I am leaving with my brother, Cliff, and his wife, Kathy, on a 2,500-mile bicycle trip on Monday. It will take 40 days to complete, averaging 70 miles daily and taking Sundays off as a rest day. We have mapped out the entire trip and reserved all the campsites. Today, I started packing for the trip. We won’t have a support vehicle, so we must pack everything we need for the trip on our bicycles. I will have two panniers on the back and two on the front. A pannier is like a saddlebag, but they are made of bright yellow canvas instead of leather. I will pack twenty pounds in each rear pannier and fifteen in the front for 70 pounds on the bike besides my slim 220 pounds of pure muscle. I have divided up the food into three groups. The first will be on the bike at the start, and I will mail the other two ahead to pick up on the way. I will have my tent, sleeping bag, pad, lightweight camp chair, non-biking clothes, biking clothes, food, cooking and eating stuff, bike stuff, an extra tire, two extra tubes, a few tools, oil, toothpaste, etc. The batteries and stuff we will need to charge them are major-weight items. The e-bikes we ride are nice for going up hills, but the extra weight we will carry when there is no support vehicle is a major trade-off. Each of us will have two 20-pound batteries and chargers, one 100-foot extension cord, and a power strip.

Deciding what to take and what to do without is a significant challenge. I have a fancy hand-held digital scale to weigh each pannier, and when they get to their weight, that is it, not on once more. So some questions are: do I include mosquito repellent? How about sunblock? Shampoo? One pair of underwear? How much laundry detergent? I can probably buy that at the campsites.

The whole process reminds me of Hebrews 12:1, “Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.”

In real life, a bunch of stuff dramatically hinders us from running the race Jesus gave us. We need to determine what is essential and what isn’t and eliminate the extra weight. It is too bad that we don’t have some kind of measuring device that we can use to determine when we need to cut back on excess baggage. There isn’t, so we will just have to use wisdom.