Just about a month ago, I put my books down and got on a bike strapped with bags stuffed with clothes, snacks, tools and tubes, and a swimsuit. A few months prior I had met a college friend for dinner, and she asked me if I was going to our college reunion in Massachusetts. “I’m planning to,” I said, and then jumped in pedals first. “I’m thinking about going by bike.”

I’ve been reading about bike adventures for years. Some readers’ guilty pleasures are romance or mystery or thrillers; mine is adventure travel. Into Thin Air? Check. Wild? Check. Kon-Tiki? Check. But for every mountaineering, hiking, or boating adventure, I’ve probably read a dozen bike tour books. Maybe it’s because that kind of adventure feels more attainable and enjoyable than slogging up a trail or drifting at sea. Also, you can get to places (like college reunions) in a reasonable amount of time.

But bike touring (and its more adventurous sibling, bikepacking which enables riders to ride and camp off the beaten track) is not exactly reasonable. While I was plotting my trip (three days at about fifty miles a day), about 200 cyclists were plotting a trip eighteen times longer than mine, mostly off-road, and, oh, with about 158,165 feet more of climbing. Starting on June 9th, they cycled out of Banff in Alberta, Canada to follow the Continental Divide all the way down to Antelope Wells, New Mexico on the US-Mexico border as part of the 2023 Tour Divide. All twenty-seven hundred forty-five breathtaking, rugged, mosquito infested, muddy, brutally hot, freezing cold, beautiful, cruel miles of it.

After looking up the trail on bikepacking.com I texted some biking friends. “Looks doable. Am I crazy?!”

Let’s answer this with the book I devoured on the subject. Jill Homer, an ultra-endurance athlete and journalist was one of three women to race in the Tour Divide in 2009. Homer has written several books about her endurance feats, including both running and biking across Alaska. She describes her athletic talents as being mostly “mule like labor and stubbornness” which come in handy for hundreds of miles in conditions that would make most of us high tail it for shelter and a hot shower. Homer’s main superpower may be her power of observation and recollection. I picked up her book Be Brave, Be Strong: A Journey Across the Great Divide thinking it would offer some glimpses into what it was like to ride and camp along the route. But a few chapters in, it became apparent that I was along for the ride, or at least a thorough description of every day on the trail. 

The book begins a few months before the race with Homer and her then boyfriend biking and running respectively through the snow and deep cold of the 350-mile Iditarod Trail Invitational. On a solitary stretch of frozen lake, Homer takes a step while pushing her bike and her leg keeps going right through the ice, soaking it up to her thigh and dumping water down her boot. It’s below zero with still miles to go before a station where competitors can rest and warm up. Her grit (or madness, depending on how you define life-threatening conditions) is succinctly revealed when another cyclist comes along and asks how she’s doing. “Great,” Homer says. “Just stopping for a little break.” Hours later, she makes it to the station, chips off the solid ice encasing her boot and is flown out on a bush plane with frostbitten toes.

It’s stories like these that pepper the miles of the Tour Divide. Bikes and bodies break down. Mud sticks to everything. Electrical storms cruise across the ridges where a steel bike is taller than anything in or near its path. It’s hard to know when another competitor is being friendly or making a pass, or if you’ll find enough Pepsi and Snickers bars at the next convenience store to fuel you to the next resupply site. 

But Homer finds plenty of emotional energy along the route. Places so silent and beautiful she hates to leave them. People who offer food, rest, encouragement. The focus of hard, muscle burning work it takes to dull heartbreak and begin to heal. Homer is never sure she’ll be able to finish the race, but when she passes the point where her ex-boyfriend quit in the same race a year earlier, she feels a sense of accomplishment. “The Tour Divide takes cyclists to the extreme edges of bicycle touring,” Homer writes, “the edges where life becomes agonizing, unrelenting, and impossible, and then spins them around 180 degrees into a world of absolute bliss, ease, and joy.”

My three days on mostly roads and smooth trails is the idiomatic apple to the Tour Divide’s orange. But I like to think there’s some similarity in setting a new goal and accomplishing it, no matter the length or difficulty. When I coasted down the eastern slope of the Berkshires, I felt more than the high of endorphins, it was exhilaration. Whether that is enough to propel me to do what it takes to get me and a bike to Banff, I’m not sure. But I’m grateful that there are athletes and writers like Jill Homer to show us what it’s like.

Curious about bike adventures? Some of my favorite stories include: 

Catfish & Mandala by Andrew X. Pham, Full Tilt by Derval Murphy, and Where the Pavement Ends by Erika Warmbrunn. And to see who won this year’s Tour Divide as well as lots of information and routes for bikepacking, check out bikepacking.com.