I wrote this two weeks ago but obviously have had a hard time pressing “publish” on anything these last few months. Honestly, I’ve just been tired. Hopefully as the season wanes I can devote more time here. Thanks for staying ◡̈
Girona, Thursday morning, they’re landscaping the public park outside the 6th bed I’ve slept in over the last 2.5 weeks. This trip has been hard in a lot of ways. A bad race to kick things off, some fumbled travel, just enough time in one place to start to fall in love and then leave. All paired with the knowledge that it’s the best time of year at home, air crisp, sun saturated and orange, a page turning with the weather. But yesterday, several chance run-ins in the way that only Girona can provide, one of the best bowls of pasta I’ve had maybe ever, and a walk home through streets that are both so old and so alive, and I want to stay for at least another month.
So much has happened. I know I was supposed to write about Kenya, wanted to while it was fresh, slept most of the 22 hours travel home with an acacia thorn in the second joint of my left middle finger. It was early in day 4, the last stage, we dismount and hike around a puddle, rather, small pond that covers the road, I slip, put out a hand to catch myself and something stabs me. My finger, then the whole hand swells for the next 100 miles and I finish in tears, take three different pills from the medics but we’re way out in the bush and I convince myself it’s fine. The thorn is still there and still bothering me but a little less every day. When season ends I’ll get someone to cut it out of me and I hope they let me keep it.
There’s an ideal range of emotions that suit themselves to this kind of writing, strong but not overly so, captivating but familiar. Kenya was none of those, it was the single most powerful experience I’ve ever lived and absolutely impossible to make sense of in words, especially words to relative strangers on the internet. This season has held more meaning than most; I’ve seen more than the midwest and met people outside of the small circles we’re so used to running in, and it’s stuck with me in a way that is heavier and harder to process in public. In person, with friends, I struggle to relate it, all I can say is you *have* to go, there’s no other way to know what it is what it’s like, the energy, the people, the people. The race itself was so physically hard that I’m pretty sure it fucked over the rest of my season but I don’t care at all, want to go back, have to really. That’s all the Migration story I have in me now, maybe it comes out in pieces maybe it comes never.
I’m tired and so tired that I’m ungrateful, so happy to be here but so over being not-at-home, spending money that in late September is getting thin. Only half of next year’s sponsors are settled, and, like every year around this time, I start to doubt I can pull it off again. Convince the gravel scene I’m worth it when I’m not winning Lifetime events and trying to sell stuff on instagram. And while it remains the dream, the pro thing I mean, I am just tired enough to start to romanticize work that doesn’t call into question my value at the same time each year; there are so many things I could do and this is just one. So maybe it happens and maybe it doesn’t and maybe if I felt less ambivalent it would be more likely to happen but honestly I don’t think so and I couldn’t handle the stress of caring so much anyways. Maybe I do this, but less fully, and also do something else that’s fine too. I have lived the pro dream and it’s incredible, but it sucks, too, in ways I think I’ve enumerated here but also keep to myself; I talk too much shit already. Selling your image and your physical capabilities and your personality in an industry largely run by men is not the most gratifying work. I have sought out, and found, and hold close my existing, consistent relationships, real friends who see me and what I am doing, and I could cry at how lucky I feel to have found them and kept them. One very large puzzle piece remains empty for next year and it’s the one right in the middle so who really knows what the whole picture is.
If this blog is going to survive the doldrums of late-season racing I need to approach it more manageably, send out snippets instead of the sagas I’ve started to set as expectation, so I’m leaving you here, unfinished maybe, unedited definitely, feeling like I haven’t talked about any of the good or happy but maybe that’s next. I am good and I am happy and the second I think about all the people here who have reached out so many hands for me I get a little rush through my chest and it’s crazy. Complicated, yes, but good and happy.
Not only does this album have a fitting title for a comeback post, it’s carried me through the last few months of constant here-to-there. Music is very location-oriented for me; I can tell you where I was on my first listen of any of my favorites, and this will forever be associated with airports and trains through Europe. There is something timeless that keeps me coming back to this, a psych-jazz order-in-disorder thing that my brain absolutely fucks with. And, fun fact, all the instrumentation is live.
no recipes this time I literally haven’t had a kitchen in forever. I am subsisting off tomato and cheese on bread. But if you come to Girona, and want life-altering pasta, head to Mola.
Reading written updates on your happenings is a fresh change to the endless vlogs we’re fed. But unfortunately I guess those are more likely to pay the bills than these written post.
“definitely not edited” :) Feel better!