Sweet Dreams

Before me fell away a never ending valley. There were no trees, just a sea of scrubby brush. Splitting the valley was a thin white line, a road. No, not a road, a trail. It wound its way through the brush like a lazy snake lying in the hot desert sun. On the far horizon rock mesas interrupted the clear, empty blue sky.

***

Such are the thoughts that have rocked me to sleep over the last few weeks. Whether I do it knowingly or not, I find myself in the high La Sals during the dark of night, or the long deserts of the Colorado plateau. Sometimes I am in a tight race, vying for a top position (yeah, only in my dreams…haha!), but most of the time I am alone, just riding. They are peaceful thoughts, and yet they breed an excitement about the race that at times has brought me out of a deep sleep. I have to get up, get some water, relax, and then crawl back into bed. Some nights the process starts over again.

I have done this my whole life. Anything that is meaningful to me I run through my head over and over again. I play out different scenarios, different outcomes. I see my life as an unfolding story. I think it is one of the reasons I was drawn into filmmaking.

I am looking forward to the isolated pain of an endurance race. The world shrinks, becoming just the size of you and your bike. Pain and fatigue grip your thoughts, and life itself becomes a bitter battle between pressing forward, or falling over. A week from now these sweet dreams will be replaced with vivid memories. A week from now I will have 142 miles worth of new stories to tell and for a time those memories, those stories will play through my head as I drift off to sleep. But for now, those stories are just dreams, delusions of grandeur, things that may or may not ever actually be. But they will do for now. They will be enough to bridge the last week before whatever reality will come to pass. Until then, I will enjoy the many possibilities that an epic race has inherently built in to it.