A new day, a new city, a new state, and a new adventure. Today was the first day I truly got to explore the city I just moved to, Albany, New York. It feels odd to live not in Wisconsin ha. 24 years old and starting over. I've heard people talk about this kind of feeling a lot, a fresh start in someplace new but mostly I'm feeling a bit lonely. I'm not even sure what I want to write about here but as I've done on all new adventures, when I end up by myself, I write. As you can tell it's nothing special but I'm going to use this platform to express myself when I have no one around who I can call a friend. Yet.
Moving during a pandemic is probably a bad idea, and the difficulty has been turned up on the 'making friends part of a new place' aspect. Today though, I find some hope and optimism. I went on a 16- mile bike ride across the city and along the Hudson River, stopping at my new office and then the abandoned factory a mile down the road. There is probably a metaphor about the dilapidated building in contrast to my new start but that's a little more effort than I want to put into this blog post right now. Regardless of the forced dichotomy, I finished my ride feeling rejuvenated. Throughout the summer I trained with my best friend Michael to ride our bikes 64 miles from Milwaukee to Madison WI in honor of the covid-canceled ShrekFest. Originally, we were going to ride to the festival but instead we decided to ride to the park where it would have been held. We trained rigorously for the first few weeks then I got super lax. While he kept putting on the miles by himself, I never rode over 40 and the one time I did that it damn near killed me. I had always planned on moving before the scheduled 64 mile ride but then this new job in Albany pushed back my start date and I found myself wildly unprepared for a ride I no longer had an excuse to skip. Was I a man of my word or a coward who would succumb to his own laziness? Maybe it was the fear of disappointing myself and all of my friends who I had told about this ride, or maybe it was simply a delusion of grandeur but I got on that bike and mile by mile made my farewell tour of Wisconsin.
10, 20, 30 miles, Michael and I were breezing through towns and laughing the whole way. 40 miles and I was sweating, telling myself that the pain I felt in my legs wasn't real because if I was this tired at mile 40 there was no way I could get to mile 60. At mile 50 Michael was as chipper as ever while I was panting on the side of the road desperate to give my legs a reprieve. Mile 60 came with labored breaths and an absolute disdain for every inch of road that I had left. Finally, mile 64 came and went and with it so did my will to move. I would have been willing to lay in that grass for the next 10 hours but Michael was determined to get a victory beer and how could I not oblige my friend after he dealt with my whining and even me crashing into his back wheel at mile 52.
This was without a doubt my greatest physical accomplishment and I wouldn't have even tried it without my friend there to push me along every step of the way. The reason my training schedule fell apart was not because I didn't have the time to ride, it was because I didn't like to ride alone. I don't really like to do anything alone, even when I spout off about my love for traveling alone, my favorite part about traveling is meeting people along the way. Over the course of this pandemic summer I easily rode over 150 miles and maybe 4 of them I rode alone. I have been worried for a lot of reasons for the last 2 weeks and one of them was the fear my bike would have cobwebs on it sooner rather than later. Without Michael him here to push me, to laugh with, I didn't know if I would get back on my bike but today, I proved that fear to be unsubstantiated. Even with the Skrek-Trek defeated I still have a reason to ride. This may seem like an inconsequential thing to be worried about, but it perfectly reflects so may of my hobbies. Without my friends to support me and to explore with, will I still practice my photography? Will I go to a game store to win a few games of magic? Will I put new miles on my bike? I answered one of these questions for myself today. Winter will be here soon, and I might have to pack my bike away, but until then I'll see you on the road.
-Lucas Wyatt Jackson