May 1 – Las Vegas to Tucumcari NM

Today was a very good day if the wind gods had given us wind from more favorable direction it would have been a great day. Our route was via NM hwy 104. There is nothing for 110 miles along this road with the exception of a dammed lake and a few boating and fishing related stores. I have pictures of the road ahead and the road behind but they fail to show the enormity of the vast emptiness. The other feature of today’s ride was one remarkable descent as we came off the edge of a mesa. I hope these pictures do the descent justice. Lastly you see is that spring has just arrived to this part of the US. That may not be a big deal to those of you in New England or the Northeast, but for a Californian it seems very late.

Physically, I am doing much better today than yesterday. I have less numbness in my left hand than yesterday. My ankle was taped today and I did not have to big a problem with it or the knee. I tried not to push big gears and turn smaller gears faster. For non-cyclists you can achieve the same speed by using a big gear (greater distance on the road per turn of the cranks) and turn the cranks slowly or by using a small gear and turning the cranks more rapidly. Turning the cranks faster puts less stress on ankles and knees. I tried to keep to the low stress plan today and was for the most part successful.

Most of today I rode alone. I did this by design as it is harder to spin the cranks rapidly when riding with others in pace line. Riding alone gives you time to think about a lot of things one thing I thought about is that in about 2 days I will have reached the halfway point in my journey to MIT. I also realized that I need to calculate the distance from my home in Berkeley to MIT in Smoots. Smoots are an MIT tradition and measure 5 feet 7 inches. I don’t know how far my route will be, but I did determine that there are 945.672 Smoots per mile. Making that calculation while on the bike was mentally challenging; I got 945.66 while riding. The number 945.672 was obtained with the calculator function of my computer, just to make sure. Now I need to determine total miles I have ridden, currently over 1600.

The other aspect of riding alone in such a vast space is that you can look out at a feature in the distance and estimate how far away it is. I saw a mesa today that looked to be 2 miles away. In fact it turned out to be over 10 miles and as I was riding at about 10 mph I had some time to think about the process of reaching a goal. I have spent most of my professional life trying, with others, to find a cure for a genetic disease cystic fibrosis, CF. About 20 years the genetic defect that causes CF was discovered. At the time the CF community could see a cure for the disease and it looked to be very close at hand, sort of like my mesa. We thought that we would have a cure long before today. We can still see that cure and are still working to get there. While we are closer than we were 20 years ago, we still don’t know if we are as close as we originally thought we were. We will not know that until we get there, but just like today’s ride if you keep pedaling eventually you can reach the goal. It is only when you stop pedaling that you don’t make it.