Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1096: Jacob Lemanski - Riding a Bicycle Around the World TWICE

Transcript

Ep. 1096: Jacob Lemanski - Riding a Bicycle Around the World TWICE · Adventure Sports Podcast

0:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi friends, welcome to the Adventure Sports podcast.
0:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Today, I have Jacob Lananski with us.
0:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And Jacob, several years back, decided to get on a bicycle and see how far he could ride.
0:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And we'll get into the details of why he did that.
0:21
[SPEAKER_01]: But the end result was, he went around the planet twice.
0:25
[SPEAKER_01]: He did thirty-eight thousand miles and ninety-nine days.
0:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're going to talk about this epic bicycle journey.
0:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And Jacob, welcome to the program.
0:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So Jacob, let's start with where you are now.
0:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So people kind of have a context.
0:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm in Denver now.
0:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, that bike tour started and then they didn't call their auto.
0:46
[SPEAKER_00]: This is where I call home.
0:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Really.
0:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
0:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So this was about ten years ago, more or less, give or take.
0:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And I got to know, why?
0:58
[SPEAKER_01]: What was it that said, you know, I need to get on a bike and just go and go and go and go and go and go.
1:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I just had this idea, it would be a young strong man once in my life, and I had to figure out what I could do with that.
1:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had always been pushing myself in different ways.
1:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Every year on my birthday, I would run my age in my eyes and be the farthest longest run in my life every year.
1:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I was just kind of used to pushing myself and then tried to side it to really go for it.
1:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So had you been doing training for these birthday runs and for this long bike ride or was it just leaning into, I'm young and I'm strong and I'm doing it.
1:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, I, you know, I exercise for fun, but I never got into training.
1:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The runs were always hard and the bike ride.
1:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You right tell the very end that is getting better shape.
1:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's cool.
1:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mentioned that because part of the adventure sports podcast goal, you know, one of our goals is to introduce people to new sports that they may fall in love with.
2:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And the reason for that is because connecting with nature, getting outside, moving and becoming healthier in enhances all the rest of life, I think it makes your whole life better.
2:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I love the idea that there are things that people can just kind of lean into and try without doing tons and tons of preparation and then grow into the sport as their fitness increases and as their interest increases and all those sorts of things.
2:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It kind of sounds like that's maybe where you were.
2:35
[SPEAKER_01]: What kind of a bike did you choose?
2:37
[SPEAKER_00]: My bicycle was a a certainly long-haul trucker.
2:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a steel frame.
2:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It had road tires, but they were wide enough for dirt roads.
2:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had two bags on the front, two bags on the back.
2:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And I also carried a guitar, a narrow guitar with me.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just to give me something to do while I was out there resting.
2:58
[SPEAKER_01]: That's fun.
3:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So it doesn't sound like it was a light bicycle.
3:04
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, without food and water is about a hundred and fifteen pounds, loaded up in the desert, I'd have to bring more water than anywhere else.
3:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would at times leave with fifty pounds of water on my bike.
3:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And that would be the heaviest I would ever be.
3:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Good.
3:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And I wouldn't, you know, I would notice leaving town with that load, too.
3:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
3:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I've done quite a bit of biking, but we're always going for as light as we can get and being over a hundred pounds.
3:34
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you just, well, you decided is on some rides you were starting out like a hundred and sixty pounds.
3:39
[SPEAKER_00]: That's crazy.
3:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, the the the the travel light thing.
3:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It's less necessary for bike tours since the weight is on your bike.
3:52
[SPEAKER_00]: But also when I left my goal was to be like a ship at sea.
3:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't want to require any help or anything else from anyone along the way.
4:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to start with everything I was going to need for the whole journey.
4:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was loaded down with a lot of, you know, I had extra tires, you know, tires were out every six or seven thousand miles and I was planning ahead for that.
4:20
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, in other ways, I did cut corners.
4:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I only carry one shirt with me and I would wear it and tell if he came so full of holes, people would start to give me new clothing.
4:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I tried to keep it lightweight, too.
4:35
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, a lot of people have seen for us gump on the day that he just decided to run and he just kept going.
4:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It almost sounds like a parallel to that.
4:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Was there a was there kind of a driving force that said it's time?
4:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just gonna go.
4:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I've been working up to it for years.
4:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Even when I had the idea to try and bike around the world, it was over a year before I actually started.
5:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to quit my job.
5:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to build the confidence in myself to take that leap.
5:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing when I started,
5:13
[SPEAKER_00]: My longest bike tour prior to that was two months.
5:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So I thought maybe I would make it six months.
5:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that I went for three years was not expected at the beginning.
5:25
[SPEAKER_00]: If I knew at the start that I would be gone for a thousand days, I might not even, I might not even have left.
5:33
[SPEAKER_00]: But that would have been a lot to take on.
5:35
[SPEAKER_00]: But to leave and just need to go one day at a time.
5:40
[SPEAKER_00]: That was something I was up for.
5:41
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's quite often I think people look at massive achievements and they just seem like they're too big.
5:47
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's too big of a bite to chew and they talk themselves out of it.
5:51
[SPEAKER_01]: But I like what you just said, go one day at a time.
5:54
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, see what happens.
5:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I've met another cyclist out there.
5:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I was in Alaska and he was doing a very similar route to me.
6:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I had started in Portugal and across the China, and I went to Alaska to the southern tip of South America, and I crossed New Zealand, Australia, in a hundred days north across Africa.
6:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And this guy kind of had a similar route in mind, but at the time, I was just trying to go one more day.
6:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had the whole thing planned out ahead of him.
6:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I was going one more day he was counting down a thousand days and emotionally it's just totally different and way more daunting to see all that road ahead of you.
6:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I was able to stay very present and I think it created a different experience for me.
6:45
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a really interesting insight.
6:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I like that a lot.
6:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're different personalities and different people like to approach things different ways.
6:55
[SPEAKER_01]: One example I like to use is Fort Teeners.
6:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Some people like to check off the number of Fort Teeners that they've done and they're the ones at the summit that will say, I've climbed twenty seven.
7:04
[SPEAKER_01]: How many of you climbed, you know, and you're like, I climb mountains, dude.
7:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
7:09
[SPEAKER_01]: That was always my answer.
7:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because for me, it was about the experience of each peak.
7:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And it wasn't even necessarily about the summit.
7:17
[SPEAKER_01]: It was more about seeing the landscape and working your way up the trail.
7:22
[SPEAKER_01]: The summit, if you got there safely, the summit was just kind of like the icing on the cake.
7:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, hey, we summit.
7:29
[SPEAKER_01]: This is cool.
7:30
[SPEAKER_01]: But what a great hike we had.
7:31
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's a little bit different approach.
7:33
[SPEAKER_01]: But I totally get the people that like to check off.
7:36
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they just set the big goal.
7:38
[SPEAKER_01]: They like to check off the peaks, check off the days, check off the miles.
7:43
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just a different approach.
7:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, trying to motivate ourselves and different things work for different people.
7:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I personally, I just, I loved riding my bike and I wanted to sleep in beautiful places.
8:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So to do those two things, which I love and need motivation, I just meant I was bicycling around the world.
8:09
[SPEAKER_00]: But really what I was doing was going through bike rides and camping.
8:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, nice.
8:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just, it's just lasted a long time.
8:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So people are going to want to know about how many miles a day you had to do.
8:21
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I would, I would, I would like five or six hours a day.
8:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And, um, in the worst terrain, um, that might get me twenty miles.
8:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And with a nice tailwind, maybe I could cover up seventy miles in that time.
8:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So it sounds like you were kind of taking it at a healthy pace.
8:39
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like whatever the day holds, that's what we're going to do.
8:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it took time to get there.
8:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Certainly, I had a bite computer and fifty miles was my goal every day.
8:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I got less than that, I'd feel a little bad.
8:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I got better than that, I'd feel a little bit good.
8:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, I just didn't, and it want to, and it want my emotions tied to that.
9:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just, I got rid of my bite computer.
9:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just, I'd bite until it started getting dark.
9:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I would stop.
9:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a way it freed me a little bit more from keeping track of what I was doing.
9:14
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I coached helped to coach a mountain bike team that my sons were in.
9:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I put Strava on my phone so that I could track miles and times and that kind of stuff.
9:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And after writing with Strava for a little while, I realized I was constantly trying to do better than the last time.
9:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And I totally get it.
9:36
[SPEAKER_01]: That is a great approach to training and challenging yourself, setting your own new personal records.
9:42
[SPEAKER_01]: But I began to realize it wasn't enjoying the ride as much.
9:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it became all about the number on the screen, you know, and you just said, I got rid of the bike computer.
9:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Made life better.
9:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I actually found myself, you know what, I'm not going to turn straw on.
9:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just going to enjoy the ride.
9:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And there is something about that that was liberating from me.
10:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I totally get the numbers people that are looking for those personal records.
10:07
[SPEAKER_01]: That's great, too.
10:08
[SPEAKER_01]: But I totally understand what you're saying.
10:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Give it to the buy computer and then you're just kind of in the present moment.
10:16
[SPEAKER_01]: That's nice.
10:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
10:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And for long for to go as far as I could, it wasn't just a physical thing.
10:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a mental thing.
10:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
10:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I needed to kind of protect myself from trying to be trying to go a little further every day, right?
10:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that gets harder and harder.
10:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I really needed to keep it at a level that was sustainable.
10:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And also, you know, I also get it to go so far.
10:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It's impressive.
10:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's, it's especially impressive to the person doing it because we understand the effort more than anyone else.
10:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But at some point it for me was around twelve thousand miles and it just it just didn't make sense to count anymore.
11:07
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just not what I was out there doing.
11:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Even, you know, my trip ended up being nine hundred and ninety nine days.
11:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And all the time, I get asked why not one more day.
11:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And to bicycle one more day just for the sake of counting it after already going nine hundred and ninety nine.
11:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It was some sort of insanity.
11:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The truth is I had stopped counting around day five hundred.
11:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's it's just happened to land on nine nine nine.
11:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if I do, I will not have.
11:46
[SPEAKER_01]: That's fun.
11:47
[SPEAKER_01]: That's very, very fun.
11:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So you must have met amazing people, seen amazing things in countered cultures that were very contrasted to the one you're familiar with.
11:58
[SPEAKER_01]: When people think of world travel, I think that those are often the things that draw us, right?
12:05
[SPEAKER_01]: But to do it on a bicycle where you're in the elements, you're moving at a pace where you can seal the things for a long time and absorb them.
12:14
[SPEAKER_01]: What was that like on the bike?
12:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Your outside is one of it.
12:19
[SPEAKER_00]: You're in the weather.
12:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's vulnerable.
12:23
[SPEAKER_00]: People can walk right up to me.
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not even enclosed in a car for safety.
12:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm out there in the world.
12:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, really force me to just put myself out there and learn to trust.
12:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I had this idea that I
12:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I was doing a trust fall and that humanity was going to catch me.
12:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And truly, any time that I got in trouble, low on water, lost, I had my thing.
12:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a ship that see, I didn't want to ask for help.
12:56
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I needed it, someone would offer and then I would accept.
13:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And that happened at every critical junction that needed to get me to get me to the end alive.
13:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Did it change your
13:10
[SPEAKER_01]: your ideas about humanity?
13:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, that was my first time meeting humanity.
13:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's certainly open to my eyes.
13:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, the way I traveled on a bike, traveling along distance, you spend a lot of time in farm fields.
13:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The city's pop up every few weeks, and then it's, you know, hundreds of thousands of miles between them, that's mostly farmers, shepherds, rural.
13:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I was mostly hanging out with, you know, not city people, rural folks who live close to the earth and we're basically poor, most of the places I was in the world.
13:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm.
13:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Never reminds me of looking out of the airplane window.
13:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems like when we live in the cities, we start to get this feeling that the world is a crowded place.
14:05
[SPEAKER_01]: But they need to get in the airplane to look down.
14:07
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, oh, look at all this open space.
14:10
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the cities are where everyone crams together.
14:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But did that?
14:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you start to have a different feeling about your day when you were going through a city versus the rural areas that you spent most of your time in?
14:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, the cities.
14:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The cities were like a welcome change because I would be a weakened farm fields and then the city would pop up and it'd be something new to experience.
14:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was totally fascinating just to see how they changed from country to country.
14:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would just be passing through.
14:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't getting a sense of the culture that much, but just seeing the architecture, seeing the people out, seeing, you know, just like getting the field of place, it was always interesting to go through.
15:02
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, there are some consistent things on the trip that I would compare, you know, as I went grocery stores.
15:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd stop at a new one every, you know, three to five days and get a sense of how it was different from the last one and how that slowly changed, you know, as I traveled around the world.
15:21
[SPEAKER_00]: cities were the same way.
15:22
[SPEAKER_00]: They had their similarities within countries in which slowly changed to something else to further I went.
15:28
[SPEAKER_01]: So Jacob has his own podcast where he recounts.
15:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Jacob, I just listened to a little of this and I really enjoyed it.
15:39
[SPEAKER_01]: But you're recounting
15:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, individual experiences that stand out in your mind.
15:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's, it's in a kind of like an elongated story format.
15:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, I thought of it at the time.
15:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's like pearls on a string, right, of time.
15:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the way that we tend to remember because our mind compresses our memory so that we can hold more information probably.
16:01
[SPEAKER_01]: But we, we tend to remember the things that stood out because they were somehow contrasted with everything else.
16:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
16:09
[SPEAKER_01]: So you share with us some of those contrasted moments, things that stood out that you're like, oh, man, that one was something else.
16:16
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, part of my goal on this trip was to get far out.
16:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And whatever that man, I wasn't even sure when I started.
16:26
[SPEAKER_00]: But I did get far out.
16:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Mongolia comes to mind, especially my beard had grown long by then.
16:34
[SPEAKER_00]: My shirt had deteriorated to the point where
16:38
[SPEAKER_00]: wasn't keeping the sun off anymore.
16:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I was crossing the goby desert.
16:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I was out there struggling to carry off water, bumping into camels, getting stuck in the sand.
16:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a wild environment and really hard to get myself physically across.
17:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Whenever I came to these places where people are living,
17:08
[SPEAKER_00]: in ways that literally no one in the United States lives.
17:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It was always just so fascinating to me just to, you know, see how other people are doing it.
17:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, I was always impressed that people really seem pretty light-hearted and kind and friendly, no matter what their living situation was.
17:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And Mongolia, they were just in their little
17:36
[SPEAKER_00]: you know they would sleep out with their animals and you know no one seemed to mind that and I was sleeping outside too and it made sense.
17:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It's even when I got back I kept sleeping outside.
17:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It's nice once you get used to it.
17:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
17:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Very interesting.
17:58
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was trying to think of some of the logistics, so just from the mindset of someone who's hearing what you're talking about Jacob and they're thinking, I wonder if I could.
18:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I wonder if I should.
18:11
[SPEAKER_01]: What advice do you have for people that are kind of entertaining that?
18:14
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's, uh, I don't always tell people they should go do it.
18:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It was.
18:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, um, it was really hard, but anyone can do something hard.
18:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, it was dangerous.
18:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I've, I count.
18:27
[SPEAKER_00]: about ten times where I was saved by luck, and it never feels good to be saved by luck.
18:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And also to go for so long, you know, for example, the woman I was dating at the beginning was married to someone else by the time I finished.
18:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, it affects relationships and
18:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd say anyone could go for a year and step back into society and not have too much to be different.
19:00
[SPEAKER_00]: But the leap for three years, yeah, people move the relationships change.
19:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It was hard to come back after being out for so long.
19:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So I recommend it, but just just understand it's, it's
19:20
[SPEAKER_00]: to go for that long, you're, you're bite-knoth more than you can imagine at the beginning.
19:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Certainly anyone I would tell them just go right and bite as far as you can.
19:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't have to be as far as I went.
19:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you find it difficult from a safety standpoint to just to be sharing the road with vehicles and things?
19:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Was that the big thing for you or were there other issues?
19:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, being on the road.
19:47
[SPEAKER_00]: There's different driving cultures in different countries.
19:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The U.S.
19:51
[SPEAKER_00]: is very rule-following country and not everywhere.
19:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like that.
19:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And some places were really quite scary, actually.
20:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Very different in China, for example, China felt very safe to bicycle because just their vehicles are underpowered.
20:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone's driving around at twenty miles per hour, almost as fast as I can sprint on my bike.
20:21
[SPEAKER_00]: So just the fact that everyone's moving slowly over there, really, maybe feel safe from my bike, whatever, no one would use their brakes.
20:34
[SPEAKER_00]: They would just swore around each other.
20:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Pachar was, say, car was coming from the right, to turn on to the road and take a right.
20:42
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no chance that they would look left.
20:44
[SPEAKER_00]: They would just come out and pull right.
20:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And anyone coming, they would shift into the oncoming traffic lane to go around them and then move back into the lane.
20:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's slowed more like a river than like a fast, bunch of fast cars falling the rules.
21:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had to adjust to that.
21:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
21:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And that sort of every time I cost a border, I had to be paying attention.
21:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you mentioned that you were saved by luck about ten different times.
21:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Will you share a story or two when that happened?
21:15
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I always think of my closest call.
21:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just I was camping on the beach down in southern Argentina.
21:24
[SPEAKER_00]: In the morning, I had just woken up, I just stood up outside of my tent and a wave came in and washed over my stuff and it was up to about my chest when I was standing.
21:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I receded, I had to gather all my stuff, you know, try to get it up higher and.
21:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a total mess, but.
21:45
[SPEAKER_00]: If that wave had come any time in the previous ten hours, I would have been zipped up to my chin and my sleeping bag and suddenly under five-feel water.
21:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure they would have drowned.
21:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, that was a luck of the timing that wave didn't come till morning.
22:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Interesting.
22:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us about it.
22:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Another one I was
22:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I got to this this kind of broad valley in Central America and the road split there one went down the west side of the valley one went down the east side of the valley and I chose the east side and at evening I set up camp on a hill and I was looking out across the valley towards the west in a big fire broke out across the fields and
22:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Certainly, if I went down that other road, I would have just been camping out in those fields where I always camp right where that fire was.
22:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I probably would have got caught up in the flames.
22:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, that was just a fork in the road where I missed a missed, getting caught on fire.
22:54
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the water fire.
22:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you have an earth story?
22:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Wind story?
22:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's see.
23:01
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the highest I bicycle was seventeen thousand one hundred feet in Bolivia.
23:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I bicycle up to the top of this mountain.
23:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And there happened to be a glass pyramid up there.
23:17
[SPEAKER_00]: This used to be an old ski mountain.
23:19
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the highest ski mountain in the world.
23:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just some artifact left over from that.
23:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I arrived late at night because it took me all day to get up there and I ended up sleeping in that
23:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And that little glass pyramid that I had no idea would be there.
23:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And the night got so cold that, you know, late in my seat and back, I would hug myself for warms, but there was also so thin that I would wake myself up short of breath because I was squeezing my lungs and then I tried to adjust my arms to not squeeze so tight and it wouldn't work.
23:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, everything became frosted.
23:56
[SPEAKER_00]: My water bottle froze.
23:59
[SPEAKER_00]: inside of my sleeping bag and I had a nice zero degree bag.
24:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So if that pyramid hadn't been there blocking the wind for me and I was just camping exposed up there.
24:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe I wouldn't have woken up when I got cold.
24:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I would have just froze up there.
24:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure.
24:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Easy.
24:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And then plenty of close calls with cars.
24:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
24:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, did you have a lot of mechanical repairs?
24:29
[SPEAKER_01]: You had to do along the way.
24:30
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the only thing that lasted on the bike was the frame.
24:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Really everything else, even a handful.
24:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It's got swapped out by the end.
24:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I would replace the drive train, you know, every once in a while.
24:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And the tires and wheels would would wear out.
24:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically, when I would get to a big city,
24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes I get into a shop and do a good tune up for me.
24:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing that actually stopped me in my path on the road.
25:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, honestly, I take that back.
25:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I was biking in Tasmania, the little island south of Australia.
25:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I was doing a lap around that.
25:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's probably the most remote place I'd ever been.
25:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And my pedal fell off.
25:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and my rear hub broke kind of both at the same time.
25:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and I was, I was strained it.
25:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And the next town was, um, is about fifty five miles away.
25:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, what, what do you do?
25:39
[SPEAKER_00]: You just start pushing.
25:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It was going to take me probably two or three days to walk there.
25:45
[SPEAKER_00]: But, I mean, I had just been planning on riding my bike anyway.
25:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So it didn't really matter to me.
25:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Um,
25:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And I pushed for twenty four hours before the very first car passed me and goodness.
25:58
[SPEAKER_01]: That's great.
25:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they actually stop and pick me up.
26:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So it worked out just fine, but.
26:06
[SPEAKER_00]: That's, I mean, that's the, especially in remote places.
26:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone sees here in trouble, they'll stop.
26:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you learn some best practices that would keep you safer or help to minimize the, the negative unexpecteds where there's some things that you said, okay, I'm going to always do this because.
26:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was careful not to stop in the cities to like,
26:32
[SPEAKER_00]: have lunch.
26:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I would make sure I was out in a quiet space for that.
26:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I never wanted to have my things off of my bike or spread out in a moment where someone might approach I need to get away quickly.
26:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So I always kept my kit really tight just in case I needed to leave.
26:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other thing I would do is I won't talk to anyone that didn't want to talk to me.
26:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm out there.
26:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm on my bike.
27:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm approachable.
27:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But if someone didn't want to chat with me, I never forced myself on them.
27:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And this way only met, you know, the friendly as people that were interested in me, especially since there was a language barrier, then they're okay with having to deal with me not not understanding them.
27:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
27:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Versus me going up to people and
27:25
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you know, trying to make conversation with someone that's maybe uncomfortable talking to a foreigner or something like that.
27:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds wonderful.
27:33
[SPEAKER_01]: One thing that I'm picking up just kind of globally is you start to relate and experience and you say, well, yeah, in Mongolia, and then in Tasmania, and there was this time, and very few people in the world, when they go through their memories, connect them to locations,
27:52
[SPEAKER_01]: literally anywhere on the planet.
27:54
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a part of your life now.
27:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And I believe that our life experiences shape us.
28:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So can you share some insights to that?
28:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you feel like you're your experience traveling in this way?
28:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Contributed to who you are today?
28:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, of course.
28:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The trip was from twenty thirteen to twenty sixteen and I haven't spent even a single day not thinking about it.
28:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It's totally effective.
28:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I've become very calm.
28:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It's something I learned basically around the world, how to be patient.
28:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And people always sense that in me.
28:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, it gave me an outstanding amount of confidence.
28:43
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, my podcast is called How to Move the Stars.
28:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a day by day retelling of the journey.
28:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I kept the journal.
28:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have edited it and I read it.
28:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to take people on that whole journey with me.
29:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And the name, how to move the stars that comes from in Alaska, the North Star, it's way over my head.
29:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It's almost straight up.
29:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I traveled south.
29:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I got to the border of Mexico.
29:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And someone had given me a bunch of pot in California.
29:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't want to smuggle it in the Mexico so my last night camp and I just smoked it all and I was out there staring up at the stars and I found the North Star again and it was lower in the sky and I realized just by just by moving my legs I had moved the stars in the sky and the the North Star continued to drop towards the horizon as I traveled south and then the southern cross came up right just by
29:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Just with the strength of my own body, I was moving the stars in the sky.
29:57
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, would have profound thing to know that I can do.
30:02
[SPEAKER_01]: It is amazing.
30:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It is amazing.
30:04
[SPEAKER_01]: What can be accomplished a little at a time if you're just persistent and consistent and, you know, just keep going.
30:12
[SPEAKER_01]: There have been many times where just keep going is what saved me.
30:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sure that, you know, people need to learn those lessons sometimes, you know, but to be able to literally change the sky.
30:25
[SPEAKER_01]: just a little out of time, and perceptively, until the day is turning to weeks and the weeks turning to months and fascinating.
30:35
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a unique perspective, isn't it?
30:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and you have to notice, too.
30:40
[SPEAKER_00]: You got to be aware.
30:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I met a man
30:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I forget his name, but he was he was breaking the record by something across Africa.
30:52
[SPEAKER_00]: He was going from Cairo to Cape Town.
30:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I think's thirty four days was the record and he's playing it on doing it in thirty.
31:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
31:01
[SPEAKER_00]: He was biking, you know, a hundred eighty to three hundred miles a day.
31:06
[SPEAKER_00]: He had a chase fan.
31:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Michael Strosser was his name and
31:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I met him out there in the middle of his run.
31:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I was, I was headed north.
31:13
[SPEAKER_00]: He was headed south and he was off his bike just for ten minutes to give his butt a break.
31:18
[SPEAKER_00]: He was around five p.m.
31:21
[SPEAKER_00]: and I was starting to look for a place to sleep and he was playing on a bike in another hundred twenty miles at night.
31:30
[SPEAKER_00]: He was maybe twenty days into the trip and I was about nine hundred and forty days into my trip.
31:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we talked to A and I asked him, is the record important because any sort of record would have long ago lost its importance to me on my journey.
31:52
[SPEAKER_00]: But for him, he answered, he said, yes, I could see it was the only thing important to him.
31:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, if you're biking through a hundred miles a day,
32:05
[SPEAKER_00]: breaking the records really got to be the motivation because there's no better be.
32:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, nothing else would would get you to do that.
32:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But I wonder if he noticed that he was moving the stars because he would have went far enough to do it.
32:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I just don't think that's where it's focused was.
32:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Fascinating.
32:20
[SPEAKER_01]: We tend to find what we're looking for.
32:24
[SPEAKER_01]: See what we take the time to observe.
32:27
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and I will say we've interviewed a lot of people that were going for the big goal.
32:34
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, whatever it was that the record and some people, it's personal records.
32:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to do better than I did last time like we talked about.
32:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And for some people, it's I want to be the fastest in the world at something.
32:47
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and people have different motivations for that.
32:51
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not always that, you know, I, I want to be the best at something.
32:59
[SPEAKER_01]: What's, what happens with that is that even if you are the best at that one thing, that will only be for a short season of your life.
33:08
[SPEAKER_01]: If you set the world record, someone's going to come along and beat it.
33:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And not that that's bad.
33:15
[SPEAKER_01]: You can always say to yourself, wow, I pulled it off once.
33:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I did the thing.
33:21
[SPEAKER_01]: But I used to tell my kids, there's always a faster gun.
33:26
[SPEAKER_01]: If you take up gunslinging, not that we do that these days, but to use an old Western metaphor, if you take up gunslinging eventually, there's going to be a faster gun.
33:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone's going to get you.
33:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's fun to chase after those big goals.
33:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I find the journey itself.
33:45
[SPEAKER_01]: DB was more meaningful.
33:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would bet the gentleman that you related to us when he when he reflects back on it.
33:51
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, yeah, that the achievement was certainly something that I feel really significantly about, but it starts turning into how it felt to go three hundred miles day after day after day.
34:04
[SPEAKER_01]: or the little things that little challenges he had to overcome along the journey that those probably have more of a lasting impact.
34:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I'm wrong.
34:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just, I'm speculating, but that's been kind of my experience.
34:16
[SPEAKER_01]: What about you?
34:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the journey changes you and the results get you something to brag about.
34:25
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, for myself, to go as far as I could, you know, it's very personal.
34:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm the only one that can achieve that.
34:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, the concept of just keep going, even the moment I wanted to quit, I was, I was out in the middle of nowhere.
34:45
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no way to quit.
34:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to keep going.
34:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, especially at the end, when I really, I got to my last day.
34:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I had this idea only getting to a place where I could go no farther.
34:59
[SPEAKER_00]: What I know that I went as far as I could.
35:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I really had to go until I quit.
35:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And that happened out on the side of the road in Africa.
35:07
[SPEAKER_00]: About nine hundred and fifty days in maybe thirty seven and a half thousand miles.
35:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just, it's just that makes sense to go farther.
35:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
35:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But
35:24
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no one coming for me.
35:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, right.
35:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It took me another, it took me another fifty days to get home.
35:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So you got to the point of, okay, I'm done when I can't be done.
35:34
[SPEAKER_01]: What were those?
35:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Those last fifty days, I can imagine would be so much harder than the, nine hundred and forty nine before that, you know, they were, and you know, even I didn't have
35:50
[SPEAKER_00]: wasn't as clear cut as climbing to a summit and walking back down.
35:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It was kind of a high point or at least a far point in my journey, which I was considered to be the southern tip of South America.
36:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And from that point, it felt like I was on the return journey.
36:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I was making my way back home.
36:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And even just being very present the way I managed to be out there, the way out is invigorating in the way back is waiting.
36:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, soldiers you staff to walk home from the war.
36:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Explorers would sail home at the pace of the wind.
36:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I could have hopped the flight home, but I didn't want to take that experience away from myself.
36:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to feel that return journey and what that was like.
36:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And I most mean it was way harder to be counting down than to be counting up.
36:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I totally get that.
36:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I haven't given a lot of thought to that Jacob, that's a, that's an insight.
36:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I think all of life, there are parallels to what you're talking about.
36:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And the idea that the first Fort Teenar I ever climbed was Pikes Peak.
37:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And I climbed it from, I say, I climbed it from Oklahoma, meaning that, you know, I wasn't acclimated to the altitude and it was, it was very hard to get up the first Big Mountain.
37:15
[SPEAKER_01]: But there was a car at the top that took us back.
37:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So I didn't have the return trip down, which Pike's peak is about twenty six miles if you do the up and down.
37:28
[SPEAKER_01]: So I only really did half of that.
37:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, I've climbed dozens of peaks, scores of peaks since then.
37:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've always thought I really need to go back and do that one again because I didn't walk back down.
37:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't have the return trip.
37:42
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, just drive to the top and walk down.
37:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It's time.
37:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, and it's not because I need to check a box.
37:51
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something about something about your own like life experience.
37:56
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, I want to do the thing.
37:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
37:59
[SPEAKER_01]: The or the undone thing, you know, and I get that when you're, when you're saying, yeah, I needed the return trip.
38:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, yeah, I, I just, I,
38:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know that's how it would feel, right?
38:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was definitely hard.
38:20
[SPEAKER_00]: You got harder and harder.
38:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's the last fifty days where in a way, totally, totally painful.
38:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I just wanted them to be home.
38:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
38:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I totally get it.
38:34
[SPEAKER_01]: What did you expect?
38:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Home would be like, let's talk a little bit more about the reentry.
38:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure that there were some surprises when you said, OK, I'm home.
38:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Now what?
38:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I met a man.
38:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the very end of the trip, I flew into New York City.
38:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I bicycle with town to Philadelphia to visit my sister and in Pennsylvania to visit my parents.
38:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And on that trip down to Philadelphia, I met another man from England.
39:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was just finishing his around the world by pride.
39:06
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been out for about a year and was just about two weeks from finished.
39:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I was the same way.
39:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd been out for years and was about two weeks from finished.
39:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And we just sat on the side of road and talked for over an hour.
39:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And neither one of us mentioned even for a moment what we were planning on doing next.
39:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It had never occurred to us.
39:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Just think about we are here, we are present.
39:35
[SPEAKER_00]: to think about what was next, so they're taking me out of that.
39:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's just not how I was living my life at the time.
39:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I only thought about today.
39:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I returned back into society in that way, like, without any forethought.
39:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The challenge was, well, you know, like, I slept in my hammock another eight months after I got back.
40:02
[SPEAKER_00]: and trouble letting go of the trip.
40:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And the hammock was comfortable.
40:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes sense to sleep inside.
40:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I stayed out there even another winter.
40:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I got a room, but I kind of ended up set myself up in the garage where I could feel the temperature and also with the door open, I was kind of half inside and half outside.
40:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
40:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was inspired.
40:26
[SPEAKER_00]: My bike journey inspirational is just the easiest way to explain it.
40:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It was so big in my life.
40:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And my background is engineering.
40:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So I, you know, I hadn't got to build anything for years, which is also something I enjoyed.
40:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I got back and inspired by that journey, I wanted to create something beautiful.
40:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And while I traveled, the only thing I missed
40:54
[SPEAKER_00]: from the life I left behind, not a shower, not my friends and family.
40:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I missed this ant farm that I had.
41:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I missed it like a pet.
41:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so I want to hear the rest of this, but people would not see that coming.
41:11
[SPEAKER_00]: No, of course not, but you know, it is like I said, I missed it like a pet.
41:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And I got home when I got this ant farm restarted.
41:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, you know, two pieces of plastic.
41:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I had kind of built it myself and set a lightball behind it.
41:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just out, you know, I was so patient.
41:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I could watch, I could watch ants, take a tunnel.
41:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I conceived the build the world's most beautiful ant farm.
41:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And over the next six months, I came up with a concept, and I built a whole installation in my basement, including the world's largest ant farm, which is eight feet wide and four feet tall.
41:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The background is this nebula.
41:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I embedded lights in the frame to illuminate the background, and then shine out through the tunnels.
41:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was just fascinating, trippy living art piece.
42:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had filmed my basement with these things.
42:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had circled the earth twice on a bicycle, which is a far out thing to do.
42:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I built these psychedelic living and farms in my basement.
42:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They were hanging all over the walls.
42:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just felt so far out.
42:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know what I was getting myself into.
42:33
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were beautiful, but they're really strange and inspired by a strange bike ride.
42:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It was almost all too much.
42:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It took me about two years to just calm myself down enough to just go get a normal job.
42:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was out of money at that point too, so that was the other motivation.
42:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes we need that out of money kicking the seat of the pants.
43:03
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I emptied my cup.
43:05
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the way I think about it.
43:07
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
43:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I went on that journey to give to give it my all.
43:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I did.
43:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I put everything I had into it.
43:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I know that there's a place where people can see some of your ant art is a way to think of it, right?
43:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The ant art, you can see that ant life dot space.
43:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, it's uh, I do time lapses up on there.
43:33
[SPEAKER_00]: They're really far out interesting art pieces.
43:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I'm still waiting for them to catch on, but you know, one of these days.
43:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's a, it's an interesting thing.
43:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I think people probably don't understand it until they kind of encounter it.
43:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So antlife dot space.
43:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's people see what you're talking about.
43:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And
43:55
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I out in the forest, you sit down on the ground to raster for whatever purpose and the ants suddenly appear.
44:03
[SPEAKER_01]: They're around you.
44:04
[SPEAKER_01]: They were always around you, but you didn't know they were there.
44:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you see one that's carrying something bigger than it is.
44:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's struggling over obstacles that
44:13
[SPEAKER_01]: It's our smaller than your tip of your pinky finger.
44:16
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you could just bump it and it would, you know, I mean, you're like, a god to these ants.
44:23
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's the point.
44:24
[SPEAKER_01]: You see this aunt and you watch him and he's struggling with this massive, massive load.
44:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And I grow.
44:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I can watch him maybe cover six or eight inches.
44:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, okay, that's enough of that.
44:38
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm moving on to something else with my attention at that point.
44:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And that partially is because I've not written around the world multiple times on a bicycle.
44:48
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, but here's the kind of the kicker is that they're always around us and they're always working so hard and they're doing feats that are just amazing.
44:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, imagine picking up something that's five times your body weight, you know, and moving it for the day.
45:04
[SPEAKER_01]: But then you see the ant mounts in the forest here in Colorado and some of these ant mounts are huge.
45:10
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there are many feet across several feet tall.
45:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And the ants are working and working and working.
45:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's, it's almost a testament to what can be accomplished by very, very small things over a long period of time with cooperation, with determination.
45:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And I can see a real parallel there between writing your bicycle around the world and what answer doing.
45:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And where would the world be without these type of colonizing insects?
45:41
[SPEAKER_01]: We would be in serious trouble without them.
45:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Think about the bees.
45:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
45:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, for sure.
45:46
[SPEAKER_00]: You're right.
45:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Answer everywhere in the world.
45:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Since I was outside all the time, I was encountering them every night.
45:55
[SPEAKER_00]: What I would do is after I was done cooking and eating, I would put my pot next to an ant hill.
46:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And like I said, every night, there's ants around.
46:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would go find one.
46:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And they would do my dishes for me.
46:08
[SPEAKER_00]: If it was a big ant hill, they would clean it really good.
46:10
[SPEAKER_00]: If there's a little ant hill, maybe I could do it all.
46:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But for years, I let the ants do my dishes.
46:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I literally never wash myself.
46:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a waste of water.
46:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And once I realized the ants could do it, it became a waste of time, too.
46:27
[SPEAKER_01]: That's hilarious.
46:29
[SPEAKER_01]: What a fascinating story.
46:31
[SPEAKER_01]: That's really, really fun.
46:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Now you do other things though.
46:36
[SPEAKER_01]: You do bike tours.
46:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, now I'm taking people on bike tours around Denver and into the Rocky Mountains.
46:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I got he bike so that people can handle the climbs and honestly, so that I can handle the climbs too.
46:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not, I'm not as fit as I was when I was biking around the world.
46:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, if you're, uh, if you're not doing it every day, then you're certainly not going to be doing it every day.
46:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's staying the obvious, but that's what it takes, you know, to stay a kind of confusion.
47:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
47:07
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's called mountain high bicycle tours.
47:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Explain what these tours are like.
47:11
[SPEAKER_01]: So people have an idea.
47:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, bicycling can be anything from, from tuteling around the block, you know, on a sidewalk to the most extreme things you can imagine.
47:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So what do you do?
47:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, my tours are a little more casual than biking around the world.
47:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I take people on day tours mostly.
47:30
[SPEAKER_00]: We go and explore the mountains on dirt roads and then we'll always make sure to stop at a brewery on the way home to just get a little little local flavor.
47:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Colorado is just so beautiful and so many ways and I've been exploring it for years.
47:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I know the good spots for anyone coming in from out of town and that's really what people need.
47:53
[SPEAKER_00]: When they arrive somewhere new, this is someone to show them where to go.
47:58
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll share that website with us again, so if people are interested, they can find it.
48:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Get mountain high bicycle tours.com.
48:08
[SPEAKER_01]: mountain high bicycle tours very cool.
48:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Jacob has been a blast talking to you and we could go on for hours and hours about this.
48:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you have years of this, nine hundred and ninety nine days of stories.
48:22
[SPEAKER_01]: So I mean, people need to go to that website to hear more how to move the stars.com, right?
48:27
[SPEAKER_00]: correct how to move the stars and search that on any podcast player.
48:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It'll pop up as well.
48:32
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a lot of fun.
48:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the part of it that I listen to, I thought, oh, if I can find the time or I'm in a place where I just want to chill and do some armchair travel, you know, I thought this is this is good stuff.
48:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So anyway, Jacob, will you leave us with
48:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe something inspirational that you learned in your life, maybe on the bike, maybe watching the ants, but what would you like to leave for our audience?
49:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, one thing that I always have to remind myself is that things take longer than you expect.
49:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would say, most of my success in life has come from consistency.
49:20
[SPEAKER_00]: for someone that can ride a bike a thousand days in a row.
49:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Consistency is the thing.
49:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, if anyone that can build that into their life, you know, I'd spend helpful for me.
49:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I love it.
49:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And I agree with it.
49:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So, well, Jacob, thank you very much for being on the Adventure Sports podcast.
49:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much, Kurt.
49:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Have a good day.
49:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this has been a lot of fun.
49:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Take care and for all the listeners out there as always until the next show, do get out there and have some fun.