My human form has spent a fair amount of time on a touring bike with nothing to do other than pedal over this mountain, then that mountain, while keeping alive. Life gifted me this confusing call to show up and document because the collective experience – weaved of the nuances of individual wisdom, both contrasting and connecting – is what creates value in the experience. I have so many words about my experience of the event, how it begged me to boil down my whys and to weigh out the cost-to-value ratios of my pursuits, but that isn’t why I was summoned by the universe to grab a slice of The Big Lonely. I was overwhelmed with confusion about why I showed up, unclear about why this felt more important than what I “should have” been doing. I neglected previously-committed-to responsibilities to get in on some last-minute, ill-planned race coverage. I could smell this batch of The Big Lonely simmering in my hometown and couldn’t resist my urge to savor some part of the berserk endeavor. The start list included 7 Female Solo Geared riders, 1 Female Solo Singlespeed rider, 2 Non-Binary Solo Geared riders, 18 Male Solo Geared riders, and 5 Teams of Geared riders. With temps dipping below freezing, 39 cold-toed humans lined up and rolled out on the second-ever Big Lonely ultra-endurance adventure bike race. A product of Northwest Competitive Adventure, the race benefits the Adventure Access Fund and is organized by Jesse Blough, an endurance athlete with an impressive list of accolades.

The race went off on October 8th at 6:00 am from Phil’s Trailhead in the High Desert of Central Oregon. The Big Lonely is a grand-depart-style event that begins and ends in Bend, Oregon and the 2021 volume conjured up the full gamut of human emotion.

The dichotomous idea that a 350-mile self-supported ultra-endurance bikepacking race called The Big Lonely cultivated the word “community” more than any other is sort of like a metaphor for life and all the funny ways our experiences are everything at once. It’s “epic”, “stoke” and “go.” For one rider it was “mom.” Most commonly though, it was described as “community” and I found this to be a curious notion. What is this big and lonely thing that I speak of? Described in one word by the riders themselves: it’s “relentless”, “jarring”, “cold”, “delightful” – “resilience.” It’s “incomplete” and it’s “grueling”. That was my lesson learned from waffling around the start and finish lines of The Big Lonely with a camera and disconcerted heart. Sometimes we don’t understand our reasons for doing something until we’ve fully emerged.

The big alone