Oh, these little trauma tours
Revisiting the jagged pieces that make us who we are
It’s an interesting thought experiment: Are we born whole and slowly broken down by life? Or are we built up through our scars?
Danni wanted to take a “field trip” to Steamboat Springs to visit the custom bicycle framebuilder who is designing a masterpiece for her 50th birthday gift to herself. I balked at the 3.5-hour drive, reiterating what a horrible trap I-70 can be. I recounted my traumas with snowed-in road closures and yammered at length about my favorite Instagram account, a smorgasbord of road-horror schadenfreude called @I-70things.
But it was a beautiful Sunday morning, and now that it’s April, surprisingly few people seem interested in commuting to the mountains. The images on I-70 Things were uncharacteristically dull, so I had no excuse to stay home. After we cleared the Eisenhower Tunnel and were nearly free of the dread interstate, I gestured down the valley toward the town of Frisco. “That’s where I quit the Tour Divide in 2015,” I said. “At Daniel’s house. I pulled up to his front porch and pretty much collapsed. I was so sick.”
We exited the Interstate at Silverthorne. “There’s the hotel where I delusionally thought I could recover and stay in the race. I couldn’t even carry my bike up a flight of stairs without becoming scary lightheaded.” I smiled as I thought about my physician friend calling in new antibiotics (another doctor had prescribed doxycycline, which caused me to break out in a rash of sun blisters). I tried to walk a mile from my hotel to Walgreens and needed to take at least a dozen sit-down breaks along the way. I couldn’t even manage a mile of sidewalk, but I was still hoping to ride another 1,500 miles to Mexico. That last gasp of hubris lasted about 10 miles — which took three hours to ride the following day — before I collapsed in Frisco.
Danni and I continued driving north on Highway 9. “This highway is part of the Tour Divide route, until somewhere up there, you go over Ute Pass.” I continued to reminisce silently: In 2015, I took a wheezy nap under a tree next to the road below Ute Pass. A motorcyclist stopped to help me, but when I told him I was riding the Tour Divide, he knew enough about the race to wish me good luck and leave me alone. Damn, I could have used his help.
As we drove into Steamboat Springs, I pointed out the urgent care clinic where I sought medical attention for my worsening bronchitis in 2015. The Colorado ski-area doctor knew about the Tour Divide and thought it was great that I was one of the participants. He listened to my lungs, confirmed they were full of fluid, and prescribed the skin-searing doxycycline before wishing me well on my trip to Mexico.
“I just wanted someone to tell me to stop,” I told Danni. “Someone. Anyone. I wasn’t willing to call it myself and it still pisses me off so much.”
I carry residual anger and regret about only a few decisions in my life. But right at the top of the list is the 2015 Tour Divide. Before the race even started, I caught a virus. Instead of conceding to the poor timing of my illness and quitting the race, I kept riding through the symptoms. My breathing and misery worsened until my body gave me no choice but to stop. I recovered from the resultant pneumonia later that summer, but my health has never been the same. Asthma moved in, followed by autoimmune thyroid disease. My lungs, now scarred and sensitive, only get worse every year. I can’t say with certainty that my illness during the Tour Divide was the catalyst for my autoimmune conditions and lung damage, but there’s a clear divide between my health before and after the race that is impossible to deny.
So why didn’t I quit? Why couldn’t I just quit? The anger still courses through my veins, still burns at the arrogant stupidity of it all, every bit as much as it did a decade ago. My EMDR sessions haven’t even touched this one as my therapist and I continue to work through more recent traumas.
We enjoyed a pleasant Sunday afternoon in Steamboat Springs. After visiting Brad at Bingham Built, we took a little stroll that turned into a 1,500-foot climb up a snowy Emerald Mountain. I am still nursing a sore shin after my White Mountains 100 mishap three weeks ago, and Danni was wearing jeans and Birkenstock clogs. We weren’t at our physical best, but we were enjoying the day and even received compliments from a couple of backcountry skiers.
As we took in views across the valley, I pointed out the vague direction of the Summer Bear, a 200-mile bikepacking race I rode in August 2019. Back then, I still had big goals that I believe required steeling myself with smaller bouts of suffering. I needed to finish the Summer Bear to prove I had what it took to walk 1,000 miles across Alaska in 2020. But the route was garbage. It was. There were some good stretches, especially in the first half. But then the race director apparently decided to make it interesting by sketching out every old mining road that hadn’t been used in decades, unrideable rocky jeep tracks, badly eroded doubletracks, and completely overgrown “singletrack” that was impossible to locate across expansive swamps.
Some 25 people started the race. Four of us finished. I was one of the finishers. I’m not proud of this. I was miserable for much of the time, which was 38 hours straight without sleep for two nights after an evening start. I didn’t want to be on those garbage roads. Steamboat is surrounded by miles of lovely gravel roads, and I was bypassing them to push my bike across yet another swamp. I questioned why I was subjecting myself to such bullshit just because I was in a “race.” Why do I keep doing this to myself?
Six years later, after I spent at least five minutes ranting to Danni about the Summer Bear, I laughed out loud. “I didn’t even realize I have so much trauma associated with Steamboat Springs.”
I seem to be an unwitting but eager tourist when it comes to revisiting past traumas. My Mom coined the term for me while visiting Colorado in 2022. We went shopping at Costco, and I suggested taking the “scenic” way home. I drove along Marshall Road, pointing out the blackened foundations and decimated shells of homes while describing the erratic path of destruction wrought by the Marshall Fire, which tore through on 100-mph winds in December 2021 and leveled more than a thousand suburban structures. I turned into South Boulder and stopped at King Soopers for the pectin we couldn’t find at Costco. The grocery store had only recently reopened after a man shot and killed 10 people in a March 2021 rampage, so I told my mom the details of this terrible story. We continued up Flagstaff Road, where I showed her the spot where the truck driver slammed my back with his sideview mirror while I was riding my bike in October 2021, and a mile later, the curve where I was the first person to arrive on the scene of a fatal car accident two weeks later.
“Wow, this is like a trauma tour of Boulder,” Mom mused.
The trauma tour. Because of my uncomplicated upbringing and great privilege, it wasn’t until recently that I was able to recognize the impact trauma has had on my life. They are little traumas, to be sure, but they add up. Just like the progression of scars spreading like webs across my arms and legs, my little traumas thread together and tug at my malleable psyche. My memory won’t let these traumas go. Like scars, they hold on as part of who I am.
As we drove home from Steamboat on Monday morning, I pointed out more Tour Divide landmarks while Danni asked my opinion about aspects of her future Bingham Built bike. She’s so excited about it and the adventures they’ll have. I’m envious. My relationship with bikes has become hopelessly complicated. Those Steamboat-adjacent psychic bruises have soured me on racing. But my ambivalence stretches beyond that. I was all-in on mountain biking until 2011, when a mindless crash ripped open my elbow and left a memory of such searing pain that I have yet to regain the confidence needed to send it … and now my skills are in a sad state of decay. The dangers of road riding were distant until a motorcyclist mowed down my friend Keith and missed me by inches while we were riding in Yosemite National Park in 2012. It took him months to recover from his serious injuries, but I’ve never fully recovered from witnessing his pain. My run-in with a truck in 2021 has only pushed me farther away from riding any surface that must be shared with cars.
On trails, I’m still happiest as a hiker/runner, even though I have arguably hurt myself more seriously, many times over, on foot compared to my bike crashes. I’ve discovered that I love the psychological and logistical ease of riding my smart trainer indoors, and I barely touched my bikes all winter. I didn’t ride outside once after I broke my seatpost and crashed into my bad elbow on the White Rim in November, at least until I borrowed my friend’s bike in Alaska in March. Four months of bike drought passed in a blink.
This week, it had been long enough. Sure, the roads are a dangerous place. I can’t go anywhere in Boulder without passing a flower-adorned ghost bike. But I do miss my road bike, which I’ve had since 2011, which I was riding when Keith was nearly killed, which has taken me so far, so fast, and which I’ve largely ignored for too long. For the first three days of the week, I had to endure the terrible process of contact allergy testing. For this test, a nurse smears dozens of patches with common skin irritants, tapes them to my back, and then I have to endure the itchy hives for 48 hours with no scratching, sweating, or showering allowed. It’s maddening, truly maddening. I promised my reward after getting the crap torn off on Thursday would be to take my road bike to Lyons and ride as hard as I could up South Saint Vrain Canyon. Some people would just go for ice cream. But I suppose there are parts of myself the scars can’t change. My line between reward and punishment is still razor-thin.
It was a great day. A west wind rushed down the canyon, carrying the blow-dryer of hot air that seems to arrive this time every spring. I relished the hard cranking into the headwind. Beautiful rock cliffs loomed overhead, and the April sun blazed down. Traffic in the canyon was reasonably light, and I managed to put it out of my mind even as my Garmin Varia buzzed every minute or so. Usually, I’m unnerved by my rear-view radar, but I suppose my anxiety is still taking a bit of a vacation.
Given my winter largely off bikes (save for occasional short trainer rides), I can’t be as strong as past versions of myself. But I still hit some solid PRs on this favorite route of mine, including the 17-mile, 3,000-foot grunt from Lyons to the Peak to Peak scenic overlook. Strava ranked me at 664 out of 1,328 athletes — men and women. And honestly, if I can end up in the top half on a road cycling segment in Boulder, I’m chuffed. All of the Olympians ride here.
I made it as far as the cutoff to Longs Peak trailhead, a cool 25 miles, before I was out of time and needed to turn around. I was still on the late side for getting to work on time, so I let’er rip on the descent. At times, my speed topped 45 mph, which is scary fast on skinny tires, at least for me. But it didn’t feel unreasonable. I think Zwift and its graphics have trained me well.
I loved that ride. It was so simple — as simple as having a bike and 3.5 hours to spare on a Thursday. I get so caught up in the risks of life that too often I forget there are still rewards. The little traumas gnaw at me, but I remember it’s still my free agency to decide how to respond. Am I weakened by my scars or strengthened by them? It’s not straightforward — don’t get me started on the garbage mantra of “that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” But moving forward is still a matter of choice.
Today, I’m resolved to move forward. I’m going to leave the trauma tours in the past — at least for a while — and plow into this Brave New World with all of the anticipation and vigor my slightly scarred body and mind can muster.
Built up or torn down? I think it depends on the person. I feel built up by my scars. But I have people in my family that are being torn down every year. The thing I ponder is what makes one person build up and another to get torn down? Big mystery.
This is great. Though you make yourself out to be such a misanthrope!