Jim Cummins was not only the founder of one of the world’s best-known gravel-bike races, the Dirty Kanza, but he was also its public face—the man at the finish line in Emporia, Kansas, waiting to give each returning rider a hero’s welcome after 200 miles of rutted roads, headwinds, and tire-sucking mud. That is, until June 17, when Cummins posted a video on his personal Facebook pageÌęcalling the shootingÌęof Rayshard Brooks,Ìęa 27-year-old Black man who wasÌękilledÌę on June 12Ìęwhen BrooksÌęwas found sleeping in a Wendy’s drive through lane,Ìę“justified” and inviting anyone who disagreed to “unfriend” him. Many followers did so, and even more expressed hurt and anger about the post on social media.Ìę

Cummins’s reach in the bike world is considerable. The race he dreamed up in 2006 as a solo, self-supported tour of Kansas’sÌęrolling Flint Hills has since grown into a marquee eventÌęattracting not only top professional racers but amateur riders fromÌęall over the country—the closest thing the burgeoning gravel scene had to a World Tour. Last yearÌęthe Dirty Kanza attracted thousandsÌęof riders to its 25-, 50-, 100-, 200-, and 350-mile events. The race put Emporia on the map as a top U.S. cycling destination, a new and unexpected reputation the 24,000-person town was happy to adopt.Ìę

In 2018, Life Time, a national chain of races and fitness companies, the once scrappy gravel grinder and kept Cummins on as its “chief gravel officer.” Until that post went up. Within 24 hours, Life Time had “parted ways” with Cummins, according to the senior vice president Kimo Seymour. The company describing his Facebook comments as “inappropriate and insensitive,” and clarified itsÌęmission of making gravel racing “a more inclusive and progressive place where all feel welcome and represented.”

Cummins declined an interview, but in a statement shared with Road Bike Action, he , “IÌęchose my words poorly” and “[I]Ìęhope that, some day, I canÌęhelp to heal the wounds that I have caused.” But his words landed during a summer marked by civil rights protests and in a cycling world grappling with a historical lack of inclusivity, particularly for Black and Indigenous riders.Ìę

His dismissal also reignited anotherÌęlong-simmering, racially charged controversy surrounding the Dirty Kanza.Ìę

Race director LeLan Dains has a long history with both this region ofÌęKansas and the race. An Emporia local, he first competed in the 200-miler in 2008Ìęand joined the four-person staff five years later. ThenÌęsomeone approached the event team about the problematic nature of the name of the race itself, which some argue is a racist slur against theÌęKaw people native to the land on which the race is held.ÌęTranslated as the “,” the Kaw were given the name “Kanza,” or “Kansa,” by early French traders and other European settlers. ButÌęit’s the pairing of “dirty” with the tribal name that many argue turns the race’s title into a historical racist stereotype.Ìę

Dains says that there were no ill intentions behind the name of the race. “We named it ‘dirty’ for the gravel roads and the dirt you get on your legs and body when you ride them,” he says, “and ‘Kanza’ for the state, which gets its name from the Kaw tribe.”Ìę

Still, over the years, Dains says members of the organization made several unsuccessful attempts to contact the Kaw Nation’s leadership for their thoughts on the name.Ìę

In 2019,ÌęCumminsÌęwas finally able to meet with Lynn Williams, chair of the Kaw Nation Tribal Council. The two convened at Kaw Nation headquarters in Kaw City, Oklahoma, on February 26 of that yearÌęand ultimately agreed that the name would stay as is. Seymour says, “The last time we spoke, Williams said the Kaw Nation took no offense to the name.” (Williams did not respond to requests for comment.)

But continuing criticismÌęraised the question of whether Williams’s decision accurately reflected her community’s feelings as a whole. In fact, according to byÌęBicycling, a few months before he met with Williams,ÌęCummins was forwarded an email on November 9, 2018, “signed by 45 members of the Kaw Nation, along with academics, advocates, and allies” saying thatÌę“the name was offensive to many people in or associated with the Kaw Nation,” James Stout wrote forÌęBicycling. (Dains says he’s not “personally aware of a petition that potentially contained 45 members of the Kaw Nation.”)

In April of 2020, Christina Torres, the founder ofÌę, an independent publication focused on “sharing knowledge and the stories of BIPOC and FTW [femme, trans, and women]Ìęfolx in cycling,” launched a urging the race to change its name. The issue felt personal to Torres, as an avid cyclist and a Kawaiisu Shoshone-Paiute descendant of the TejonÌęIndian Tribe, she . “The Kaw Nation of Kansas, now of Oklahoma, has survived adversity and today is a federally recognized, self-governing tribe seeking to recover its cultural heritage and land,” . “To preface the Kanza people with ‘dirty’ shows a disconnect of America’s legacy of anti-Indigenous violence.”

The petition drew more than 1,200 signatures—many from Indigenous people across the country—and the attention of the team in Emporia. In response, Cummins issued in April 2020 revealing his 2019 meeting with WilliamsÌęand said that the race name would not be changing. The statement also clarified hisÌęintentions behind choosing its name. Though Williams’s signature appears on the open letter, her voice seemed to be absent.

At the time, the Dirty Kanza wasn’t the only gravel event confronting the impact its name might have on Indigenous groups. In late 2019, Bobby Wintle, founder of the gravel race in Oklahoma, announced thatÌęhe had changed the race’s official title to .ÌęWintle VeloNews that when he first named the race, he was “unaware that the name held negative connotations for many still living today.” The Oklahoma land rushÌęwas named as such because a , effective April 22, 1889, allowed 50,000 white settlers to seize two million acres of Indigenous land. (The land run of 1893 saw settlers take a further six million acres.)Ìę“Once our small crew and myself realized that the correlation with the original land run of 1889 was offensive to others, we had to make a change,” Wintle said in .

To many, the Dirty Kanza was one more example of the way Native-derived names often ignore the voices of the very people they purport to honor, raising the question of who gets to grant permissionÌęto use those names. “One person from the Native community saying, ‘I think it’s OK’ is no different than someone saying, ‘That’s not racist, because I have a Black friend,’” says artist, gravel rider, and Indigenous activist Gregg Deal. “You’re talking about an entire community of people, which means there are different ideas and schools of thought.”

Deal bemoans the fact that Indigenous people aren’t given agency or authority in matters so deeply tied to their culture. “People will tell you straight to your face, ‘It’s not offensive, that’s not the intent,’” he says. “Most Americans in that school of thought feel like they get to decide what’s offensive, what’s not offensive, and what’s an honor, what’s not an honor. But that can’t exist without a true dialogue or relationship of some kind.”Ìę

That dialogue is finally being attempted on more of a national scale. Just this week, the NFL’s Washington, D.C., team announced plans for a to replace its long-protested racist one, California’s Squaw Valley Ski Resort reportedly for a less offensive moniker, and Yeti Cycles they’d stop using the word “tribe” in their marketing.

Torres declined an interview, and while she didn’t provide her reasons, the naming saga had become heated and sometimes personal.ÌęOnce Cummins issued his open letter, many thought the issue was settled: the Kaw Nation had granted an ostensible stamp of approval on the race name. This prompted a fair amount of online backlash to the petition. Commenters unleashed their usual gripes about cancel culture, some of which spilled over into personal criticism of Torres. “Stop looking for ways to be offended!” read oneÌęof the tamer responses on Instagram.Ìę

And then came Cummins’s June 19 Facebook post, which renewed theÌępush to change the race’s name.ÌęActivists began a second petition.ÌęTitled , the petition is a “campaign to end the use of the slur ‘dirty Kanza’ as the event name of DIRTY KANZA (DK) in Emporia, KS.” The authorsÌęhave decided to remain anonymousÌębutÌęare described as a “united collective of Indigenous advocates, cyclists, people of faith, educators, elders, youth, local Kansas residents and builders of a just world.” I reached out to the authorsÌęthrough an intermediary, and they declined to comment. As of today, the petition has been signed by more than 6,500 people.Ìę

This time, the team in Emporia was ready to listen. In a June 22 , race organizers committed to changing the name. Dains confirmed over the phone on June 24 that they were in the process of landing on a new race title, which they would announce in “eight to ten weeks.”ÌęHe added that the petition had accelerated the decision, but that the name-change conversation had remained open for some time.Ìę

“We know now more than ever that words have meaning,” Dains says. “At the time we made that announcement in unison with the Kaw Nation, we felt we were right in continuing with the name. But at the end of the day, we can be legally ‘right,’ orÌęwe can be kind. We’re going to choose to be kind and change the name.”Ìę

For many, that change can’t come fast enough. Support for the petition and further demands—including more acknowledgement of the Indigenous groups who have long opposed the name and have had their complaints ignored—continues to grow after the announcement, even among past riders and winners. Amity Rockwell, the winner of last year’s race, requests for the organizers, including a name change and a BIPOC athlete-sponsorship program.Ìę

The decision to change the name is a “good move, in good faith,” says Deal, adding that it’s one “that won’t change the hard, grueling nature of the race.” It’s a move toward better accountability to the Indigenous communities whose names and images have long been appropriated to represent the outdoors.ÌęBut it’s not the finish line. That will come into sight, Deal says, when Indigenous people are given true agencyÌęover the use of their names and symbols, and when bike races create more opportunities and accessibility for riders of color.Ìę

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In March 2015, then 19-year-old Ed Pratt left his home in Somerset, England, on a mission to become the first person to circle the globe on a unicycle. Three years and 21,000 miles later—after crossing Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S.—he rolled back to his starting point and a cheering 500-personÌęcrowd, successful in both his final dismount (he was worried about that) and a new record.Ìę

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fJTwj0T4Ee8
Check out anÌęepisode of Unicycling Across America.

Along the way, Pratt fought fought crosswinds through Australian deserts, almost got hit by a car that wasÌęspinning on ice in Kyrgyzstan, and performed karaoke to Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” at a Tibetan New Year party. He documented hisÌęadventures and misadventuresÌęin his entertaining YouTube seriesÌęÌęand is still dropping new episodes of his travels across the U.S. Pratt also raised close to $400,000 for , a UK-based charity that provides school supplies for underprivileged kids around the globe.

Before he set out, Pratt said he was confident he could ride up to 40 or 50 miles a day. The main challenge was finding a way to carry all his gear, and—as he quickly discovered—replacing all the stuff that broke or wore down over time. He shared his 12 gear essentials with șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.

Bike

“Unicycles are all fixed gear, so the biggest variation is wheel size. The largest you can get is 36 inches, which is better for long rides because you’re not pedaling as much to go the same distance. I chose the Ìęunicycle,Ìębecause it’s one of the lightest and most durable on the market. Unicycles are pretty unstable things—I probably dropped it at least once or twice a week.”Ìę

Tire

“There are only about three or four tires to choose from in this wheel size. I went with , a typical mountain-bike width, which was the best-of-both-worlds option between a road slick and a tire with a lot more grip. The Nightrider has tread but also works well on roads. I used five tires over the course of the trip—each one lasted about 5,000 miles.”Ìę

Frame Bags

“You can’t just go out and buy unicycle panniers, so I turned to the man who once held the record for longest unicycle trip, , to make them. They’re not great, because they’re not waterproof and not particularly durable—I had to do a lot of maintenance on themÌęand even get them completely remade midtrip. But the front and back bag were the right size and shape. They didn’t rub my knees and made use of the limited space I had.”Ìę

Frame Rack

“The challenge was figuring out how to actually attach the panniers to the unicycle. My granddad created an aluminum frame for attachment. He’s built everything from a grandfather clock to a scale model of a fire engine, so if anyone was going to create a custom unicycle luggage rack, it was him. He came up with a very good design—I could even break it apart if I needed to fly.”

Sleeping Bag

“I went through three sleeping bags. The first was a , which was a three-season down bag. Down is light and warm, but it always eventually clumps up and then isn’t as effective in the cold. So I replaced it with another down bag from a Chinese brand, a , and then later got a Ìęin the U.S., which I still use.”Ìę

Sleeping Pad

“My sleeping pad was a , my fourth of the trip. They’re really lightweight and comfortable, but the seams fatigueÌęafter about six months, and you have to start patching them.”Ìę

Tent

“My first tent, the , did alright. The poles were thin, and the pegs were like toothpicks, but it was nice having something so lightweight. Eventually, the fabric started to break, and a dog ripped into it in Turkey. Then it got blown over on top of a sand dune in China and was never the same. So after a year and a half, I bought an , which held me the rest of the trip. It’s a good tent with a reasonable amount of space.”Ìę

Shoes

“I only used one type of shoe for the entire trip: Ìęmountain-bike shoes. I went through four pairs. They’re a bit heavy, and your feet getÌęa little warm, but they’re good at gripping the pedals, andÌęthe high cuffsÌęgive you that confidence that you won’t turn an ankle when you come off the bike.”Ìę

Camera

“I started my journey with a , which was alright for photos and a little bit of video. I went through two and then broke another one in Kyrgyzstan. I was just using the stuff too hard. Dust would get in and break the lenses. I was also doing a lot of time-lapse videos, which puts a lot of strain on the motor of the camera.”Ìę

Mapping App

“I used an app on my phone called , which creates open-source maps that are completely free and downloadable. I never used it to route from A to B, I’d just look at a map and figure out a route as I went so I could make choices when the road split.”Ìę

Inflatable Globe

“I couldn’t carry many extras, because I wanted to stay as light as possible, but I did carry . It was good to bring out around kidsÌęor just to show people where I came from and where I was going, which was useful in places where I couldn’t speak the language.”ÌęÌę

Stove

“My stove system lasted the whole trip! It’s a , and you can do anything with it—attach gas bottlesÌęor use diesel or petrol [gasoline]. I ran it on petrolÌęthe whole trip, because it was the cheapest and most reliable to get ahold of. The stove was built to be lightweight and modular, so you can easily take it apart and clean it. I’m sure it’ll last another tenÌęyears.”

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When Dylan Jouras first agreed to undergo psychedelic therapy, he was apprehensive. But the 26-year-old veteran from San Jose, California, was also ready to try almost anything. It was April 2019, and Jouras was coping with PTSD from two combat tours of Afghanistan that ended in 2012. While deployed, heÌęsustained traumatic brain injuries, shrapnel to the side of his face, and hearing loss. When he got home, constantÌęmigraines landed him a Percocet prescription, which later developed into an opioid addiction. Jouras wasÌęin and out of recoveryÌęand spent five years sleeping an average of three hours a night. Antidepressants numbed him into a shadow of himself. Then his best friendÌędied by suicide, which triggered the worst of Jouras’sÌęmemories from combat. “We didn’t think Dylan was going to live through that week,” says Arleen Pietrzak, his mother. That’s when founder Mike Sinyard reached out to the family, sayingÌęhe knew ofÌęa cure for PTSD.Ìę

For Sinyard, 70, promoting psychedelic-based treatments hadÌębecome something of a passion project. Although he doesn’t say whether he has taken magic mushrooms or ayahuasca personally, the bike-industry leader says he’s seen great success with theirÌępsychoactive use as an emerging treatment for PTSD, addiction, and depression. NowÌęhe’s launching a foundation called , which is focused on expanding access to psychedelic-assisted therapies.Ìę

Project New Day was actually foundedÌęin 2019, but last Wednesday was timed to immediately follow a pivotal moment in the fight for legalization. On January 28, the city council of Santa Cruz, California, to decriminalize natural psychedelics, making arrests for use or possession of natural psychoactives like psilocybin mushrooms the lowest priority for law enforcement. TheÌędecisionÌęputs the city in the company ofÌętwo others—Denver, Colorado, and Oakland, California—but Sinyard says he expects legalization to expand to the entire state of CaliforniaÌęand eventually Colorado and New York. Advocates from Project New Day were at the city-council meeting in Santa Cruz, ready to coordinate with local groups to provide education and resources on psychedelic treatments.

The power of psychedelics to combat substance abuse and PTSD isn’t a new cause for Sinyard—it’s one he’s been researching for years as an offshoot of , the foundation he created in 2015 to promote cycling as a nontraditional therapy for ADHD. Outride began with Sinyard’sÌęrealization that aÌębike was an effective tool for combating both his and his son’s ADHD symptoms. But heÌęsays pharmaceutical companies had no incentive to fund studies on cycling—it couldn’t be bottled and sold the way Ritalin could. Outride, then called the Specialized Foundation, became an effort to fill in the gaps by partnering with neuroscientists on cycling-based ADHD studies and programs. This year 35,000 kidsÌęacross the countryÌęwill go through Outride’s school program, which has since expanded to address obesity, depression, and addiction.

Similarly, Sinyard believes that psychedelic treatments can work in unexplored ways, without the side effects of pharmaceuticals. He told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that, after watching people in his life struggle with opioid addiction—and growing increasingly disillusioned with the abuses of Big Pharma companies—he turned to the research of , a Canadian physician who has used the plant-based hallucinogen ibogaine to treat addiction.Ìę“I’d witnessed it firsthand with the people in my life,”Ìęsays Sinyard, speaking of the impact of addiction, “and thought, There has to be a better way to help people reset. That’s why we called it Project New Day.”

Sinyard started connecting people he knew who were struggling with substance use with researchers doing similar psychoactive interventions. One of those people was Jouras, whose stepdad was at the time interviewing for a position at Specialized. Jouras and Pietrzak were returningÌęfrom a frustrating VA appointment with yet another prescription for antidepressants when they got Sinyard’s call and decided to take him up on the offer.Ìę

To understand how the therapy enabled the combat veteran confront his PTSD, it helps to know how psychoactives work and what usually happens in a session. “It’s not like people who have these issues can take a bunch of mushrooms and go into the woods and be OK,” says Sinyard. “It’s a very precise way of being ready and working with a therapist who can help you.”Ìę

Dr. Alli Feduccia, Project New Day’s leading research scientist and cofounder, has been studying therapeutic uses of MDMA, the active drug in ecstasy and Molly, since 2004. She says the drug releases a number of chemicals, particularly serotonin, which quiets the brain’s fight-or-flightÌęresponse to fear. This helps lower unconscious defenses around traumatic memoriesÌęso they can be explored in further detail with a mental-health professional. “Some people describe it as 20Ìęyears of therapy in a short amount of time,” Feduccia says. “The discussions are really long—like six to eight hours instead of a 90-minute session—so people can get into a lot of deep material in that amount of time.”

The research outcomes are promising. Feduccia that she helped conduct with the nonprofit (MAPS) from 2004 to 2017: of the 72 participants who received an active dose of MDMAÌęduring therapy, 54Ìępercent no longer met PTSD criteria afterwards. The success rate was more than double that of the 31-person control group, which received similar talk therapy but either without the psychoactive, or with a very low dose. In 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) awarded MAPS’ work its Breakthrough Therapy Award,Ìęfor treating PTSD more effectively than the only currently available pharmaceutical treatment of antidepressants. Two other organizations studying psilocybins for treatment-resistant depression and major depression disorder both received the same award in 2018.Ìę

Some of this research has raised concerns about the potential for negative side effects or abuse. In June 2019, the heads of the National Institutes of Health and the FDA responded to an inquiry from Hawaiian senator Brian Schatz as to their findings on psychedelics. TheirÌęletter states clearly that the organizations aren’t recommending psychedelic drugs be moved from their classification as Schedule I drugs, or what the as “drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” For MDMA alone, the NIH and FDA heads point to inconclusive data and the potential for kidney and brain damage, among other health risks. But MAPS that the letter makes claims based on incomplete, uncontrolled research and animal experiments with too high dosages.Ìę

Sinyard knows that some of his advocacy sounds unorthodox. He’s heard it from the families of adult substance abusers for whom he’s tried to propose psychedelics. But he sees a big distinction between taking prescription drugs on an ongoing basisÌęand using a hallucinogen several times in a controlled setting. “The first response from the parent is, ‘This sounds crazy—they already have a drug problem!’” he says. “But these aren’t drugs in the same sense. With an opioid, you take it and you feel nothing—you feel on a cloud. But you take the psychedelic plant medicines, and you’re living through the problem, so there’s no escape.”

For Jouras, breakthrough wasn’t immediate. He started with a holotropic breathwork session, a type of rhythmic breathing designed to achieve a natural, almost hallucinogenic state, then moved on to MDMA-assisted therapy with a doctor. In his first MDMA session, he was able to explore and discuss the trauma surrounding his best friend’s death. By his second session, he could dive into his experiences in Afghanistan and let go of his feelings of self-blame. Now clean, Jouras spoke out about his positive experiences at the Santa Cruz council meeting.Ìę

“I think this could save thousands of lives if it became legal and mainstream—and even improve the quality of them, without the side effects of antidepressants and antipsychotics,” Jouras toldÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “You’re walking around in this zombie shell of yourself when you’re on antidepressants. Yeah, you’re living, but you’re not really living. With psychedelic therapies, especially mushrooms, it’s resparking your curiosityÌęand making it so you want to be back in natureÌęand connect to people. Psychedelic-assisted therapy got me living again.”

Project New Day expects decriminalization of hallucinogens to spread across the country, so it’sÌęcreating tool kits to educate people on safety issuesÌęand preparing materials about how communities can establish peer-recovery and support groups. It’sÌęalso working to raise awareness aboutÌęthe research and focusing on getting grants. Board members are particularly excited about the potential for helping veterans and other at-risk populations.Ìę

Sinyard will continue to be a believer—and one willing to put his own funds behind promoting the relevant studies. “These are medicines,” Sinyard says emphatically of psilocybin mushrooms and other hallucinogens. “I’m not advocating them for partying but for healing—I’m advocating for the healing potential of these plants given on this earth.”

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In a race for your life from a belligerent madman,Ìęthere is no worse getaway vehicle than a recumbent bicycle. Particularly on any sort of climb. At least that’s what Alan* and I discovered as we crept up a desolate stretch of Arizona highway, necks craning behind us to see if the knife-wielding drunkard was gaining any ground.Ìę

Alan, an amiable psychologist in his late sixties, was the one turning his recumbent’s pedals as fast as he could. I was on a traditional bike, but as the leader of this group tour across the U.S., I was duty bound to ride at the back, to help with any mechanical issues.Ìę

Not today. Today Max rode at the back. I could see his neon jacket a hundred yards behind us, from where he was trying to close the gap. An hour earlier, from his perch on a picnic table at the edge of the sad RV park we’d called home for the night, he unceremoniously announced his plans to murder us all. It was 5 A.M., and he was on his second 12-pack of Old Milwaukee, having never unloaded his bike nor set up his tent the night before. Instead, it seems he’d visited the town liquor store while we slept. Crushed beer cans formed a barrier reef around the table. Something in the morning chorus of sleeping bags being unzipped had stirred Max’s drunken rage into action. Red-faced, he barked obscenities and sexual slurs, most of them at me. And then came the death threats. Bleary-eyed and not yet caffeinated, I scanned the empty horizon for anything resembling a cell tower and the possibility of a phone signal. Then I took the only course of action available to me: I politely requested that he leave the tour.Ìę

Now we were engaged in the world’s slowest chase scene with a middle-aged psychopath in high-vis spandex. The rest of the tour’s participants, a ragtag band of 16 cyclists from all over the U.S., had long since hightailed it from camp to tackle the day’s first climb. I was out of water and in need of coffee, and my stomach was growling a song about pancakes. But Alan and I kept pedaling, determined to die somewhere more scenic than the side of a baked desert highway, next to an empty bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and the dried-out remains of an armadillo.

It was March 2009. We were just eight days into a guided cross-country bike tour, and things had already started to unravel. The trip, run by a national bike-touring organization, would take us from San Diego to the coast of Florida over the course of two months. Each day we’d pedal anywhere from 50 to 80 miles. Each night we’d set up our tents at campsites along the way. But things had gone sideways from day one, when a young man who’d suffered a severe brain injury in a motorcycle crash years before showed up to tackle the ride on a rusty singlespeedÌęcruiser. When I questioned the soundness of the bike, his mother stabbed her finger in my chest and said, “He can do anything he puts his mind to.” The frame snapped into two pieces that afternoon, one mile into our prologue ride. I scrambled to find him a replacement in time to remain on the tour.

At some point during the first week, I stopped thinking of the group as a band of fellow adventurers and more like cast members on a partially scripted reality show designed to bring out the worst in everyone. This morning hadn’t been the first hint that Max was cast to be the angry one, or, in reality-TV parlance, the one “not here to make friends.” Earlier in the week, he’d uncapped a fire hose of rage-fueled expletives the night sprinklers came on underneath his tent. Out of shape and unable to keep up with the other riders, he’d allowed his exhaustion to slide into simmering resentment that escalated into a brawl with a sprinkler head. But today was the first time he’d threatened violence against anyone in the group.Ìę

He was hot on our wheels, with a multitoolÌęand nothing to lose. Had anyone considered running background checks on any of these people?Ìę

Believe it or not, bike touringÌęhad once been my greatest love, and not just the conceit for the survival-based elimination show I now found myself living. Four years earlier, when I was a somewhat adrift 25-year-old , I’d left my home in Portland, Oregon, for a 2,600-mile ride to Missouri with a bunch of used camp gear and a ratty T-shirt that read, “Two Wheels, No Rules.” My body felt electrified with possibility as I rolled past the Portland city limits, ready to chase some vague spirit of adventure I felt had long been denied me by the canon of great road-trip novelsÌęthat only told stories about men.Ìę

The things I experienced on that trip—the beauty and bleakness of small-town America, the awe of pedaling up and over a mountain range, saddle soresÌęthat crippled my romantic life for half a decade—changed me profoundly, in ways I never expected. Months of having no one to talk to except for elderly roadside gawkers brought out a gregarious, assertive side I didn’t even know I had. I left Portland a painfully shy queer kid with disheveled hair and a distrust of strangers. I came back wiser, bolder, more openhearted, and with even messier hair.Ìę

But returning to the monotony of daily life was like quitting an antidepressant cold turkey. I spent the next six months in an adventure-come-down fog, broke and dreaming of my next touring fix. My once thrilling job as a messenger no longer felt fun, dangerous, or freeing. It had become as predictable as a morning paper route.

On the road, I pedaled all day and wrote in my journal into the night, detailing my misadventures by the glow of a headlamp inside some of America’s sketchiest campsites. Each day was different and surprising. Would I find rustic, shaded forestlands to sleep in, or an abandoned Lions Club park by the side of a seven-lane interstate? Might I encounter a smooth, winding descent alongside a river, or a series of 19-percent-graded climbs guarded by feral pit bull mixes? How long could the human body subsist on peanut butter and banana sandwiches alone? Better yet, how long could I continue to go without showering before being added to some sort of national-parks watch list?

Back in Portland, dreams of the open road haunted me. The mountains. The desert. The crush of gravelÌęunder my tires. The satisfaction of tracing my finger across a map and realizing my legs could take me anywhere, given enough time and carbo­hydrates. Even the memories of waiting hours by truck-stop pay phones for my girlfriend to call me back struck me as timeless and romantic. As I shuttled documents to and from law offices and courthouses, I mentally relived those long, sweeping downhills and misty forest back roads—basically, I fantasized that I was Jack Kerouac with a helmet mirror.Ìę

It was while deep within this state of longing that I found myself susceptible to some truly bad baby-boomer advice. Not of the “Go back to school and get a degree in something practical” variety. That would have been helpful. This was more like an empty platitude someone’s mom might’ve been wowed by because it was delivered by a charismatic stranger sitting next to her on a plane.

OK, it was my mom. She called shortly after her flight landed, eager to share.

“Do what you love and the money will follow,” she said.Ìę

It was one of those nuggets of wisdom you only hear from people with monetizable assets—or the right ratio of talent, luck, and privilege to have landed a dream job that actually came with a paycheck. But in the swampy darkness of a Portland winter, the idea resonated. I adopted it at face value. There had to be a way I could get paid to keep hauling everything I owned across the country by bike. After all, I didn’t need a lot of money to follow from doing what I loved—just enough to support my cat while I searched for America out on the open road. That spring of 2006, I signed up for a bike-touring leadership course.

Being an outsider in the touring world would work in my favor for landing a job. I was young and female in a scene dominated by kind-eyed, gray-bearded men in zip-off cargo pants. I came to the course preloaded with my funniest bike-messenger anecdotes and a talent for lightning-fast flat-tire fixes. A month later, I was offered my first gig leading a tour.

When I picked up the phone, all I could hear was screaming and sirens. I was in Spokane, Washington, sweaty from the effort of unloading 44 duffel bags from an oversize box truck. A pack of cyclists were gathered around me, anxious to get their bags and take showers at the end of a long day of riding. “There’s been an emergency,” my coworker finally said over the sound of a woman’s wail. My heart began pounding. Still, I hoped: a few broken bones, a concussion, a ruined vacation at worst. “Drive back here and find the other tour leaders,” he instructed me. “And put Arthur’s bag back into the truck.”

I was working my first cross-country tour as a leader, and we’d left Seattle five days earlier. The format of the trip was different than usual for the touring company, which typically ran small self-supported excursions: groups of about a dozen participants who rode, camped, and cooked together, with a professional leader planning and organizing it all. On this trip there were 40 riders, and I was one of five leaders. It was supported, which meant there was a luggage truck and vans to haul water and food. It was my job to drive one of those vehicles three out of four days, and ride on the fourth day.Ìę

I took to the role with enthusiasm and a fervent conviction that I would do anything to make the trip a success for the participants, who had been promised more of a luxury experience than the standard pannier-laden ride. But the two-month trip was doomed. When I drove back to meet the other leaders after that phone call, I learned that one of the riders had been struck by a car and killed, on the side of a long, mostly flat stretch of Washington highway. The screams I’d heard on the phone were from the woman riding next to him—the two had been happily making small talk right until the moment of impact.Ìę

It was one of the worst days of my life. On the previous day, I had gotten to know Arthur, and now he was gone. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was responsible by virtue of my role as a coleader, though I was nowhere near the site of the crash when it happened.Ìę

The rest of the trip was a disaster. The group was understandably traumatized. Many of the riders agreed that leadership was to blame for choosing a heavily trafficked road. My colleagues and I scrambled to make things right, hustling to find safer side roads to ease fears. We drove the route each night and spray-painted arrows on all the new turns. No longer would we ride every fourth day or take a day off—now our days and nights were spent driving, researching, spray-painting, and serving as targets for the justifiable fears and less grounded, petty complaints of the shell-shocked clients. When the trip was over my body fell apart, and I was waylaid for weeks with illness and grief.Ìę

For some reason, I went back. Over the next three years, I led three smaller self-supported cross-country rides. There were no follow vehicles, and I could actually pedal my bike every day. All were months long, with no escape time to be alone. And all pushed my resolve not to quit in diverse and challenging ways.Ìę

Many of the people I met on those tours changed my life for the better, and I’ve stayed in touch with them to this day. But the troublemakers were as bizarre as they were inescapable. There was the man who told me in explicit detail why he hated lesbians so much, on the second week of a three-month tour—not recognizing that he was delivering his manifesto to one. There was the mysterious tent urinator, who found a way to pee on the side of another man’s tent every night for six straight weeks (and whose identity is an as-yet uncracked case). The man who always took photos of me changing flat tires to send home to his wife, because “she was never going to believe that a woman could do this.” The woman who had never ridden a bike before the trip. The daily hitchhiker who “didn’t do climbs” and thumbed for rides up hills. The racer who wanted everyone else to ride farther and faster each day. The relapsed gambling addict who snuck into town every night and couldn’t be trusted with group funds. The sexual harasser who hounded me daily with lewd comments unfit to print. And in every group, there was always one person who tried to rile up a mutiny because he wanted out of the cooking rotation.Ìę

It was hard to know who these people were in their daily lives, when they weren’t pushing their bodies to the limit and sleeping on the ground. I had to imagine that the mysterious tent urinator wasn’t similarly taking out his frustrations on a coworker’s office chair. Maybe all that misdirected rage could be chalked up to exhaustion, homesickness, and electrolyte imbalance?Ìę

I wasn’t at my best, either. I had to do all the planning and campsite reservations each night, pedal all day, stop to help everyone who had a physical or mechanical problem, hand over all my food and water if someone needed it, and continue to put out group-dynamic fires once we’d reached the campsite. As a young woman (and, on some trips, the only woman) who was barely half the average age of the groups I led, I struggled to command authority. I faced the classic conundrum of trying to lead while being female. Not wanting to seem “pushy” or “aggressive,” I tried to be “fun” and “chill” instead. That didn’t inspire confidence from the older male participants, who would talk over me while I ­delivered map notes for the next day’s ride. When tensions arose, I typically (and ineffectively) defaulted to unrelenting chipperness and a handful of platitudes about the spirit of adventure to patch things up.Ìę

Ultimately, I realized that my job wasn’t to ride my bike; it was a service position with round-the-clock expectations for less than minimum wage. The outdoor industry calls this getting paid in sunsets—which wouldn’t actually sound so bad if those sunsets weren’t being blocked by a pair of full-grown adults fighting over whose turn it was to wash the group spatula. I had wanted freedom and adventure. What I got instead was too much responsibility.

But let’s get back to the hill, the madman, and the day I realized I was done trying to make bike touring work full-time. As I stared at the back of Alan’s head and willed his recumbent cranks to turn faster, I began to realize that no amount of tailwinds, sunsets, and campfire Uno tournaments could make a day like this worth it. If I survived to the end of the tour, I was going back to school to find a job that didn’t involve mediating nightly septuagenarian conflicts about tent placement.Ìę

Max never caught us—for an hour I watched as he got closer and then started to recede, before later zooming past us in the bed of a pickup truck, middle fingers extended skyward. For weeks he kept calling me and the bike-touring company, threatening to sue for being ousted from the tour, but there were too many witnesses to what he’d done to that sprinkler head. I lost sleep worrying he’d show up along the route packing something more formidable than a Leatherman. But we never saw him again. Two months later, ten of the original 16 of us rolled into Saint Augustine, Florida, and triumphantly dipped our front wheels into the ocean. I flew back home to Portland knowing I would never ride my bike from coast to coast again.Ìę

Getting paid to do what I loved made me realize that I needed to find something new to love. Something useful, perhaps—turns out there are only so many ways to make money on a bike when you’re not particularly strong, fast, or good at it. At 30, I went back to school and chose journalism. Instead of life on the road, I began writing about people undertaking their own transformative journeys.Ìę

It’s been ten years since that final cross-country ride. Today I have a family, a home that isn’t staked to the ground, and more than three shirts. I’m also a more relatable friend now that all my stories don’t end with me sucking the sugar coating off an Advil for the calories, sleeping in a stranger’s treehouse, or (it was self-defense). The money hasn’t exactly followed, nor has the dream of endless freedom and adventure that I pedaled away from home in search of. But there will always be some part of me looking back and hoping they might be there, holding tight to my rear wheel, trying to catch a draft.Ìę

*Names have been changed to protect me from retribution. In fact, I’d probably change my own if șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű would let me.

The post I Loved Bike Touring—Until I Got Paid to Do It appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The day Mike Posner was in eastern Colorado was the best one so far. He had been awake since 3 A.M. and had already walked 16 miles along a thin, two-lane highway with no shoulder when he felt a stab of pain and waited for the shh-shh-shh of confirmation. It was around noon on August 7,Ìę2019. In front of him loomed the Rocky Mountains, which had only materialized on the horizon the previous morning. Behind himÌęan imaginary dashed line led back to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where the writer and singer of the hit “â€Ćš¶ÄĐŻ±đČő, that Mike Posner—had started his walk across America 114 days before. He scanned the gravel beneath the RV, his support vehicle for the trip, which had pulled over with him for his lunch break, and saw nothing. ButÌęthen he heard it: the unmistakable rattling that made all the warnings he’d received that day from passing strangers feel like dark omens.

For most long-distance hikers, this would have been a low point, a venomous brush with death signifying the end of the road. But Posner had already dipped into the darkest places his mind could go on his 2,851-mile journey, and now he was just thrilled to have a helicopter ride, some air-conditioning, and life-saving medical attention. After weeks of trudging on stiff, aching feet across Missouri and Kansas, through 90 percent humidity, he says his five days in the ICU of a Colorado hospital wereÌęlike a luxury hotel stay. But it wasn’t just that. The Grammy-nominated pop star also had the sense that he’d found the struggle he’d left Los AngelesÌęin search of, or some sense of validation—the journey was real enough to have almost killed him.

Posner posted a photo of his venom-engorged leg with a buoyant caption: “Shout outs to this rattlesnake that bit me—he only made me that much harder.” In other photos from his recovery, he’s inching a walker across a hospital room in a gown and no-slip socksÌęand beaming at medical caregivers from behind a full amber beard, curly hair untamed, blue eyes crinkled at the corners in a characteristic look of glee. Never mind the fact that Posner would spend three more weeks in crippling pain, trying to relearn the basics of how to walk (heel first? toe first?)—the rattlesnake bite had been a good day. “I was really in the trenches,” he says, laughing as he recounts the story. “This experience put me in the hospital, but I was proud because I was living my life, maybe for the first time.”

By his own account, Posner was on a journey without a cause. Five years ago, he’d been hanging out in L.A. at a friend’s jewelry shop, listening to some faux Venice Beach hippie ramble on about chakras, when he overheard another conversation about someone who walked across the U.S. “You can do that?” he interrupted, incredulous, abandoning the hippie’s long-winded sermon on crystals. “My friend just did!” the shop’s owner told him. And Posner knew right then: I’m going to do that someday.

Though he remembers that exact moment, Posner maintains it’s not important. “We all have a thousand of thoseÌęmoments,” he says. We list the things we want to do in the far-off futureÌęor announce a huge goal and get a dopamine-rush reward as if we’ve already pulled it off. What mattered was when he made the actual commitment to walk. He laid out his mission in a series of Instagram posts of this year:

I’m excited to announce that starting March 1, 2019, I will be walking across America. I will start at the Atlantic Ocean and end at the Pacific ocean. The journey will take me most of my 31st year. You are welcome to join at any time. See you out there, mp

The plan had only come together that week, during the press tour for his third studio album, .ÌęPosner was 30. He was a multiplatinum singer-songwriter with two major radio hits, but success hadn’t always been easy to sustain. His 2010 debut songÌę“”—an electro-pop earworm recorded in his Duke University dorm room when he was 20—had reached number sixÌęon the Billboard Top 100. By 22Ìęhe had already released his first album, ,Ìęwith RCA RecordsÌęand was out on the road with the Vans Warped Tour, playing at festivals like Bonnaroo and South by SouthwestÌęand opening for Drake. Then his recording career stalled. Years went by without producing another hit of that level. Between 2012 and 2015, his record label shelved two albums’ worth of his songs.Ìę

Posner says he felt like he was in some kind of artist purgatory. He had always pictured success and fulfilment as a ladder, but it was starting to feel more like a hamster wheel. A 2014 YouTube video titled “”Ìęsums up his attitude at the time: “I always thought as soon as I got a record deal, I would be happy. But I sure wasn’t. I was still fighting my depression, and the world felt too big, too scary, and I wasn’t comfortable with everyone liking me so much.” While he was essentially benched at RCA, he started writing songs for other artists, including the hits “” for Justin BieberÌęand “” for Maroon 5. In some ways, not getting to record the songs for himself felt like a failure. But taking a break from the spotlight also suited his uncertainty about how much attention he was comfortable with.

In 2015, Posner moved labels, to Island Records, and then released his second album, ,Ìęthe following year. It included the massive hitÌę“I Took a Pill in Ibiza.” The song had already been out since April 2015 as a quiet acoustic single, but in July of that year, Norwegian EDM production duo SEEB released a remix of it to massive international success—and ultimately, after it made it big in the U.S., a Grammy nomination for 2017 song of the year.

With lyrics chronicling the downsides of celebrity culture, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” describesÌęPosner wrestling with his relationship to fame. But with a pure injection of club-beat energy to offset all that melancholy introspection, the song hit hard in its reincarnation as an upbeat house banger. The opening showcasesÌęPosner’s knack for vulnerability: I took a pill in Ibiza to show Avicii I was cool / And when I finally got sober, felt tenÌęyears older, but fuck it, it was something to do. Then, furthering the irony for a hit that would go on to chart in more than 20 countries: I’m just a singer who already blew his shot / I get along with old timers ’cause my name’s a reminder of a pop song people forgot.

His next album, A Real Good Kid,Ìętook Posner into even more personal territory. Recorded from early 2017 through 2018, and released in January 2019, the album was an attempt to process his emotions after a breakup, as well as the 2018 suicide of his friend Tim Bergling—the Swedish DJ better known as Avicii. But it was anchored by the grief of losing his father, who died of brain cancer in 2017. When his dad was diagnosed in 2016, Posner moved from L.A. back into the house where he grew up,Ìęoutside Detroit, to care for him. The first song on A Real Good Kid,Ìętitled “”—the day his father died—closes with a recording of Posner’s father’s voice: “I love you so much. You’re gonna put that into a song?”

“I had to go to the studio every day, and I was trying to just show up and record all the songs and do a good job, and I was sad,” Posner told NPR about the album.

The recording came out to largely favorable reviews admiring its depth and authenticityÌęand Posner’s seemingly newfound maturity. “There’s always been a melancholy edge to Posner’s innocence mission, but his light soulful rasp, gently thumping grooves and upbeat optimism always gives away his unique club kiddishness,”Ìęwrote .Ìę“‘A Real Good Kid,’ however, portrays what a few years… and several tragedies… can do to a man, and how he thinks of that now-ragged axis of life, love and responsibility.”

In one of the album’s most traditionally poppy songs, “Move On,” Posner chronicles those two years of tragedy and grief, with a title that doubled as his personal resolution. His voice sounds sunny and full of hope. But once the album was out, Posner had an ache in his stomach. He searches for the words to describe it to me, settling on “existential despair.” “I felt empty,” he says. He started to dread promoting the album, or as he put it, “doing sets between Shawn Mendes and other artists that are tenÌęyears younger than me, and traveling around the world trying to convince program directors and radio stations that they should play my song more than Ariana Grande’s.”

“I just realized my responsibilities to promote the album are based on complete bullshit—they’re based on maximizing my incomeÌęand my record label’s income, and maximizing my fame, and hoping that turns into more income,” Posner says he remembers thinking around the end of last year. “I couldn’t bring myself to do any of that stuff. I felt stuck. I was explaining it to one of my best friends, and he said, ‘What do you want to do?’Ìęand I said, ‘I want to walk across America.’”

Ìętook form quickly. Posner hired two logistics managers to help him plan a route and take turns driving a Fleetwood Jamboree RV and preparing meals. After he announced the trip, he was inundated with comments from his manager and others close to him, who wondered why he was walking across the U.S. Some asked ifÌęhe was on a quest to further the grieving process that began with the album. But when I spoke to him, he resisted that easy narrative, saying those deaths served as more of a push to do the walk than asÌęinspiration.

“When people die, it’s just a reminder that you’re gonna die too, dude—you’re next,” he says. “In the meantime, you should start doing the things that are important to you now. This is it. This is your life. Look around, here it is.”

Posner envisioned the walk as a party. He would perform what he calls “ninja shows” along the way: free shows in parks to audiences of assembled fans in bigger cities on the route, like Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Columbus, Ohio. He would release a new, prerecorded song at every state border he crossed, teaming up with big names like Wiz Khalifa, Ty Dolla Sign, and Talib Kweli. People would join him to walk alongside—a throng of walkers would assemble behind him like he was the Forrest Gump of party jams, and he would practice “deep listening” to their stories and problems. He would be present in the moment and in his struggles in a way that was tough when you live in an overstimulating city and a huge component of your life is self-promotion.

In January, he released a bold itinerary for the walk, including the cities he would pass through and his daily schedule, which involved waking every day at 4 A.M., walking 20 miles in total, and meditating and doing yoga in the mornings and evenings.

At first, when he took his initial steps away from the beach in Asbury Park, the walk did appear to be an itinerant social gathering. Posner was excited. He had 30 or so fans striding alongside him. He had his support driver to drop in and check on him. And he had his phone—with music, podcasts, and Instagram—to keep him entertained. By the end of his busy first day, he was completely worn out. His trek had taken him a grand total of eight miles, less than a third of 1Ìępercent of the distance he needed to cover. “I pulled up Google Maps, and it just looked like I was still on the ocean, like I hadn’t moved at all,” he says, laughing. Still, he fell into bed exhausted by the effort.

To drop into Posner’s aggressively chipper Instagram from those early days is to get the impression that walking across the country is all mindful meditation, endless positivity, and campfire guitar sing-alongs, with the occasional motivational platitude in acoustic-jam form to spur you forward. Times were chill, he says—he spent a lot of the hoursÌęjust walking with peopleÌęand hanging out. On his 31-day trek across Pennsylvania, he played a few concertsÌęand did a few news interviews. Already in good shape from daily yoga and strength training, he worked his way up to 15 to 20 miles a day as his body adapted to the distance.

The narrow Midwestern states ticked by even faster: Ohio in about two weeks, Indiana in eight days, Illinois in eight days. Now there were more frequent milestones to celebrate. Posner kept his promise to release a song at every border, dropping acoustic covers and new, prerecorded collaborations. Along the way, he continued to meet up with fans, who would message him via social media,Ìęand he had dinner in the homes of roadside strangers, who invited him over with no idea that the friendly, wild-haired man was a famous pop star.

As the walk progressed, Posner says he complained about the rain, the heat, and his aching body to friends, but his Instagram was still sunshine and chestnuts of road wisdom, like, “I’m not walking to show people who I am. I’m walking to find out who I’ll become.” Julian Roy, one of Posner’s two walk managers and a fellow musician, says that inside the RV, theyÌęshared stories of playing music and adventure travel. “There was a lot of focusÌębut also extreme silliness, because you have to have both sides when you’re doing something intense like this,” says Roy.

Then he hit Missouri. It brought heat, humidity, and mosquitoesÌęand offered little shade. But the flooded roads besideÌęthe Missouri River, which slices across the middle of the state, presented the biggest obstacle. After record rainfall thisÌęspring, the governor had issued a state of emergency. InÌęJuly, Posner found himself fighting his way through waist-deep water along the Katy Trail. To avoid the worst areas, his straight-shot route folded back on itself, and for days, Posner walked in the opposite direction—a soul-crushing detour. The temperatures soared into the upper nineties, with 80 percent humidity. As he struggled, he told himself everything would be OK if he just made it to the Kansas border. It became a mantra: Just make it to Kansas, just make it to Kansas, just make it to Kansas.Ìę

Walking across the state border, Posner cried with relief. But the next day, the alarm went off at 4 A.M. like always. “I just started to fall apart,” he says. “My body, my mind, my spirit, they thought I was done because I had made it to Kansas. I was limping. I got to this point where if I wasn’t actively thinking, Walk!,Ìęmy mind would drift, and I would realize I was just standing in the road.” Posner had to force his body to move from one patch of shade to the next—every part of him was done. “It was the lowest I ever felt on the walk and I honestly didn’t know how the fuck I was going to finish,” he wrote about the experience on Instagram. He struggled with the sense that he was giving it everything he had, and it just wasn’t enough.

There’s a motivational speaker named David Goggins who’s often cited as “the toughest man alive,” a former Navy SEAL who’s competing in ultramarathons and ultra-distance cycling races essentially off the couch, treating them as mental challenges rather than pure physical ones. From Goggins’s social media, Posner discovered the concept of false finish lines,Ìęor creating an imaginary end point that causes your body, mind, and spirit to react as if you’ve already reached your goals.

If Posner’s quest was an effort to find something more authentic inside himself through struggle, he was now successful. The party was over. The cockiness he had in those early days, back when he was cruising across a new state border every week and thinking things like, This shit is easy! I got this! was gone. Even his social-media posts took a turn. The trademark chipperness was replaced by sweat, sunburn, and frustration. The physical and emotional exhaustion of occupying a body that walks 15 to 20 miles a day was setting in.

By the time he’d trudged out of Kansas toward the Rockies and directly into the baby rattlesnake’s path, he had learned two lessons: There are no real finish lines, just “checkpoints”—that’s the word he started using when heÌęhit milestones like state lines.ÌęAnd always include a “no matter what” clause in the contract when you come up with a big goal. That’s how Posner knew the rattlesnake wouldn’t stop him, even if it meant taking nearly a month away from his journey to heal.

“If you crack the door open and say, ‘I’ll do it unless this happens or that happens,’ before you know it, the door will keep opening,” he says. “If you say, ‘Instead of 24 miles, I’ll walk 20 today,’ soon the alarm goes off and you just take the day off. And then, before you know it, you’re just like, I’ll take a bike or a motorcycle, and then before you know it, you’re just staying on the couch and you’ve failed.”

But Posner did not give up or catch a ride. After healing from the snakebite, he returned to his route and began to walk again. The incident had shaken him, though. So, too, had meeting a man running across the country, 40 miles a day, unassisted by a support team. “I felt like a wuss next to him,” Posner says. “He was sleeping on the ground, he didn’t even have a tent. But what was really impactful to me is he didn’t have headphones, he was just alone with his thoughts.”

Inspired, Posner started walking without headphones and distractionsÌęand asked his fans not to join him along the walk anymore. He had been taking a more or less direct route, walking a mix of back roads and highways. On narrower, busier streets, cars were clipping him with their vehicle side-view mirrors on occasion. It felt too dangerous to bring others along for that. Now he was covering up to 30 miles a day, with no time for anything else. Just walking, eating, and sleeping.

“Unplugging made the journey a lot deeper, because I went to places in my mind that I didn’t know were there,” he says. “I tapped into my superpowers, as I call them. The trip is supposed to be hard, so you’re just riding these up-and-down waves. At some point, I figured out how to get through a low to the next high with only myself.”

Prior to the trip, he had been to every stateÌębut only to a major city within each border. Now he was seeing how much more was out there:Ìęthe mountains, the desert, empty dirt roads. In Arizona, he walked across the Navajo Nation. Roy remembers this part of the trip as the most inspirational, as the two walked with Navajo tribe members and learned more about their lives and traditions.

Back in Pennsylvania, Posner came up with an ego-driven vision of ending the walk with thousands of people crowded around him, to really “blow it up,” he says. He thought he would emerge from his “hippie-dippie, freewheeling journey as some type of bearded guru. I was still looking for validation from other people,” he says. But as he crossed his final border, into California, the vision changed. “I realized the person I was now, I didn’t want that at all,” he says. He wanted to walk on his own, to sprint into the waves of the Pacific with an audience of only his closest friends and family, and feel what he felt without having to explain it to people like me, a journalist who wants him to articulate exactly how he felt.

Posner once described the comedown after leaving the stage at a big concert: you connect with thousands of fans and then discover yourself on your own after the show, standing in silence. I asked him if the end of the walk was a similar kind of letdown: to paraphrase Posner’s own lyrics, he was about to step off that roller coaster and be all alone.

He says he didn’t see it that way. He feels like his walk was a process of coming to terms with something he had long suspected since his first album, when he realized the fame he thought would finally make him happy made him feel no different than he had before. “At the time, it made me ask myself, OK, if fame and success isn’t what life is about, then what is?ÌęThat’s what I realize my job is now—to go to the fringes of society, to walk across America, to live a life where my waking hours aren’t spent in pursuit of material goods. To go see what’s out there and report what I find.”

Too many people see happiness or enlightenment like the end zone on a football field, he says—like you can just dance across the line and spike the ball in celebration that you’re done. But in reality, it’s a day-by-day decision of who you’re going to be.

On the last day of the walk, Posner ran across the sand at Venice Beach, California, and dove into the ocean to the cheers of gathered friends. He of himself afterward, captioning it simply, “My name is Mike Posner and I walked across America. Keep going.” It was just the beginning of whatever comes next for him. It wasn’t even the best day on his trip.

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