In September, Lael Wilcox finished her 108-day, world-record ride around the globe. As a cycling feat, Lael accomplished something truly remarkable. But what struck Janie Hayes most was not the number of miles she rode, or how fast she rode them. It was the 3,000 people who came out to pedal next to her, from Portugal to Georgia to New Zealand.

Jenny Graham held the record before Lael. Her ride was uniquely hers – a single mom who set out to surprise herself with her own determination. Before Jenny, Paola Gionotti took her own lap around the globe, wanting to “live every moment.” Before her, Juliana Buhring rode, processing the trauma of her past.

Cycling creates a chain of inspiration. Whether we see it or not, we are all a part of that chain. We get wild ideas from watching others. Other humans show us what might be possible if we allow ourselves to dream.

But all too often, watching others makes us feel not inspired, but less-than, not good enough. What power could we harness if we could see our competitors as teachers? If we allowed them to to launch us onto our journeys, in order that we play out our own unique stories?

In 2017, when I was 44 years old, I set out to beat Lael’s cross-country record in the 4,200-mile TransAmerica Bike Race. What I learned chasing her record wasn’t what I planned – but it was exactly what I needed.

A Glimpse of the Possible

My quest started the year before. In 2016, I arrived in Astoria, Oregon to ride the TransAm for the first time.

I was 43 years old that year – not so old, but also not so young. My body and mind were changing in ways I couldn’t quite understand or embrace. I lived an ordinary life in small-town Colorado. I was grateful for it. But I was restless. All I knew about bikepack racing I had learned from movies and books. It seemed it might offer me a way to cope with my unease.

On the start line, I was a nervous wreck with everything I didn’t know. Only weeks earlier, I had ridden into the night for the first time, a sketchy flashlight duct-taped to my handlebars. I had never camped alone. Other than being able to repair a flat, my mechanical skills were zilch. I had too many clothes, including a pair of pants I promptly spilled wine on during day one. My frame bag overflowed with hormone pills and creams to treat the night sweats and anxiety plaguing my pre-menopause body.

The only thing I felt truly confident in was my love of sugar: candy corn, Twinkies, and Coke. Maybe a sugar high would carry me to the finish line.

Before the start, I met Lael. I also met Sarah Hammond, a head-shaven ultra racer from Australia with bright, confident eyes. In the first five miles, I watched in awe as they tore off with the fastest men. As the days went on, I followed their dots on TrackLeaders as they floated across the country. Waking up each morning, I’d groan in disbelief over my cupcakes and coffee as they advanced yet another half-state ahead.

Weighing my own progress against theirs, I felt I was moving backwards. On day seven, I rode into Lander, Wyoming at daybreak.

Faded chalk messages were scrawled on the road:

“Go Sarah the Hammer!”

“Go Lael!”

A thought passed through my mind: What about me?

A faint, familiar, voice from inside: Because you’re just not good enough.

That year, Lael won the race and set the women’s record at 18 days. I finished four and a half days later. During those 22 and a half days, I had averaged 180 miles every day. I had learned how to sleep alone in the dark, fix my bike, ride through the nighttime, and persist through anything the weather brought. The mystical powers of sugar and caffeine had indeed been confirmed.

Some part of me said: Be satisfied. Yet, I kept thinking about going faster.

Here’s the thing about the ambitious mind: It’s tricky. On the one hand, seeing the power of women like Sarah and Lael had highlighted my own self-limiting beliefs. Their strength allowed me to glimpse my own potential.

Yet, something darker and edgier and restless was mixed in. It was a feeling of shame. There was a hole inside that I needed to fill. I still felt small, not good enough.

Total Commitment

In the wake of that race, I vowed to annihilate that shaky sense of self. I believed that by riding farther, faster, and stronger, I could fill that hole. With enough focus, I could outride my insecurities, maybe even the aging process. At least I could subdue my restless mind.

I drove myself relentlessly through the fall, into the winter and spring of 2017, devoted to my mission. I rode 10,000 miles, through rainstorms and into wind and snow. I made spreadsheets and tracked watts. Some weeks I spent more than 30 hours on my bike.

I rode at dawn before work, and every weekend day. When I served jury duty, during lunch break I went out to ride intervals. I traveled to Uganda for a work trip in the spring. After trekking from rural health clinic to health clinic during the day, I would climb into a taxi each evening for an hour-long trip to the single gym in Kampala with a spin bike. I would ride for 2-3 hours as day turned to night, sweat pouring off my body in 95-degree heat.

I called it commitment. Some would have called it obsession.

Chasing the Record

The race began on June 3. I knew that I was better, stronger, and more prepared than before. I had given everything I could. But was I good enough? I wanted the miles to answer that.

On day one, I rode over 300 miles. As the days spooled on, I continued through hail and heat waves, mechanical problems, and bone-deep exhaustion. Lost time was a greater peril even than grizzly bears, and I dreaded stopping. The hour before a stop, I would run my mental checklist of all the to-dos: charge electronics, pack 8,000 calories, put ice down my bra, adjust clothing and rain gear, treat saddle sores. I left my helmet on. I tried to never sit down. I did make exceptions for the toilet.

The weeks took on a certain asceticism. I liked being able to weigh the value of each day by a number. If I had covered over 230 miles, it was good enough. If not, I should do better. That equation felt satisfying. Within that simplicity, my mind could indulge. I could go as hard and as far as I wanted. I was satisfied with me relentlessness of moving through time and place: mountains and canyons, suburbs and towns, night and day.

With this effort, it was now my dot that floated across the country. I remained in front of Lael’s record time across Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois. When I crossed the ferry over the Ohio River into Kentucky at 3,200 miles, the record was in reach. That night, I was so exhausted and numb that I fell over just coming to a stop and greeting a dot-watcher.

Still, I was chasing a record and the perfect race.

Death and Dogs

On the early morning of the sixteenth day, I eased my body into a McDonalds booth in Bardstown, Kentucky. I had slept in a ditch the night before. Before the sun rose, I had ridden 35 miles through a humid, whiskey-tinged mist. Bardstown was an entry to bourbon country. I desperately wanted a drink.

I had 800 miles to the finish. Six Egg McMuffins sat in front of me. I was scrolling through maps, planning my day in elevation gain, weather, and miles before I would sleep again.

Suddenly, an alert came through on my phone. A fellow racer, Eric Fishbein, had been struck by a car and killed in Kansas.

Time froze for an instant. I sucked in hard, forgetting to breathe. I felt the cool booth beneath me, the fluorescent light, the hum of customers ordering food. I had pedaled with Eric on day one. There’s a photo of us that morning, side by side. Him in his yellow reflective vest, a smile on his face for the adventure ahead.

I pulled up the map and used two fingers to zoom in to Kansas. I knew that stretch of highway. I had ridden it a few days before. Long and straight, cornfields glinting gold on either side. I zoomed in further to see EF’s dot. It was translucent gray, which meant the rider had been stopped for more than 30 minutes.

A chill ran through me. Stopped didn’t mean stopped. Stopped meant gone, forever.

Suddenly, I want nothing more than to quit. I called my husband Jimmy.

“Should I come home?” I asked, wishing my words to sound reluctant, but also willing him to hear what was underneath. Please, please tell me to come home.

He was quiet for a minute, grasping both what was said and what I couldn’t say. Then, with a firmness that sounded like love: “I think you need to get on your bike and keep riding. It’s the only thing you can do.”

I was deflated, wrung out. I didn’t want to ride, but I needed to. I stuffed Egg McMuffins in my jersey pocket, got back on my bike, and pedaled the jaws of the hard hills to Harrodsburg. It was still drizzling, and people were driving to and from church. Floods of emotion washed over me. Periodically I had to stop, sit down on the side of the road in the wet grass, and cry dry tears into my forearms.

I remember saying a prayer. I wasn’t sure who I was grieving for – Eric, his family, myself – or who might be hearing my pleas.

In a Harrodsburg gas station, I sucked down a cup of dirty coffee at a table covered in a plastic tablecloth. A dot watcher came in from the rain. He held poster boards covered with magic marker and glitter in his hands. He told me his two daughters in junior high had been watching my dot every night. They had made me signs.

He said, “I told them about you. I want them to see what they can do someday, too.”

As I left the gas station, I thought about those girls. I wondered what they had to learn from watching my ride. I wondered whether it inspired or perplexed them. I wasn’t so sure myself.

I still held a tether to record pace. The next morning, day 17, I rode into the steep ravines and summits of opioid-ravaged eastern Kentucky. The towns were eerily quiet. Chain-link fences glinted in the midday heat. In the early afternoon in Pippa Passes, a small town of 500, a pack of dogs dashed out from behind a house. One of them tore into my right leg.

The pack surrounded me, hissing and growling. I called for help. A man on the porch came out slowly to the end of the driveway. He said the dog were strays and had been acting funny for days. He slurred his words and shrugged when I questioned him frantically about the dog’s vaccines. He wasn’t unkind, but he was stoned and unable to offer much. His eyes watched vacantly as I pedaled away.

Fretting about the record, my mileage, and wondering how hurt I was, I rode over the next steep rise. Blood dripped into my shoe. I braked at an intersection where a man was mowing his lawn. His name was Greg. I showed him my leg and he brought me quickly inside.

Inside the one-story brick house, family photos and doilies covered the walls and table. His wife Angela pulled my dirty bleeding self to her chest in a hug. She insisted I needed a rabies shot. Within ten minutes we were careening around narrow, winding curves to the urgent care.

In the quiet clinic, I lay on the table, covered in dirt and blood. The pace of things had come to a screeching halt. My mind still raced. But I could only wait.

My phone rang. It was Lael calling from Anchorage. She wanted to encourage me to keep after the record.

I told her that I was lying in urgent care and felt like a wreck.

I just want to eat ice cream, I whimpered.

Perfect, she said, laughing. Eat ice cream on the bike.

Once my leg was pumped with anti-rabies serum, Angela drove me back to the route. She told me that she and her husband once dreamed of moving to Colorado, but they were stuck. No one wanted to buy a home in rural eastern western Kentucky these days. For young people in the area, she told me, there were no jobs, only drugs. Lots of suicide and lots of pain.

When we got back to the route, she looked me straight in the eye like she’d known me – and this sport – forever.

“Well, hon,” she said fiercely in a thick Kentucky drawl, “I guess you’d better chug a Red Bull and ride into the night.”

I pedaled off smiling, my leg wrapped in a pink and white bandage. I felt strangely understood. As I turned around to wave goodbye, it struck me that – battered as I was – I was free to ride away. Angela wasn’t.

A few hours later, still on a winding road, a car pulled up beside me. I was shocked to see my friend Fred, who was the chief of police in Chattanooga, and his wife Paige in the passenger’s seat. Upon hearing about my accident, they had driven seven hours, simply to talk to me out of the window and see with their own eyes that I was okay.

Here and Now

That night I slept on a square of fake turf outside a boarded-up motel past the “Virginia Is for Lovers” state-line sign. This was the last state. As plastic grass poked into my side, I lay wide awake. A well of mixed emotions, mostly grief and kindness, filled me. I sensed this ride was revealing something new. Something hiding in plain sight that I had missed before.

It was hard to understand how my compulsion to break this record could exist in the same world where a good man could die tragically, where Greg and Angela and their neighbors’ lives could be ripped apart by living in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wondered how much I had missed in pursuit of my goal, and if it still meant so much to me.

The next morning in the predawn air, I felt calm and present. The Virginia mountains felt a little more friendly than Kentucky. I pedaled up a hill into a sunrise throwing pink and orange across the sky. I drank a chocolate milkshake mid-morning in a gas station parking lot – and savored it.

So much in this race, like life itself, was out of my control. Things were always changing, and my obsession with the record was an attempt to declutter the messiness of my mind. In some ways, my striving had led me astray. But not exactly. Because it was the very drive to achieve that had revealed something infinitely more important than the record.

As I rode up the river-grade climb out of Damascus, passed by rafting buses full of customers in life jackets, a thought came to me: This is my journey now, and I feel free.

Chain of Inspiration

Those last two days of the race, I fell off the record pace. That goal that had consumed me slipped away. When I did reach the finish line, I was short of Lael’s record by just over a day.

I had failed. But I had touched something that succeeding might not have given me. Being present to my life hadn’t come through reaching my goal. It had come by waking up to what was around me and truly seeing the world. I might not be a cycling heroine, but I was most certainly a traveler. And my journey mattered.

A Link in the Chain

Releasing my grasp on the record seemed to fill me with deeper appreciation for my competitors. When I reached Yorktown, I was teary-eyed to see Evan and Jon, the two racers who had finished before me, there cheering. Each of them had been attacked by the same dog. Evan had set the overall record despite it.

Jon’s teenage daughters hugged me and looked at me like I might say something important. I didn’t. I thought about the girls in Harrodsburg and about the chain of inspiration. I thought about Lael’s phone call, and how her example had inspired me. But that I preferred eating ice cream off the bike.

I waited for the next rider to come in. Then he waited for the next one, and on like that. Amy Lippe arrived and also Meaghan Hackinen – finishing her first ultra race. Each of them had their own stories. Read Meaghan’s book about her experience.

Today I see competition differently. Witnessing and supporting the efforts of others is a great gift. Perhaps paradoxically, chasing someone else’s record led me to spend less time striving to be better, to evolve away from who I am. I know now that my efforts are enough, so long as I pay attention. And that all our messy stories – yours and mine, record-breaking or not – have equal value in this world we create together. Each one of us provides a link in the chain.