"She had finally stopped feeling so small. It's a hard thing to look for miles in any direction and see nothing but the rolling clouds, dark and bubblin’ up there in the big Wyoming sky. She forgets about life back home. The only thing she writes about is food and the only thing on her mind is putting lotion on her chaffed ass cheeks. She flexed in the mirror, when did these arm muscles show up? The hours just pass by and she looks left, then right, then left again. It's the same scenery, but somehow the sights are different. She thinks about those kids in high school; if you could see me keep up with this guy you'd take back all those terrible things you'd ever said about me. He's strong, mentally, physically. A young man at his physical peak. He never really biked before but he sets the pace for them. She hates him sometimes, "let's just go up that last climb". The climb stretches on, but she's happy to get the miles in…"
From alexandherkrampus.blogspot.com
Alexandera Houchin
June 18, 2015
If I slow the carousel of memories behind my eyelids, and for a brief moment, I can time travel back to that very mirror. The mirror where I looked at myself, for maybe the first time ever, and wasn’t disgusted by the woman staring back at me. It was an unfamiliar feeling, contentment with who I was instead of wishing I was anyone else in any other situation wrapped in any other skin. It was a new to me feeling, and as quickly as it came, it left.
I keep coming back to this same place, the preparation for the Tour Divide, a 2700-mile bike race that I’ve lined up to complete more times than make sense. Number six. I have ridden my bicycle into Banff five times, attempted to race it four times, and I’ve finished three races of this iconic route. That’s an appropriate resume, considering I quit everything I ever started before 2015.
The first thing I ever remember starting and quitting was a diet. I didn’t learn that I was fat until I watched a recorded video of a synchronized swimming performance of my team that included heckling from my classmates. “Moo,” they shouted. I hadn’t a clue because the weightless feeling of the water shielded me from their voices. The only thing I remember from that performance was the metronome in my head and flawless execution of our choreography. I begged my stepmom to take me to Curves, a fitness facility for women and started a diet after.
The diet didn’t last, the weight didn’t come off, and the social alienation of middle school life swelled to an unbearable internal anguish. I was later institutionalized, where I witnessed eating disorders in a clinical setting. I was diluted with a cocktail of pharmaceuticals that were supposed to help cure my depression, bipolar disorder, binge eating disorder, borderline personality, and manic depressive disorder— diagnoses given to me that detailed the ways in which I was broken.
I learned a lot about what the Tour Divide was for many, while watching my partner, Johnny, compete in the 2024 Tour Divide race. I’d only really known the race as a participant, witnessing the race from my perspective. It was the first time I ever watched someone I loved so much compete as a dot and like so many others, I grasped at any bit of content that may let me in on what he was experiencing. I realized that the goals of the racer and the goals of the spectator don’t really align; serving one doesn’t really serve the other. Commodifying and broadcasting the race play detracts from the humbling riders experience of being a symbolic gust of wind whipping through the route. And for the spectator, no amount of coverage illustrates the complete reconfiguration of one’s internal landscape. While the race has grown, the information about the route infinite, with videos, podcasts, even people who detail all of the logistical information about the route in the form of guides for sale, it still does, and likely will forever be a symbol of the exact moment my life became the beautiful, joyful, meaningful life it is today.
My finish of the 2015 Tour Divide was the beginning of my life. It’s been ten years since that first training season.
Every day, I pull myself out of bed to my alarm clock. I have nowhere to go at 5:30 in the morning. But I wake up not because it’s easy but because it’s hard as hell for me to peel myself out of the king-size bed I share with my person. And every day, I bundle up to walk to the river just a mile-and-a-half from my home. Aaniin, I say. It’s me, Nenookaasiigwaneyaashiikwe. I’m still here, we’re still here, and I’m doing what I love. I’m still focused on the Tour Divide. I’m happy. I live near the mouth of the St. Louis River, the place where the river drains into Lake Superior, in the place my ancestors used to live before we relocated to the Fond du Lac Reservation 15 miles west of here. It’s a deeply powerful place for me, a land where the people responsible for my life are buried. People who thought about me before I became me have grown into trees that produce berries for the deer and birds.
I think back to my first season of training for the Tour Divide and where I am today. In 2015 I attached a trailer to my bike that I used for commuting. I rode my bike all day for work, commuted to work 20 miles a day, year round. I said yes to all things bike, and no to most things that wouldn’t help me be successful. I built a world around myself that supported my goal of finishing the entire Tour Divide, and I removed anything that didn’t seem to help me make that possible.
Upon my return home from that 2015 trip, I laughed it off when people repeatedly told me they didn’t think I’d actually finish it. It stung. It was a reasonable for them to think this, but hearing it hurt. It hurts when you grow out of the person you were, and people reveal to you the ways they used to pity you. The Tour Divide became not only a mirror for me to see myself physically, but to understand how people really perceived me.
I was met with a deep depression after finishing that first Divide, and wanted to use the successful feeling of finishing that thing to finish another thing. After completing a welding program, I applied to a program in Tool and Die making and completed that in 2016. With two years of straight A’s, I re-applied to colleges because I was tired of feeling stupid. I was always surrounded by academics, doctors, and PhD’s. I was accepted to college and chose to go back to Tucson, the place where I started that first Tour Divide all those years ago.
I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree in 2020, studying chemistry and American Indian Studies. I chose chemistry for a degree, a science I had thought I was too stupid to comprehend. I legitimately thought that I was stupid because I struggled with obedience. I’ve always been bored with the point-to-point definition of learning.
I attribute any bit of happiness, healing and success in my life today with that first completion of the Tour Divide. It was the first time I ever finished something that gave me every reason to quit. It was the place that I learned I was stronger than everyone else told me I was. I proved to myself that love was fleeting; that there’s more to life than money. I learned that the journey meant more to me than the outcome.
Though we’ve both changed, the race and myself, I love the Tour Divide like you love childhood friend. I get wrapped up in the competition, in the process, in the marketing, in the media of it all. Even the sheer truth of the terrain and riding style— I downright prefer technical terrain that requires much more skill than the easy spinning of the miles of the Tour Divide. What I love the most is our relationship.
In 2015, I was insecure and lost in my life. I knew I loved riding my bicycle, and I knew that the bicycle was a metaphor for every other hard thing I was presented with in my life. I learned how to ride the bike, I knew how to fall off the bike and get back on it again, I knew how to fix something that broke. I knew that if I just stuck with it, I would get to the finish. I knew that some days I would feel weak, and other strong. That was just part of the contrast. I knew that the challenge of the climb offered the reward of the descent. When life off the bike dominated my time, I would sink into sadness.
When I started riding, when I started this love affair with the bicycle, the cycling world I knew didn’t have room for someone like me. I forced myself into places where I was excluded because I wanted to know everything there was to know about how my bicycle worked so that I never had to rely on anyone to tell me how I should fix it. I lived in Madison, the most bike-friendly city in the entire state of Wisconsin, and in the early 2000’s I was the first woman hired in the shop I worked in, ever. I felt alone, ostracized, and colluded against in the early tenure of my bike shop job. And now, my loyalty to ultra-distance, the only facet of cycling that appeared to have space for me, burns brightly.
How do I show my gratitude to a non-living entity that gave me a path to follow when I was so lost? How do I say thank you for showing me something I didn’t know I needed? I found the Tour Divide at the exact right time, and it made me realize I was capable of more than I let myself believe. I was shy, invisible—an addict. When I won the women’s race in 2018; people paid attention to me not for the way I failed or let them down, but instead for what I’d accomplished. Instead of letting that feeling die, I realized that I needed to try again.
I could cover that distance better. With more style, more confidence and more intention.
I’m coming back again to you, my love. I’m ten years older, ten years humbler, and ten years more open to the outcome. I intend to include my whole self in the journey to the starting line, focused on self-love and self-preservation. I will put in the work before the race so that I am able to show up to the race without doubt, fear, anxiety, and insecurity. I will include others in my pursuit and not close myself off to possibility. Ultimately, I’ve decided to stop limiting myself because of fear, and instead, I want to lean into what I can do when I really, honestly, seriously try, letting go of what happens if I “fail.”
I’ve finally learned the true definition of failure; it’s never to have tried in the first place.
Weweni, with care,
Kaasi