Comfort can capture you
Friday morning 29th September 2023. 0815hrs Lyndon Road looking south towards Lake Coleridge, where I had ridden up from the previous afternoon.
The previous evening had been tough; the wind almost blew away my tent and the temperature was well below what I had brought gear for. The forecast for the morning was wind gusts exceeding 100kh/hr. The wind was so strong that I was blown up the hill once I left camp.
For most of this trip, when given the chance, I'd take the easy option—starting late, stopping early, cutting distance. It's always easy to find a reason to do less.
Looking back on my notes from my time in Christchurch, I can see why this trip, like a few recent ones, has had overtures of easy.
My flight was booked for Queenstown, but I disembarked at Christchurch. Three different hotels in three days lugging around two, large and heavy bike boxes while trying to get a flight to Queenstown is hardly the start to a trip anyone hopes for. Packing the night before I left was unnecessarily stressful and difficult. Having not slept that night, I had sufficient time to wonder why I was doing this.
I eschew organised events, hand-holding parties and anything that feels like an obligation. Sitting in a motel in Christchurch on a wet Friday night, having a reason to leave would have been helpful. Knowing that within a few minutes, being able to find somewhere else through my phone easily is dangerous availability when looking for excuses. Once you accept that you're not riding from A to B, any loop is inherently a compromise. Why not start another day later? I could spend the time writing a better list, learning how to use a drone, and finishing off a list of tasks I've put off for weeks.
I've never believed that the hardest step of any trip is the first, but comfort can capture you.
What I experienced in Christchurch has captured many of us in the 21st century. The difference is that instead of having the friction of packing all your gear onto your bike and moving between hotels we never need to leave home. There's always a reason not to head out into the unknown. Work and family are our favourite collective excuses. You might have your own, unique excuses. I am not going to deny your feelings, but I can find someone with a similar situation who has been able to overcome their excuses. If your reply starts with "But, they don't..." I am wasting my time showing you the counterfactual.
Psychologists would call the behaviour I describe as 'learned helplessness' or a lack of self-efficacy. The original experiments that showed learned helplessness were conducted by Martin Seligman in the 1960s and involved giving animals electric shocks. I see people exhibit the same behaviour; an inability to escape their circumstances but for the opposite reason, they're captured by comfort.
Your level of hope for the capacity of people to change would determine which condition you choose to classify people with. A lack of self-efficacy describes how someone believes they can't achieve their goals. Learned helplessness is more difficult to overcome as this person chooses to discontinue attempts to 'escape' a negative stimulus even when clear alternatives are presented. The person who has learned helplessness will still find a reason not to go out into the unknown even when the weather is good, their bike has been serviced and they are well. There is, of course, a difference between a dog being given electric shocks and choosing not to escape and a well-off middle-aged person who says they like riding bikes but finds excuses never to do this beyond a narrow conception. The differences between these two situations are much smaller than you might like to admit. Especially if you're not the dog.
One of the most common misappropriations is to compare ourselves to those from an earlier time. The basic narrative is that people used to do hard things, and I should also be able to. If you wake up cold, wet and hungry, trust me, you'll get up and get going for no reason other than to warm up. If you're in a comfortable space, it’s much harder. I've always known this, but I was to be reminded first-hand how true this is later in the week.
Thursday evening 28th September 2023. 1900hrs Lyndon Road looking east as the predicted storm rolls in earlier than anticipated. After stopping to take this photo, I will ride up the road to see where the rainbow begins. Minutes later, the rain will begin, eventually turning into a snowstorm.
I had originally planned to ride this part of the route in reverse, but I prefer to be able to ride up the gravel hill and down the sealed road as I'm less disruptive to traffic.
After a glorious, cloudless morning without reception, I came to my lunch stop later than planned. During lunch, I saw that the forecast was for a storm to come in during the evening. The prediction was for snow down to 800m with gale-force winds. I had every reason to stay low, cut the route short and head back towards where I'd catch a flight in 48 hours.
After lunch, for the first time in far too long, I rode off knowing I'd made the hard(er) decision. I thought I had everything I needed to get over the 925m summit of the day. I was mostly correct.
I worked through a few scenarios; all involving getting down to the lower slopes before the storm. In the late afternoon, I could see the storm approaching as I climbed the hill. I'll be fine, I thought.
The rain began as I approached the top of the climb, and the last rays of sunshine were engulfed. After I put on my jacket, I continued. I'd found a place on Google Maps where I thought I'd have some shelter before the section of highway riding. I planned to put on more layers and rain pants. As I arrived, the light was on, the gate was locked, and barbed wire was on the fence. They didn't want visitors.
As I stood looking at the highway, two semi-trailers roared past in the dark, their lights illuminating what I was feeling; the intensity of the rain was increasing.
My options were limited: I needed to keep riding or find shelter.
I decided to set up camp. Most of my tent was up when the wind turned into a gale and the snow began. This change happens in an instant, there's no warning. I was lucky to have the fly on and secured to the tent as there was no way I could have pitched the tent in the howling wind. I've never figured out how to tension the guidelines despite watching the video multiple times. This lack of knowledge was soon to become a problem.
I find myself in the vestibule trying to hold onto the tent for dear life, knowing that if I lose the tent, I have serious problems. Eventually, I realise that the only way I can get out of the snow is to bring in my snow-covered panniers and place them in the corners to stop the tent from blowing away.
The outside and inside of the tent are wet, I've gone past cold to shivering. I change out of most of my wet clothes between the strongest gusts. Not that I can set up my stove to have a hot drink in these conditions. On the list of dumb-ways-to-die, using a stove in a tent is pretty high on my list. I'll let you look up what happens if the flame touches any part of the tent. Having eaten most of my food for lunch with no option to resupply, I have a protein shake for dinner.
The snow continues and is now coming in underneath the fly. I can see the snow build up between the tent and the groundsheet. Soon it's a few inches high.
Occasionally I hear a car turn off the highway, slow down then continue. No one stops. It's entirely reasonable from their point of view, I am set up in a comfortable position. I would have appreciated someone yelling out 'are you good'? If you don't have the skills to help, do you want to make this offer?
As with most forms of prediction, as you refine the space you're interested in it's harder to be accurate. Depending on how I read the colour gradient on Windy, I could be in for as much as half a metre of snow tonight. That’s asking a lot of a 'three-season tent'. Realistically the tent will collapse under the weight well before half a metre of snow falls. This is a fun mental exercise to work through. Not the use of my PhD in statistics I imagined.
Thursday afternoon 28th September 2023. 1430hrs Zig Zag Road provides incredible views of the Rakaia Gorge and Rakaia River and allows you to enjoy these without the traffic of the main road. Looking across the river reminds me of parts of the USA. In the USA, this area would be a National Park; in New Zealand, it's just another river.
Today, the river looks benign. The photos from various flood events show a torrent of water running through the gorge. One of the nicest campgrounds I've ever seen is only a few kilometres from this photo at the Rakaia Gorge Campground.
Now committed to the decision to camp, I decide to take the only logical action and video call my girlfriend, who I'd spoken with earlier in the day as I ate a block of cheese for lunch. If there is a glamour to bikepacking, I am yet to find it.
There is, at least, an irony in finding myself in what is turning into a dire situation but having the technology to have a video call to describe what's happening to someone I might not see again. Being able to video call feels like the modern equivalent of the people who wrote paper diaries knowing they'd never see out the trip.
I'm unlikely to freeze to death, but there's the non-trivial chance of being crushed and suffocated by the snow. If there is enough snow to break the tent poles, there is no way I could get out from underneath in the fraction of a second it would take to fall a metre. Thinking I'd somehow get out of this is the same dumb logic as being able to fight off a bear in the woods.
My rational thought is that I'll get up throughout the night and clear the snow. I don’t set an alarm for every hour, which is what I should have done. Both pairs of shoes are now frozen. With only a few pairs of socks, how many do I sacrifice to go outside on a regular basis? Each time I leave the tent I'm colder when I return.
Fortunately, I have a large piece of Tyvek that I use to put my gear on while packing my tent. I use the Tyvek to create a waterproof barrier for my sleeping mat (it's not clear if the r-value drops when the sleeping mat is wet) and to try and keep my sleeping bag dry from the tent's (now wet inside) side walls. Being a down-filled sleeping bag, it needs to stay dry.
The sound begins to change as the wind settles down. The blustering gusts are reducing as the gentle pitter-patted of death lulls me into a false sense of security. For all the problems of the wind, the wind clears the snow off the tent. This is a moment to ponder - be careful what you wish for.
I decide there is no point staying awake shivering; I might as well try and get some sleep and warm up. With a few more layers on, I'm in my 'always summer' sleeping bag, confident I am okay down to about freezing. Tonight will go well below that. Looking at Windy, the air temperature could be close to -10C. Then add in the wind chill.
I'll wake up shivering multiple times throughout the night as the temperature continues to drop. I'm already wearing most of my clothes (waterproof pants and jacket), leaving me few options. I'm reminded that there is a reason the apprenticeship model of 'adventure' has proven to be popular for over a century. Having someone with more experience in the tent say ‘this is fine, we'll be okay’ would be reassuring, but that path is not one I have chosen to walk down for various reasons. Lack of effort to find people is not one of these.
Despite what we might like to believe many situations we encounter are binary outcomes. Either I'll wake up or I won't. I'll make the best of the situation if it's the former; I'll never know if it's the latter.
Sitting back it's easy to point out how I could have avoided being here. There are no prizes for that.
As I see the first rays of light, I know I have at least another day. As I drink another protein shake for breakfast, I check the forecast to see the predicted wind is over 100km/hr this morning. I pack everything wet into panniers and separate the few dry items. Between gusts, I pack down the tent with increasingly frozen fingers.
The photos are from the following morning, they don't convey the slight tremor in my voice the previous evening, the roaring sound of the wind or the loneliness of the evening.
After being emotionally defeated for months by bike parts not working, I found my mojo back where it's always been: in the dark, difficult corners that few venture near.
Friday morning 29th September 2023. 0745hrs Lyndon Road looking west towards Lake Lyndon. Somewhere in the picture is a 24-hour public toilet, which could have provided shelter; a few kilometres back down the road is Lake Lyndon Lodge.
The sky in the background provides a sense of optimism about the day. Every minute I spend up here increases my chance of something going wrong. There's an unspoken tension between 'being in the moment' (whatever this means), and getting off the mountain before the wind makes the ride increasingly difficult. Overlay this with the need to capture the moment for social media and it's possible to see how you get to the end of a trip and wish you'd never left home.
The obvious question to ask is - knowing my experience on Porters Pass how does one use this to overcome a lack of self-efficacy or learned helplessness? The unfortunate answer is there's little that directly applies. By believing that our circumstances are somehow unique (they're not), we believe that any counterfactual is irrelevant.
If you don't rely on external input, all that is left is internal input to change your circumstances. The only consistent path I've seen taken to break out of their cycle is people who end up in difficult circumstances and make it out. If you had somehow ended up on Porters Pass and worked out how to survive, you'd have evidence to back yourself in the future. The chances of this sort of experience happening are slim to none. The more difficult the circumstances the more evidence you have. The less difficult the circumstances the less evidence you have. Repetition of an experience increases the amount of evidence; we're asking what's required to start this process.
Linking the idea of evidence to an outcome through the lens of statistics, we could see that your individual experience is akin to a new data point which we could test to see if this forms part of the known distribution of your experience. Depending on the assumptions we make would determine the specific type of test we undertake. The simplest option is to undertake a t-test. The technical definition of statistical significance is that the test statistic is larger than the critical value - both measured in units of variability - standard error for a t-distribution. The standard error is the term used to describe the standard deviation divided by the square root of the sample size.
What we'd see with a t-test is that two parameters matter (i) the amount of variability from the past and (ii) the amount of data we have from the past. We could frame this as a 2x2 matrix with high/low variability and large/small data set. Statistics would suggest that for a person with a long history of not doing much (low variability/large data set), the experience wouldn't need to be that extreme to show them what they're capable of. For the person with either a small data set or high variability, they will need something far from their standard experience to convince themselves what they're capable of. There will be individual variability among each of the groups, but less than you might think.
Returning to my experience: despite going to sleep wondering if I'd be crushed to death by snow, given my experiences over the past few years, this wouldn't be enough for me to consider what I am capable of. When I look objectively at my time on Porters Pass, this is not far enough away from other difficulties I've chosen to fall outside my individual experience. Looking at the photos, there's an ease in wanting to believe that the life I live is more desirable. There's no reason you have to end up wondering if you're going to be crushed to death in your tent. The smaller increments of riding through the night, going somewhere you've never been or working out how to get out of a difficult situation will offer more than you might imagine, with a lot less risk. I'm comfortable with the idea I might never come home, if you're not, maybe my life is not as desirable as you think.
Your ability to find this is entirely dependent on you.
Write down your excuses and post them to your future self.
Friday evening 29th September 2023hrs. 1930hrs Little River Link bike path looking west back along the bike path I'd just ridden. I'm 15 minutes away from reaching my AirBnB in Christchurch, having a shower and being inside for the first time in a week.
Today's ride has been harder than expected, with the trailer failing to make riding easy by what seems to be a significant design flaw. My correspondence with the manufacturer will prove futile. Poorly designed products seem to be endemic in the cycling industry.
The sunset brings a close on what's proven to be a difficult week in my life; from packing up and leaving a house I've just moved into to delayed flights and ultimately replanning my entire trip in a hotel room, I wondered if I'd ever leave.