In search of sleep
Remembering patches of grass (and cheap hotel rooms) I have known and loved
Hello friends,
It’s a bright spring day, and I am so sleep-deprived I can barely see straight. I’m not sure why, but I was wide awake from around 3am, and none of my usual tricks worked, so I’m currently operating in a state similar to how I used to be during ultra-races, when I worked out that I could survive on around four hours of sleep per night.
I kind of wish I had a 300km ride ahead of me now, because as I frequently tell people, long-distance cycling isn’t easy, but it is certainly very simple. The only action point on your to do list is: keep moving forward. So when you can do that, you do, and when you’re too tired or hungry, you stop and put that right, and then you carry on riding.
Regrettably, today’s to do list was far more complex than that, and involved solving problems, making decisions, and focusing my brain on complex matters for longer than it really wanted to focus. So rather than trying to construct any sort of sophisticated essay for this week’s newsletter, I’m going to share what’s uppermost in my mind right now, which is places I might go to sleep.
If you’ve spent any time bike touring, you might have become used to looking out for camping spots as you go. I even do this in the morning, hours from when I might want to stop, because I reason that it’s good practice.1 And on the longer rides I’ve got into in recent years, when there’s a lot of time to pass, I’ve got into the habit of, among many other things, trying to recall all the places I might have slept on one of my trips or races. During the final cold dark push up to John O’Groats on New Year’s Day 2018, I managed to remember every camping spot for the first two-and-a-bit months of my round-the-world ride. I definitely couldn’t do that now.
It dismays me how easily I forget things that seemed important at the time. When I reached the end of the Transcontinental in 2016, I thought to myself that I should write down all the places I’d slept along the way.2 I never got round to it, partly because I was too busy recovering from my 4,000km ride and dealing with all the attention that comes with winning a race – but partly because I couldn’t believe I’d ever forget those small patches of earth, that for the few hours I had occupied them, had felt like such significant parts of my life that I would recall them alongside my childhood home. Now, I’m no longer sure if I’d recognise half of them, if I rode past again.
So I’m finally attempting the list here, for posterity, and as a gentle challenge to today’s insomniac brain.
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