Today, I finished my bicycle remodeling project of putting a Rohloff hub on my bike. It is a transmission, like a car transmission, with gears of various sizes inside the bike’s rear hub. It has 14 gears that are shifted by a shifter on the handlebars. It replaces the nine sprockets on the back wheel of the bike and three sprockets on the bike’s crank that I had previously, which almost all bicycles have. It was a highly complex process of replacing the old hub with the new one, replacing all the spokes, and getting them laced correctly and tuned so the wheel went around in a true circle. I made many mistakes and had to redo what I had done dozens of times until I finally got everything right. I celebrated my accomplishment by going on a twenty-mile ride. The weather was gorgeous, and the bike worked flawlessly. It shifted from the lowest gear to the highest and back as smooth as silk; riding such a fine-shifting bicycle was a joy.

Even though the bicycle worked flawlessly, I had not ridden 20 miles on a bike for over eight months, and when I got back to the house, I was near death, or at least felt like it. On May 20th, I am leaving on a 2,500-mile bicycle trip, averaging over 60 miles daily for 40 days.

We all face situations in which we fear failing when the reality is stacked against the challenge or goal we are facing. What do we do then? Many people quit rather than risk the possibility of not succeeding. I wasn’t thinking so much at the end of the ride today about the possibility of being unable to do it, but more about the pain I will feel at the end of each day on the trip. When I ride into our designated camping spot, I have to set up my tent, blow up my pad, roll out my sleeping bag, cook dinner on a little propane stove, and sleep on the ground. The next morning, I will need to do it all in reverse and do it for 40 days.

When I got home today, the question that came to mind was, “Do I really want to do this?” When I thought, “Yeah, I think I do,” the next question was even more perplexing, “Why?” It wasn’t that many years ago that the question, “Do I really want to do this?” It wouldn’t have entered my mind. The excitement of the challenge would have totally erased all such questions from my thinking. Not so much now.