain, the wheezing and the battle for oxygen was making me miserable. But in the strange coping mechanisms of the mind, I didn’t fully recognize this. The crimson sunsets and snowcapped mountains reminded me of happy memories. As I pedaled along the dusty roads of the present, I spent more time drifting through the past, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge my afflictions. The deeper I retreated, the faster time passed — many miles disappeared entirely into feverish dreams. But I always had to emerge — sunburned, mosquito-bitten, gasping through a DEET-saturated face mask as relentless summer winds pushed mucous and dust deeper into my lungs.
While crossing the high desert of Western Wyoming, I became too tired to formulate the elaborate daydreams that had been sustaining me. The sagebrush plain spread out toward the horizon, capped with the distant peaks of the Wind River Mountains. I just stared forward, thinking about nothing, feeling pain but only in the most visceral way, as though I was suffering in a dream. Only when my stomach growled did I snap to alertness, and re-focused on the horizon as I reached into a bag of trail mix. Every muscle in my body sagged. My heart beat in shallow murmurs. The sun was again moving low on the horizon, saturating the desert in orange light.
“Where had I been, all this time?” I wondered. “Where did I go?”
As sugar filled my bloodstream and a semblance of lucidity returned, I thought, “This is what it must feel like, to be very old. To be worn out by life.”
When my grandfather was dying in a nursing home, my mother and I went to visit him on a Sunday afternoon. We walked past the rooms of others who were dying in the nursing home, sitting alone in beds and on chairs, staring at televisions. This is what my grandfather did as well, as the sun rose and set beyond the shades that darkened his only window. We talked, but only of banal things, and I couldn’t understand how he could have so little to say at the end of his life. If I believed I was nearing the end of my life, I would use every last breath to wring joy out of existence. I would not wither away in a nursing home if I could help it. I would limp into the mountains, as high as I could go, even if I was never seen again.
Now, on the sagebrush plains of Wyoming, I understood. I understood what it must be like to gaze into a horizon without seeing, to think only in banalities, to crave only sleep and oblivion. The incandescent beauty of the wilderness meant little to me. I too could go into a dark room and stare at a television and it wouldn’t make much difference, because my body was all used up. Where the body goes, the mind follows.
No. I refused to believe I was done. What was that poem about refusing to go gently into that good night? To rage, rage against the dying of the light?
I wanted to believe this illness was something I could control, part of the mind-over-matter challenge I’d been seeking in my dozens of endurance races, as though bronchitis was nothing more than a devil in my heart. Through the grapevine of social media networks, I’d learned that several other racers ahead and behind me were coping with respiratory issues and bronchitis. Perhaps a virus had been shared amid close quarters in Banff, and the air was particularly bad with consistent strong wind, high pollen counts, and dust. A handful of sick racers had quit; just as many were still on the trail. One woman went to the hospital in Helena, Montana, and was still out in front of the field, on pace to shatter the women’s record.
I unapologetically race for my own reasons — most of them cerebral — but I’d be lying if I claimed I was unaffected by peer pressure. Other racers managed to either out-think or out-muscle their illnesses. So I knew it was possible.
While cycling through my memory archives, I often drew on the experience of completing a seven-day foot race in Nepal while battling food poisoning so severe that I couldn’t eat or drink for most of the week. My body was seriously depleted and weak, but I knew it was a rare chance to experience the Himalayas, so I pushed through the discomfort and had an incredible — if exhausting — experience. I imagined I’d reach an even higher plane of satisfaction if I could banish the devil bronchitis and finish my second Tour Divide.
So I ground on, coughing and sputtering my way along the rolling foothills of the Wind River Mountains and into the Great Divide Basin. As I approached the sandy plain that lacked so much as a trickle of flowing water, the wind picked up and heat bore down. Brown clouds of dust streamed across the desert, and I felt a visceral fear not unlike the terror of watching ground blizzards obscure the sea ice in Alaska. Even with fabric wrapped over my nose and mouth, the high-velocity dust found its way into my throat and pushed deeper into my airways, intensifying the cough. A paste of sweat and dirt coated most of my exposed skin, and dizziness clamped down before the top of every hill. I needed to take increasingly longer breaks, slumped over the handlebars and yanking the buff away from my face as I gasped away from the wind. There were more than a hundred shadeless, dry miles between there and the next town of Wamsutter, Wyoming. I realized, too late, that I had every reason to feel this gnawing fear.
“They’re going to find my body out here, pinned underneath this bike, skin blackened by the sun and lungs filled with dust. This is how I die.”
Conditions on the dirt road continued to deteriorate until it was only two faint tire tracks worn into the clay surface, scarcely visible amid the ye
llow grass and sage. I wouldn’t have believed it to be a route used by anyone since Mormon pioneers pulled handcarts along the Oregon Trail, but the GPS pointed me in that direction. After meandering through the rusty remnants of an abandoned oil-drilling site, the trail shot upward, cutting a direct line along the rolling crest of a shallow ridge.
Each short but steep hill took ages to climb, as I walked beside my bike and stopped every three or four steps to gasp for air. Even though I’d only gained a few hundred feet of elevation, I could see for a hundred miles in every direction — the distant snow-capped peaks to the north, the sagebrush plains to the east, the pink horizon to the west. I was moving south, where the late evening sunlight cast shadows over the fluted cliffs of this ridge. The geography of the Great Divide Basin was startlingly complex, and between gasps I found myself grappling with frustrating calculations — “I’m sixty miles from Wamsutter. I have three liters of water. I’m moving at two miles per hour uphill, about ten downhill. Fifteen more hours? Twenty?”
Failure to reach a conclusion was followed by more disturbing observations about how “they” would find my body if I collapsed. Each coughing fit left me feeling dizzy. I needed to lie down, but I was frightened and fear drove me forward. I was in survival mode, low on energy, using each breath-catching stop to cram string cheese and chocolate in my mouth, fearful that any lull in momentum might cause me to drift to sleep while standing. I needed to reach Wamsutter before morning — I was convinced my life depended on this. If I camped in the desert and drank most of my water during the night, the heat and wind of another day out here would surely kill me.
Minutes trickled past as darkness settled, and the furnace blast of wind calmed to a breeze. The track dropped off the ridge to a more manageable grade along a dry stream bed, and the surface of the road gradually improved. The night was starry and cold as heat dissipated into the clear sky. I was an old woman again, alone in a dark room, staring unseeingly at television static. Suddenly, an abrupt jolt broke the reverie. I was lying in the dirt. I’d fallen off my bike. Disoriented and confused, I sat up and looked around.
“Where did I go?”
Behind me, wheel tracks meandered drunkenly along the edge of the road before veering abruptly into the ditch. I concluded I’d either fainted or fallen asleep on my bike, and this realization brought a new wave of frustration and anger. I was losing control. I could no longer trust myself to even reach Wamsutter, let alone Mexico. It was hopeless. Everything had been exhausted. GPS told me Wamsutter was twenty-eight miles away. I decided I could sleep for a few hours and still make it there before the heat of the day.
I pushed my bike fifty yards off the road and spread out my bivy sack in a narrow strip of sand between clumps of sage. As I pulled off my shoes and climbed inside, I noticed streaks of white light shooting across the sky — faint spotlights across a wash of stars. Although exhausted, I was mesmerized by these lights, and watched them for several minutes before a green wave emerged, rippling along the black edge of the northern horizon.
“Northern Lights?” I found their presence confusing, and glanced around to make sure I hadn’t experienced another lapse in my awareness of time. The sage desert was rendered in nighttime’s cinematic silvers and grays, but it was undoubtedly the desert. I was still in southern Wyoming, at a latitude far south of those typically exposed to the aurora borealis. It wasn’t impossible … but was it real? Was I hallucinating? I scooted my bag sideways so I could lie down and watch the green light as it danced over the desert. It was so beautiful. It was so comforting, like a signal from the heavens that the world was good and the North beckoned, always, even as I suffered through this long journey south.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said aloud. My voice chirped as I talked, which startled me, so I cleared my throat and said in a more soothing tone. “Everything will be okay.”
I didn’t want to stop watching the light show, but within a minute the decision was made for me, and oblivion returned.
Chapter 3
Hard-Fought Failures
Two weeks later, on a withering 102-degree afternoon in Salt Lake City, I decided to roll out of bed and attempt a walk.
I’d effectively been in bed since my parents rescued me in Frisco, Colorado, after I dropped out of the Tour Divide. I managed to cover several hundred miles after I rolled into Wamsutter, where I learned that there’d been an intense solar flare, and the Northern Lights I witnessed were not a hallucination. Rejuvenated by this sign from the universe — and a half gallon of cold Pepsi — I continued pedaling south.
The dust and heat factor only worsened as I entered the oil fields of southern Wyoming. I caught a third wind in northern Colorado, with the high Rockies beckoning and the kindness of a trail angel to spur me onward. I visited a medical clinic in Steamboat Springs, where a doctor diagnosed me with bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics and an inhaler. The prospect of medication renewed my optimism, but the following day everything fell apart in spectacular fashion. Beyond Steamboat Springs, I grappled with frequent asthma attacks that the inhaler only tempered. More often these attacks forced me to curl up in culverts under the thin shade of aspen trees for a half hour or more, until I felt well enough to pedal. Finally, a fever and intense nausea left me too weak to climb stairs, let alone ride my bike up mountains.
There was finally a moment when I accepted that I had to quit, and the realization settled over me like smog as I limped into Kremmling, Colorado. But pride wouldn’t let me quit there. Kremmling is the home of old wounds — it’s the town where my ex-boyfriend quit this race during his only attempt in 2008. The following year, I promised myself that never, no matter what, would Kremmling be the end of my road. So in 2015, I pedaled fifty more miles to Silverthorne, taking frequent breaks while lying in ditches or on the hot gravel of road shoulders. I spent the day wheezing and coughing despite incessant inhaler hits, and drinking sun-heated fruit juice because it was the only calorie source I could keep from throwing up — barely.
While I was slumped over the handlebars, gradually descending on a paved road at only six or seven miles per hour, the stupidity of the lengths I’d taken this ride became uncomfortably clear. There was usually such thrill and satisfaction in facing fears and overcoming great challenges, but this was just sad. I’d traveled seventeen hundred miles for what, exactly? This wasn’t fun or triumphant. At times I was so delirious that I could scarcely keep my decades straight. The only force I’d overcome was common sense. Shame washed over me, and I realized it wasn’t because I was planning to quit this race, but because I hadn’t quit earlier.
Despite this prevailing shame, it still took me another day to make the final call. I wallowed in a hotel room in Silverthorne, sleeping in fitful spurts and waking drenched in sweat. I was too weak to carry my bike down the hotel stairs, so I hiked one mile to a pharmacy to pick up a new antibiotic prescription. This one mile took nearly an hour to walk as I sat down on curbs and slumped against trees next to the sidewalk, gasping for breath. While standing in line at the pharmacy, my prevailing fear was whether I’d find the strength to walk back. Outside the building, I called my parents in Salt Lake City, who said they could drive out to Colorado the following day. With that I felt the familiar rush of guilt, and just enough relief to crawl back to the hotel.
Most of the next week passed while languishing in bed at my childhood home, battling pneumonia. My mother drove me to Target to purchase a second set of clothing to replace the outfit I’d worn for seventeen hundred miles, and I nearly fainted while walking across the parking lot. The July sun was intense, and I understood why weather forecasters issue heat warnings for the elderly and the sick.
My first real venture back into the living world, three days later, did not yield encouraging results. I made it three blocks before the wheezing returned, and turned around after six. Some form of active recovery had always yielded positive results in the past, but I was a
brittle shell of my athletic self, full of holes. Good health is life’s most valuable gift, and I never appreciated it the way I should have. The devil bronchitis drained all of my vitality and zeal for life, leaving plenty of room for loathing and regret.
Eventually I felt strong enough to board an airplane, and flew home to California. Beat was also just returning from a similarly arduous 1,400-mile mountain bike race in South Africa, and would soon be gearing up for his annual duo of two-hundred-mile mountain runs in Europe. Beat’s endurance seems to have no boundaries, and flexibility in his work as a software engineer at Google allows him to push limits where few have ventured. All the while, he refuses to take himself seriously and only engages in training when it’s convenient and fun. I admire his attitude, but when I aspire to it, I find myself failing spectacularly.
I now had two of what I considered egregious failures in just half a year, and my illness — which was later diagnosed as pneumonia — proved resilient. Short ventures on the mountain bike brought on asthma attacks, and I could only run at a moderate pace before I began hyperventilating. Friends who had experience with chronic asthma urged me to dial back my efforts, but I was simply engaging in a minimum of activity to keep my mental health intact. The Tour Divide had ravaged my mood. When I abruptly stopped riding my mountain bike fourteen hours a day and spent the next two weeks in bed, my thoughts went to dark places I rarely encounter. Post-adventure blues are usually present, but when they’re wired into personal failure and a steep decline in health, the results can be devastating. I feared depression, and didn’t want to slip into a downward spiral. So I fought back in the best way I knew how.
