It’s hard to be the slow one in a world that does not honor slowness.

Six years ago, the first day I got my bike Kali, there was a Taco Tuesday evening ride to Springdale and I was so excited about my brand new shiny bike that I decided to take her on the ride. She’s a big, black, heavy steel bike with thick tires. She’s made for rolling over all terrain. I wouldn’t call her a gravel bike because gravel bikes tend to be way lighter and faster, closer to a road bike. Kali is more like a mountain bike with no suspension. And the first day I got her, I took her on a paved ride, while everyone else was riding a fast road bike.

I was the caboose big time. People had expected the ride to be a lot faster, but because I had joined with Kali, everyone had to wait for me, multiple times, and it was embarrassing. I realize in retrospect I had chosen the wrong bike. Instead of Kali, I should have taken Black Beauty, Carlos’s vintage Japanese road racer. But this was an important lesson to my career of riding a bike: get used to being in the back. I have gone on many group rides in the Ozarks and I am almost always in the back. I have been the caboose so many times that I stopped going to some group rides because I didn’t feel welcomed at my pace.

It’s not like I’m not strong. I’m strong. I’m determined. But I have a pace that stays pretty firmly fixed at about 10mph. That’s at 2000 feet above sea level. Right now I am at 12,000 feet above sea level, and have plans to ride my bike to 16,000 feet.

There is so much about bikepacking/ bike touring (and any outdoor sport, or sport in general) that is masculine. Masculinity is a beautiful thing, and I consider myself someone very in touch with her masculine side. When I talk about masculinity and femininity, I do not mean traits or characteristics that belong only to men or women, but rather complementary natures that we all contain within ourselves regardless of our gender. To me, masculinity is an intiator, forward-moving momentum, and femininity is being and presence. To me, both are beautiful and necessary, and one cannot exist without the other.

I’m assuming that to anyone reading this post, saying that we live in a society that worships masculinity and despises femininity is a very obvious and mundane statement. And water is wet. So being the water we swim in, it affects everything, including sports, including outdoor activities, including bikepacking. The focus and the conversation is often how far or how fast or how high or how long you can go. All worthwhile endeavors, but not always realistic endeavors for everyone, and not necessarily everyone’s goal. All the blogs we read, all the Bikepacking Journal issues we bought essentially still perpetuate a masculine view of the activity. Not because there aren’t women writers or bikepackers, there are. Not even necessarily because of the content. Many, many beautiful entries on presence and being on a bike have been written in Bikepacking Journal; it’s one of the reasons I love it so much. But it’s the water we swim in. If you want to plan your trip, how many days will it take? How fast can you ride? Are you strong enough to carry all your gear on your bike? Will this be too hard for you? Will you give up? And that’s because planning is a masculine thing. You initiate. You set things in motion.

But when it comes to being on a bikepacking trip and enjoying it, I don’t think it’s possible to do without being deeply in touch with my feminine side, with being and presence. The whole point of the trip was to be here and take the time we needed to ride the route. When I woke up this morning with menstrual cramps I feared asking for another rest day. We haven’t made it very far on the Peru Great Divide. I keep slowing us down. Carlos is a much stronger rider than I am, always has been. He could go a lot farther and faster by himself. My 10mph pace is more like 10kmph (6 ish miles per hour), if I’m doing good. The altitude makes riding so dang slow. We rode 40 km (25 mi) yesterday with almost 1000 m (3000 ft) elevation gain. To me that’s a long afternoon ride in the Ozarks, like three or four hours. It took us six and a half hours at altitude. Sometimes the air is so thin that I get off my bike and walk. I’ve been dealing with a lot of gastrointestinal upset on the route for the past week, and that slows me down too, enough that I’ve needed to ask for more days off than we had thought we’d need. If this continues long enough, finishing the route won’t be a possibility.

And why did we begin this route? To finish it? Check off the “Peru Great Divide” box? Or did we do it to be here? Right here, in Baños, 40 km away from where I last rested in La Union.

Being a slow rider is a gift. It is a constant lesson to be here, right now. It is a constant lesson in love and compassion. Being hard on myself for being sick or having my period is ridiculous. Pushing myself up a mountain at high altitude when I don’t feel up to it is also ridiculous, maybe even dangerous. Listening to myself without beating myself up requires a lot of love and compassion, something I am trying to learn every day. The Peru Great Divide has been less of a great adventure and more of a crash course in self-compassion so far.

Even Bikepacking Journal’s slogan is “Pedal Further.” What about “Pedal Here?”

To Turtle, who moves slow and whose back we stand on.