Chapter 20
Three riding days to go.
Three more destinations.
Three.
All the time in the world to do it in.
Today: Vanrhysndorp. How the fuck do you say that?
It's somewhere between two hundred and three hundred clicks south.
It should be a cakewalk. But I don’t feel good about it.
I don’t want to get on the bike.
Well rested brain or not, it feels like I’m being conditioned to hate it. Every time I go near the bike I’m repulsed by the idea of riding it.
I’m scared for my safety. Less and less the physical, more and more in the head. I don’t feel that “I” am safe when I’m on the bike.
“I” feel like it’s going to change me.
And I don’t want to change; Not when I don’t know what that change is, or what life looks like on the other side.
It’s the event horizon of my mind, the point at which I can't see beyond, and I want to stay the fuck away from it.
Every time I get on that bike I feel it sucking me closer, like a goddamn singularity.
I should be feeling chilled out; South Africa was supposed to be a victory lap. But that's not it at all...
It's a fucking grind. But there's no other way to do it; every inch needs to be done sitting on the Shrike.
Better get to it.
Closer and closer to Varhyswhatever it’s just ramping. Out of control.
I have to take more and more breaks to separate it out. To kill the exponential rise. But each time I feel more panicked when I put my helmet back on, till I start to feel physically repulsed as I squeeze it over my ears.
Last break; thirty clicks from Vahryblahblah, off comes the helmet, and I take a long, long walk.
I’ve parked on top of a little crest in the road, and for everywhere I can see - in every direction - there’s nothing.
Utterly alone.
I come back to the bike; there’s nothing left to do but to get on it.
It's only thirty clicks... But I can't do another second...
I can’t breathe enough.
The breaths come easy, but it’s like it’s coming through a straw, till I’m sucking in full lungful’s through my mouth, on my haunches.
I can’t get back on the bike. I can’t make myself do it.
My face twists up.
It’s happening.
I’m breaking.
By reflex, I look wildly, franticly, for somewhere to flee to.
Escape! RUN! But there’s nowhere to hide here.
It crashes into me like a king wave. Obliterating me.
I lock up my jaw as my whole body shakes itself apart, like standing epilepsy.
I can’t think a thing. Can’t articulate a feeling, a thought; the terror has fogged everything except the need to flee this.
It endures, and endures, and endures, while I uselessly crawl my rattling hands back and forth over the Shrike. Looking for something. Something to help. Something to make it stop.
My body can’t endure it. And turns it off.
Minutes later, I’m crouched next to the bike with a hand the handlebar, another holding my face. And something, strange, like a soft release, spreads quickly, gently through me. Like a drug. It feels amazing, that softness, like the greatest drug no one’s ever taken.
I’m still Me.
Foggy, scared, but Me.
I really thought that that was going to be it...
I can’t do that again...
Something’s going to give.
In the softness, I don’t resist when I put my helmet on, there's no repulsion. I get on the bike, and go.
Vanrhysndorp.
I've been drowning myself for two days in television and the Commonwealth games. I only leave my hotel room to eat.
I reflect on what happened out on the road. The episode.
While it was happening, it was happening for eternity. I mean that literally. It's not a metaphor. Because the future is eternal, and, while I was in it, there was no way to know if it would stop, so, possibly, it might not, and if it does not, then what I was enduring never ends.
That’s forever.
Not knowing the future is what stretches moments into true eternities, not because that’s how long the moment lasts, but because that’s how long it could last. It’s a thing of the mind. While in that moment, while living it, it is eternal. And then it’s not, and it feels short again. But while in that moment...
Fuck.
I feel like failure - catastrophic failure - is imminent. Not only imminent, but almost inevitable. Like an impending, fated doom.
As I’ve got closer to Cape Town – my goal, my finish line – the tension, my tension, seems to be ratcheting. Every day. Every click. Always ratcheting tighter, and never going backwards.
Never slackens.
I can't believe I got back on the bike again...
I feel like I got lucky, to be able to close the distance and make it here to Vanrhysndorp without snapping in two.
What scares me – not on the same level of fear as going beyond that mental event horizon, but fear nonetheless – is that I’m going to make it within sight of Cape Town, and through no external forces, I’ll fail.
Just like shitting myself when I saw the islands on that fucking boat in Guinea-Bissau. I saw the finish line and my body decided that it had held out long enough... Cue the fire hose...
I've travelled more than thirty thousand of the toughest clicks, and I'll fail in the last few hundred of the easiest...
I’ve seen it before: blokes who do ultra-distance ironman races. They've been swimming and riding and running for double-digit hours, and then fail when they’re in sight of the finish line. After hours of exertion and with only seconds to run and they fail.
I fear that a capitulation, this time, in similar circumstances, will be far more disastrous than that overboarding in Bissau. To fail now... it’d be something I couldn’t live with.
But, whether I can live with it or not, I can feel that the urge to accept failure, to give up, is ratcheting as we go. And ratcheting with it is this thing. It's all going to hell in a handbasket.
In a marathon, it feels incrementally more impossible – with every single step it gets harder – till it’s over.
Like the ironman and the finish line, the boat and the island - all that can save me now is Cape Town. Only two more rides...
Far more than for “success” – far, far more than that – is because I can’t keep feeling this way; I just can’t.