This year feels different.
Last year, I completed the long-distance ride on a broken hip, spread across four weekends in June, because that was all my body could manage at the time. I didn’t fully understand then how much pain had quietly woven itself into my everyday life. It became part of the background. Part of my normal. I learned how to move around it, work around it, survive around it.
This year, I’m attempting the same distance over the span of a single week.
Or at least… trying to.
And somehow, that feels more intimidating now.
Maybe because healing changes you.
Maybe because once your body breaks and rebuilds itself, you stop seeing movement as something guaranteed.
Life got away from me leading into this ride. Work. Art. Writing. Responsibilities. The endless shifting between versions of myself — creator, survivor, worker, dreamer. I didn’t get the perfect training season I imagined. There were no carefully structured months of preparation. No endless kilometres logged under ideal conditions.
Just fragments of time.
Stolen evenings.
Tired legs after long work days.
And the quiet hope that maybe the body remembers what the mind is afraid to trust.
And somehow… it does.
The first ride back was 10km.
Then 42.
Next round, 50. Tomorrow 80?
And with every ride, something ancient inside me seems to wake back up again. Not just strength — something deeper than that. Rhythm. Memory. Instinct. The strange intelligence of the body remembering how to endure long after the mind begins questioning itself.
The muscles protested less.
The breath steadied faster.
The trail stopped feeling like resistance and started feeling like a return.
Because somewhere along the way, biking stopped becoming something I wanted to do and quietly became something I need.
Running used to hold that place in my life. That obsession. That release. That desperate need to outrun the noise inside my own head. But the bike offers me something different now — something wider somehow. Slower. Deeper.
I can go further.
See more.
Disappear longer.
I can carry my camera equipment into hidden places where the world still feels untouched and listening.
And something almost impossible to explain happens out there.
The blue sky fractures through the trees in scattered pieces.
The sunlight spills across the path like burning gold.
The wind moves through the leaves like whispered language.
The earth smells alive again — damp soil, wild growth, warmth rising from beneath winter’s grave.
Sometimes wildlife appears so suddenly it feels symbolic.
A deer stepping through brush.
A hawk circling overhead.
A rabbit vanishing into tall grass before I can fully focus my eyes on it.
And for brief moments, it feels as though the trail exists outside of ordinary life entirely.
Out there, the noise dissolves.
The pressure.
The grief.
The expectations.
The constant weight of becoming.
The wheels keep turning.
The body keeps moving.
And everything heavy inside me loosens its grip enough for me to breathe again.
Not perfectly.
Not permanently.
But long enough to remember myself.
And maybe that’s the real reason I keep returning to the trail.