In September of 2016, my sister Lisa and brother-in-law Kyle told me they were planning a trip to Iceland. As avid bike tourists, they had previously toured from New York City to Vancouver, BC. They wanted to tour Iceland’s Ring Road next, and they asked me if I wanted to join.
I didn’t own a bike, and I hadn’t ridden one more than a few miles at a time. I was afraid that I would slow the group down, or just be miserable the whole time. “What if I suck at bike touring?” I wondered. For nine months, I gave no definitive answer as to whether I would go or not, and recurringly weighed my merits against the adventure I’d been invited to.
At some point during all that hesitation, I recalled times when I had invited my family to go climbing or mountaineering with me, and the self-doubt that they had expressed in joining. Having already pierced the veil of inexperience myself, I knew beyond a reasonable doubt that they could climb mountains and cliffs too. But I also knew that until they wanted the experience enough to endure the anxiety and discomfort of starting out, they wouldn’t try it. I remembered the pang of disappointment I felt each time they politely declined. I went into the mountains without them. At each summit I reached, I wished that they were there with me to share the unique feeling of exhaustion and glee as we looked at the world below.
Here, my family was asking me to join them in a new activity, and they were telling me that they felt sure I could do it. So I silenced my doubts regarding my abilities, and just asked myself if I wanted the experience of riding a bicycle across Iceland with my family. At length, my answer was yes. So with only four weeks left until the trip began, I bought a bike, and told Lisa and Kyle that I would see them in Iceland for the final week of their journey.
On the fourth day of my tour, we camped at Skógafoss, a massive waterfall directly across this field of lupines.
My preparation for the trip was an education in its own rite. Lisa sent me a checklist of items I would need for the journey - a tire patch kit, waterproof booties, and lotion to ease the pain of chafing chamois, to name a few. The purpose of each item illuminated a potential hardship ahead. When it was all packed, everything I would bring on my twelve-day trip fit into sixty liters worth of panniers, and a 270 liter bag for my disassembled bicycle.
On June 24th, I flew through the evening from Seattle to land in Keflavik the next morning. Cool drizzle whipped my face as I stepped outside into the glaring daylight. I hoisted my awkward load of gear to a shuttle, and arriving at a nearby hostel, set to reassembling my bike. I pored over the photos I’d taken of my bike before it had been disassembled, but by the end I still ended up with an extra washer or two left over. As I reinflated one of the tires with my cheap hand pump, the valve of the tire’s tube snapped off, rendering the tube useless. I replaced it with my only spare tube, and prayed I would not get a flat once I started actually cycling.
Then I went for a test ride. For the first time, I pedaled my fully loaded bike up a small hill. Gaining initial momentum felt like steering a car from the Flintstones. The laden panniers were like a sail on either side of my bike. They caught the wind to gently push me forward when it blew at my back, and punished my legs when there was a headwind. I grunted my way back uphill to the hostel to get some jetlagged rest. I was sure that the trip was going to thrash me.
The next morning I took a 230 mile bus ride counterclockwise on Iceland’s Ring Road, and got off at Jökulsárlón, a glacial lagoon and popular photo-stop for tourists. Lisa, Kyle, and their two friends from college, Lily and Matt, were all waiting for me there. They had started their trip a week before, and had already biked well over 600 miles clockwise on the Ring Road. “Hey Jeff!” Lisa hugged me warmly. “You’ll need a cycling name,” she said. “We’ve decided to call you ‘The Fifth Element’ of our team.” I laughed and thought of how “Fifth Place” was likely to be more fitting by the trip’s end.
Taking a break at 11:30 p.m. on the first night of our tour. Visibility was never an issue when riding at night, and traffic was all but non-existent once the sun went low.
We got on our bikes, and began to pedal. It was 7 p.m. and the sun was still halfway between its pinnacle and the horizon. I checked my GPS. Our camp was 35 miles away, and the terrain was flat. To boot, we had a strong tailwind behind us. We stopped to eat snacks several times, and biked slow enough to converse with each other side-by-side on the nearly vacant two-lane highway. By midnight, we were setting up our tents in camp with daylight still glimmering behind the mountains. It couldn’t have been a more forgiving first day.
The next afternoon, I encountered my first big hill. The wind was stronger than before, but was now working against us. The nearly sea-level plane we had been coasting across suddenly rose up 300 feet over the course of half a mile. I shifted my back gear to the lowest setting, and began to exhale sharply out of my mouth. When I made it to the top of the hill, I pulled over to the shoulder, panting and red in the face. Kyle joined me in good spirits. “That was rough,” I conceded. With an encouraging tone, he said that I “might want to try shifting the front gear to low next time.” I looked down at my front gear. The chain was still on the middle cog. I realized that I’d exerted significantly more energy than necessary, and committed the blunder to memory.
When we stopped to eat lunch at a restaurant that afternoon, Lisa filled out some postcards to send home. She asked me to sign one she had written to our sister. “Don’t be pissed,” Lisa said with a smirk as she handed me the card. She had written about our trip, and included a passage about my own progress: “Despite his lack of preparation, you were right: Jeff is killing it. Total bullshit.” I laughed and signed it. I couldn’t ignore the sudden boost in confidence I felt from Lisa’s endorsement - I was biking across Iceland, and I wasn’t holding the group back as I had feared I would.
On the last day of the tour, we ran into a logistical conundrum. We were supposed to meet other friends who were arriving in Reykjavik that afternoon, but we were still too far away to travel by bicycle and arrive on time. We all considered catching a bus, but this was stymied by the limited number of bikes the driver would allow on board. In the end, only Lisa and Kyle rode the bus as forward emissaries. Lily, Matt and I prepared for 85 miles of varied cycling, the longest bike ride of my life so far.
When you pedal to get places, the slower pace and work you put in makes stopping to check things out all the more appealing. When we reached Heimaey, I hiked to the top of one of the island's mountains, Blátindur. This is the view from its summit.
As Kyle had advised me, the three primary elements of crappy cycling conditions included precipitation, headwinds, and steep inclines. “If you get one of those three, it’s no big deal. If you get two, it starts to suck - and if you get all three, you’re in hell,” he had said. Luckily, my ride that day only exhibited two of the three elements at a time, usually as hills and headwinds.
Empty black sand beaches, Dr. Seuss-esque volcanic rock formations, and crystalline blue lakes lined with violet lupines were some of the sights we took in through the countryside of our final stretch. 14 hours after we had started biking that morning, we arrived in Reykjavik. Traffic was scant as the old city slept in twilight, and its smoothly-paved bike paths made a welcoming finishing line. When we got to the house that we had rented, I took a shower, ate a meal of cheese and crackers, and laid down in a bed for the first time in a week. I was elated with the sense of accomplishment, and endorphins coursed through my bloodstream as I drifted into the sleep of exhaustion.
Aside from newfound confidence in my ability as a cyclist, I took home a reaffirmation from Iceland - one that spoke to fear of inadequacy as an omnipresent symptom when undertaking any unfamiliar endeavor. I had felt the same fear as a new climber, but I forgot the feeling since I had grown comfortable with that sport. If one allows an initial hesitation to grow into long-standing paralysis, their fear of inadequacy will be self-fulfilled in a perpetual state of inexperience. But by allowing ourselves to feel inadequate while in motion, we open the door to growth. If I had stayed home, I would still be unaware of my ability to bike long distances. Instead, I now have an opinion of the activity - specifically, that it’s an awesome way to travel long distances while retaining the flexibility to explore a place in depth.