I’ve been turning this phrase over for several years, thinking it might make a good title for a book of essays about my travels. (Needless to say, it came to me during a long bike ride.) It originated from the realisation that most of my biggest adventures (including the ones I considered the greatest successes) had been abandoned early, or not ended in the time and place I originally intended them to. But, like all the best titles, it also held a multitude of other meanings, and offered me enough space to explore whatever idea I wanted. ‘Unfinished’ can carry the sense of being unvarnished or unpolished, like a bowl that has been left unglazed so that you can still see the imprint of the maker’s hands. It also alludes to my habit of retelling my earlier journeys, finding new stories within them as time wears on.
I set out in 2011 to cycle round the world, thinking I’d be away for at least four years, and that the only thing that could possibly curtail things would be running out of money. I came home 18 months later, savings largely intact, after only making it as far as the end of Asia. My reasons for stopping in Japan were several and complex, but mostly boiled down to having got everything I was going to out of the physical journey. The journey I’d intended, which ended with me riding back to the point in Mid Wales where I’d started, remains unfinished.
On the second day of 2015, I set out to ride from Anchorage to Seattle, on a fat bike, in the dead of winter, having been planning this ride since the summer of 2012, when I paused in Hong Kong to wait for a visa and catch up on my admin. I rode into Vancouver on my 33rd birthday, surrounded by cherry blossom and sunshine, humming with the metamorphic energy of realising that what had been etched in my mind for so long as an ambition, was now a memory, in more-or-less the same form. And that was enough for me. A couple of days later I ended the trip earlier than planned, in a close friend’s hometown across the Puget Sound from Seattle, and when my bike and I finally reached the city, it was in the back of someone’s car, en route to the airport.
I raced in the Transcontinental (then the biggest, and one of the only self-supported ultra-distance races) in 2015, 2016 and 2017. And I normally talk more about 2016, because that’s the year I won, but the other two years were just as significant, even though I ground to a halt in Italy and Slovenia respectively. The first race was when I truly began to understand how much more I was capable of than I’d previously believed, that I had a talent for this sort of thing, and that I loved being pushed beyond myself. I continued to limp across the Balkans after I recovered, eventually made it to Istanbul with the help of public transport, and burbled at the race director about how grateful I was to have been given this opportunity, to stretch myself beyond what I would ever have attempted otherwise.
The final year I raced I was grieving the death of that race director – Mike – who had died during a race in Australia, and struggling with the scrutiny of the race’s increasing number of fans and spectators. Eventually I withdrew from the race, turned off my tracker, and then had one of the most wonderful days of cycling of my life, crossing the mountains from Italy into Slovenia, riding from sunrise to sunset, and glorying in the knowledge that no one knew where I was, that my ride was my own again.
Keen observers will note that these particular journeys were unfinished not only in the sense of having not reached the designated end point, but also in that I couldn’t help continuing, even after I had announced I was stopping. It’s been this way with the career I’ve unexpectedly forged, writing and talking about cycling. At every stage, I expected my momentum to slow, the work to dry up, or people to lose interest – surely there could be nothing more they wanted to hear from me? On the eve of my second book’s publication, I noticed myself assuming that this would somehow be the end of things, rather than the beginning – that the book would be the final word on my years of racing, and no one would ever invite me to write or speak about anything ever again. I knew even then that this was naïve. People – myself very much included – like to hear the same stories over and over again.
And there are always new ones to be sifted from my years of constant travel, from memories I hadn’t had time to revisit or write down, from the perspective that time has given me on my earlier adventures.
A pleasant habit I’ve developed in recent years, is to pass the time on long bike rides by reliving previous rides, in as much detail as I possibly can. Because – what I couldn’t have known before I started – is that each day spent riding my bike through an unfamiliar country would be so rich, so full of experiences and encounters and observations and meals, that I simply wouldn’t have time, once I got back to my busy home life, to remember it all, much less write any of it down. So, a few winters ago, as I pedalled through the dark with Jenny Graham and Huw Oliver, during our four-day winter LEJOG, I started reliving my Asia ride, day by day, mile by mile, campsite by campsite, and discovered memories that had lain untended since I first inscribed them. There were so many of them, I only made it as far as Slovenia before we reached John O’Groats and went to sleep. Another unfinished journey.
Last year, I started including my original not-quite-round-the-world ride in my talks again. It used to be the bulk of the subject matter, then got progressively trimmed down, as more recent adventures took pride of place. But I realised, not only that lots of people were coming to the talks on the strength of having read my books or followed me on Instagram, neither of which were around when I crossed Asia – but also that there was still a lot to say about it. In fact, there was even more than there had been, because the Emily I am today is quite different from the Emily I was then, and can cast a critical eye over the events of 2011-13. It has been both interesting and illuminating, to reconsider directions I took and decisions I made, from the perspective of someone who lives in the world as it is today, rather than as it was then, and I’m starting to think I might have just as much to say about as I did when I blogged about the adventure from the road.
Said blog is currently unavailable, and will remain so until I get around to overhauling my website, something I am constantly vowing I will do, and might actually get round to, now that I’ve said it out loud. But that was the old way. I came of age as a writer through blogging, which now seems like a very quaint, early 21st-century concept. It was a wonderful way to hone one’s craft – you could write in whatever form or style you wanted to, and experiment free from editorial oversight – but nowadays my most-read words are in Instagram captions. And I often remember Hossein Derakhshan’s essay from 2015, where he mourns the death of the hyperlink, and the attendant insularity of social media platforms. (I reread the essay just now, and it hasn’t aged anywhere near as much as it might have, given that the internet has continued to evolve at a dizzy rate over the last eight years.) I love Instagram, but it isn’t my true home as a writer. I am too long-winded, too tangential, too full of reference and analogy. And I’ve started to see a swing back to how things used to be.
In the early days of email (I set up my first account in December 1999, when I was 17), it was common for people to send an occasional round-up to their entire inbox, with indulgently long updates on their gap year travels, their family news, or just their day-to-day life. This mild nuisance quickly evolved into blogging – where readers could opt in, rather than having to risk upsetting anyone by asking to have their name removed from a mailing list. And now we have the hybrid form of newsletters. You opt in, by signing up through Substack; and I will deliver my indulgently long write-ups to your inbox. You can opt out at any time by unsubscribing, and I won’t be offended (or even aware).
I’m looking forward to it – it’ll be like ten years ago, when I could spend days working on a 4,000-word blog post, and take my time engaging with the comments, rather than Instagram, where the first likes pop up mere seconds after I’ve pressed ‘share’ on a 2,000-character post that I dashed off by the side of the road. And I’m looking forward to turning the soil of my older adventures (including the ones I never shared at the time), and finding out what has been germinating over the years. A journey is never finished, except in the most literal sense.