What's fun about carrying all my stuff up this hill?
Have you ever thought that your lungs were going to explode? I get that feeling from time to time when I pedal my bike up a hill that is just a bit too steep. I feel an expanding pressure as my body fights to take in more oxygen than the finite space within my lungs can hold. Although I have felt this and other similar feelings of struggle before, every time I get that feeling, I experience it as if it could be the first time. When it is all over, I don’t so much remember the sensation of struggle. As my memory forms, the focus of it centres on the enjoyment of the whole experience.
Photo: Chloe Howarth
My girlfriend Chloe and I were making plans for some longer bike-packing trips over the summer, and we thought that being new to bike-packing, it’d be wise to test our gear out with a quick overnight trip in early April. The ride we landed on was 16km each way with about 650m of elevation gain. 16km is a distance that I had covered many times on my mountain bike with similar elevation gains, but this was not my mountain bike. I had underestimated the weight of camping gear packed onto my bike and the grade of the hills that stood before me. Chloe and I pushed through the relentless gravel road, while taking moments to admire the landscapes; views of expansive grasslands which, as we climbed meters of elevation, turned to views of mountain lakes surrounded by pine and interior douglas fir. We put in all this work to arrive at a camp covered with patches of snow sitting on the edge of a frozen lake. We enjoyed our evening sitting next to a campfire, taking in the contrasting sensations between the cold April mountain air and the warmth of the flames. After some time, we climbed into our tent and sleeping bags to wake up the next day and ride downhill back to where we started.
People often refer to this kind of thing as type 2 fun. When I am bike-packing or backpacking, I often ask myself why I even call this fun? Why do I have the desire to do such things? Why am I always drawn back to these experiences? Certainly, the feeling of an impending explosion of the lungs is not pleasant, nor is the sensation of a fully loaded backpack, or the many other unpleasant sensations that can be experienced while travelling by human-power on the land.
Is it the feeling of accomplishment we achieve in the end? Or the pretty views along the way? The experience of bonding with our peers? I am Métis, and at times have wondered if the desire to travel on the land with the weight of my belongings on my bike or back stems from some epigenetic connection to my ancestors. Perhaps that is just romanticizing the purity and simplicity of the life that they lived, while ignoring their challenges for survival. Or maybe, it is that our modern comforts have created a numbness that can only be relieved by experiencing the discomfort of connecting to a lost way of life. Or maybe it is that getting in touch with a state of mind that is primarily concerned with travel, sustenance and connection offers us a temporary relief from all the concerns we have constructed in our society.
It inspires a presence and purity of experience that I have not found anywhere else.
I do not have any answers to these questions. If anything has arisen from writing this, it is just more questions. What I do know, is that every time I return from an adventure of this kind, I am already thinking about the next. When I am out on the land with good people, carrying the weight of everything we need to survive, I feel the most like myself. It inspires a presence and purity of experience that I have not found anywhere else. The feeling of connection to life surpasses any feelings of suffering, creating an end experience that is pleasant beyond description.