Emu Racing and Record Chasing by Tom Davies

Author:Tom Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Nerves

The nerves first started about a week before I left. Up until that point, the trip hadn’t felt real. Although the planning and the training had been going on for months, departure always seemed like a long way off. With a week to go, I suddenly realised how close it was. Over that week the stress built up and up, until the final night where I collapsed into bed having spent the evening panicking about last-minute details.

On the morning of my departure, I was oddly relaxed. I wasn’t nervous and I wasn’t even excited; my head was empty. I felt detached from the whole thing. I couldn’t quite believe that it was actually happening. Whatever I was feeling when I made my first pedal strokes, it wasn’t nerves.

The situation was different that night on the ferry to France. After an emotional goodbye with my family, I was left alone with my thoughts. The nerves definitely returned then. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, how I would do it or what to expect. The concept of 18,000 miles seemed like such an impossible distance. Even now, I can’t get my head around it. All I could think about on that crossing was that I had perhaps made a very big mistake in being so ambitious.

As the trip went on, I became more comfortable with what I was doing. That does not mean that I stopped feeling nervous, which generally stemmed from a fear of the unknown. Whenever I was unsure how the next week, day or hour would pan out, or when confronted with something new, I would get some form of nerves; for example, when it first started snowing on me, my first night in a tent or when riding into a new country. The last of those was the most frequent, and when I felt the most on edge. I liked settling into a routine. It made it easy to break the days down, and it meant I didn’t have to worry as much about things. I would get used to shopping in the same kind of shops, eating the same foods and even riding for the same distances between breaks. Crossing an international border threw all this up in the air.

Whilst some border crossings presented only subtle changes, there were others that were far more drastic. Flying from Europe to India didn’t just challenge my cycling routine, it flipped every single thing I knew about life on its head. During my two days in Mumbai, the nerves were ever present. Those days were essential and enjoyable, but making no tangible progress to my mileage only exacerbated my anxiety.

Burma was even worse. This surprised me at the time, considering I had just spent a month riding through India. After finishing that leg, I hadn’t thought I would be fazed at all, but when I arrived in Mandalay I was bricking it. On the surface, it was nowhere near as intimidating as India, but, as I started to think about the coming days, I realised I knew absolutely nothing about anything.

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