Waiting for the Rêve

Preparing for the Rêve Tour is unlike anything I’ve ever done. In the nine or so years of my adult life that I’ve been riding a bicycle, I’ve prepared for hundreds of races. I have that shit down. I know what to eat, how to ready my legs, what level of nerves and excitement to allow myself, and how to perfectly dial my energy up and down as the race approaches. I know how to get excited without getting grumpy, how much attention to pay to the details without letting them rule me.

I can take a smidgen of those race-prep routines into preparation for Rêve, but because the Rêve is so much bigger than a race, the same formulas don’t exactly hold. Training and fitness will only carry us through the first week. From there, it’s all mental strength (and a good pinch of luck).

My feelings preparing for the Rêve vacillate from excitement (Ohmygod I get to ride my bike all day, every day, with five fun, inspiring, and amazing people—life doesn’t get better than that!), to apprehension (Will I be able to find French food that my vegan-for-six-years stomach can handle? How will my body respond to riding 9+ hours for days on end?), to pure fear (Being away from home, Spencer, Churro, and my job for a month. Eek.)

Unlike a race, where the buildup only lasts a week or two at most, I’ve been thinking about the Rêve every damn day for the last three months. And with every day that passes, it occupies my thoughts and rules my emotions more and more. Racers always say that waiting in the start grid for the gun to go off is the toughest moment of a race—just standing there, waiting for the pain to come. Preparing for the Rêve makes that wait seem easy. This isn’t like a ripping off a Band-Aid. It’s a long-ass wait, for a long-ass ride.

During interviews at our team camp in Santa Rosa, I likened preparing for the Rêve to having a baby for the first time (not that I know—just guessing here). We’re all just sitting around, waiting for that moment that will forever change our lives in a pretty major way. All we can do is decorate the nursery, take our supplements, and wonder just what it will feel like, and how it will change us.

When I mentioned this feeling to Heidi, she had a good point. Unlike being pregnant, there’s no biological instinct to guide us through the Rêve. We can’t look to our friends with children and think, “Well, they seemed to make it through that okay. It can’t be that bad.” There’s no What to Expect When You’re Expecting for the freaking Tour de France.

We really don’t know what we will go through in July. Only that it will be spectacularly difficult and life-changing. Things will go wrong, we will get sick, our bodies will break down, our minds will tell us we should go home. We will find ourselves shitting behind a tree without any toilet paper. It’s a scary thing to wait for. But if it wasn’t so difficult, would it be really worth doing?

As bicycling super genius Allen Lim says in this "bedtime story" TED talk,

"As daunting as it may be, it's about doing something because you know you've never done it before. Because it's the first step into the unknown."




Allen concludes,

"In a world of risk and reward, we've been conditioned to ask ourselves if the juice is worth the squeeze. If the risk of giving up who you are today is worth the reward of becoming someone better tomorrow. But what I've realized the last year is this: If you strip away all the crap about who you're supposed to be, if you take away who you want people to think you are, if you stop betting on false currency, the status, the appearance that you think fits the bill, then you really have nothing to lose. You'll have nothing to lose, because no one can ever take away from you who you've always been and who you will always be. And that is perfect. The person you are—talented, flawed, beautiful, crazy, human."


I have nothing to lose. I just have to wait.

Photo by Michael Robertson / Velodramatic