After my abandonment in the urban heart of Arizona, there was one particularly profound fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about: A phoenix rises from the dead. It is probably melodramatic for me to say that my initial failure was essentially death to me at the time, but the prospect of moving on did seem like rising from the ashes in some sense. Whether that was the ashes of my recently deceased youthful idealism or the literal flakes of my sunburnt skin, I was in no condition to be optimistic anymore. My time had come to feel sorry for myself.

I was embarrassed, and I didn’t know how I was going to tell my family and friends. I also felt stupid and incapable, and being the only girl in my group had even caused me to blame my gender for some of my shortcomings. And my age, and my maturity, or lack thereof. I felt like everything that had happened had been the fault of my naivety, and I was frankly pissed off that the real world was turning out to be so anticlimactic. I was in the process of learning the hard way, and it seemed like nobody was willing to give me any patience.

That is, of course, until I met up with Bike the US for MS. I called my mom moments after my group left me, in a McDonald’s bathroom as I sobbed over an M&M McFlurry that I thought would make me feel better. Not long after I hung up the phone she did a good old-fashioned google search and quickly found me a new group to bike with. They were van supported, raising money for Multiple Sclerosis, and they were going to be coming through Phoenix in a week and a half. That meant that I had ten days to get my shit together.

I started by making a list of all the reasons I had been abandoned, because I couldn’t accept that I had been totally ignorant. On the contrary; I have almost always been able to trust my intuition, and I swear to god those guys didn’t give me one hint that they were going to give up on me that afternoon. So the first thing I put on the list was the first thing they had told me- that I had bought the wrong bike. Now that I was going to be riding van supported I wouldn’t have to carry all of my own gear, so that was no longer an issue. Then I wrote down the other, more personal things they told me; that I was too inexperienced, too young, and too much of a cause of guilt because they felt personally responsible for my safety, thanks once again to the fact that I am a girl.

It seemed like there was nothing I could do to change any of those things, so I spent the next ten days bracing myself to fail once again. The only thing I had going for me was the fact that my bike was going to be 65 pounds lighter than it was, but I was also facing the prospect of riding a lot farther than I was used to. The van supported group rode an average of 70 miles a day, which was more than a cause for concern for me. I still had 2,500 miles left to go, and I was going into it with a severe lack of excitement and incentive. I would no longer be able to say I had biked the Southern Tier self supported; I would no longer be able to raise money for WWF like I had planned. I felt like my only reason to continue was to prove that I could do it, and that didn’t feel like an admirable reason at all, it felt selfish.

Luckily I had no other choice, or else I might have chosen to continue on all by myself. I don’t know if it was fate that landed me with Bike the US for MS, but after only one day of riding with them I felt like a weight had been lifted off of me that was much heavier than 65 pounds.