Day Zero

What the f*&? Is wrong with me? I mean, seriously: what the hell am I thinking?

That was the thought running through my head this afternoon, as I unloaded my bike, with about 25 pounds of gear, into some random hotel room in Bar Harbor, Maine to which I’d just spent 8 hours driving, having gotten up at 3:30am, before I then turned around and delivered the rental car to the Hertz return counter at the Hancock County Airport, at which point I caught a bus back to Bar Harbor, grabbed a sandwich and soda downtown and walked a half hour back to my hotel, where I’ve been repacking my bags, doing some nerdy little social media post, taking a shower, and examining my bike for a possible leak in the rear valve, before going to bed early, before getting up early again, to start a 620-mile bicycle ride over the next two weeks with a pre-dawn climb up a g*%d@^^*d mountain all because I thought it would be “neat” to start my ride with the sunrise on top of the mountain which receives the first light of anywhere in the United States each day.

I mean, seriously … who does that?

Look, I’m not bragging, seriously. While this will be a big effort surely, it’s nothing like an ACTUAL athlete doing ACTUALLY athletic things on an ACTUALLY meaningful or significant scale (even though, for me, it’s one of the bigger single challenges I’ve taken in the last, oh, 56 years). But my point is simply … why? Really: WHY?

You know that scene in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, when Richard Dreyfuss uses up all the mashed potatoes at dinner making some shape he just can’t quite figure out, only to look up and see his family looking at him with expressions of varying degrees of confusion? That’s kind of how I feel.

Not the family part, of course, my family’s all been great and very supportive. They all seem to get it, more or less. So much so that sometimes I wish they might explain it to me. But, like Dicky Dreyfuss, all I know is that I just have to do this thing.

It’s a thing that seems very enormous. Until I break it apart, into all its component pieces, realizing that while it’s still a very big thing, it’s more a big series or relatively manageable things, strung together in a way which, mathematically, will have to include variables at several points along the way. But the power of each variable to affect the total outcome is inversely relative to the amount or training and prep I’ve done for each of the individual pieces I know of and can predict.

In other words, sh*# happens (believe me, I know), but it doesn’t mean you can’t adapt and improvise. Especially if you’ve been making plans and preparations for other stuff you did actually see might happen.

So, tomorrow I wake up 2 1/2 hours before sunrise, check to see if I have tires that can hold the air I put in them tonight, and I head out to climb to the top of Cadillac Mountain. Should be about an hour’s climb. About 1,500 feet of climbing over 6 miles. To watch a sunrise.

Then I roll back down to my hotel, load my bags onto my bike (you think I’m hauling THAT kind of weight up a mountain??), drop into Bar Harbor for a lobster bagel or some such touristy thing, and then take off for a tour of Mount Desert Island before heading inland towards Ellsworth (probably) for the night.

Oh, and I just made my fundraising goal! $6,000 for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and for World Bicycle Relief ($3K each). If you’re a donor, then thank you ENORMOUSLY. If not … there’s still time! Just click on either of the links on my webpage: toddcerveris.com/sts2023. They’ll both take you straight to a donation page for each respective fundraiser.

…….

I’m still trying to answer that question, you know. “Seriously, what the f*^& is wrong with me?”  But … can it be so wrong, if it feels so right?