How to Have a Microadventure

Lookout Mountain, Georgia

There are over three billion public land and marine acres in the United States. These are managed by a patchwork quilt of over 15,000 national, state, and local agencies and nongovernmental organizations. The overwhelming majority of these lands can be enjoyed by you and me. That’s amazing. 

Each of us owns our public lands, yet no single person can claim them as their own. It is this beautiful, (mostly) successful experiment in socialism that nobody knows about. At least 188 million acres of public lands are national forests, which operate under the multiple-use concept. This means you can basically do whatever you want out there so long as you preserve it for the next person. It’s that small “d” democratic spirit that Woody Guthrie sang about that makes our public lands so great.

The bicycle is a manifestation of that same spirit. The Nineteenth Amendment, which extended the democratic principle to women was ratified, in large part, because of the bicycle. According to Susan B. Anthony, the bicycle "did more to emancipate women than anything else in the world."  Google it. Bikes do not require a license or permit; anyone can ride one. Bicycling is possible for all ages, race and ethnicities, genders, and is generally accessible to all socioeconomic statuses. (Adaptive bicycles for riders with disabilities sadly remain a different story.) If you have a bike, you have cheap, clean, and healthy access to the world.

The bike is the people’s vehicle.

Public lands belong to the people. 

Together they foster a democratic spirit of adventure – the microadventure. Adventures, Alastair Humphreys says, for "normal people with real lives." Here's how to plan your own bicycle-powered microadventure. 

Pull up a map of your city. Print it off. Throw a dart at any of the green or brown areas and I bet you can ride your bike to it. There is a good chance you can sleep there as well. That is a microadventure. Don’t have a color printer or dartboard? Check out the Protected Areas Database from the United States Geological Survey. It is a national inventory of the United States' protected lands (and marine areas). 

One in every 3.5 acres of land in the United States is federally owned (i.e., you and me) but don't sleep on state parks and state forests (also owned by you and me) and benevolent private land managers. Chances are, wherever you live, there is someplace you can adventure to. 

Once you find a destination, you need a route. This, to me, is the fun part. I love maps. My wife estimates 90% of my non-work-related computer time is spent looking at maps. Several resources are available for planning the best possible route. I prefer unpaved adventures so I use gravelmap.com, mtbproject.com, and ridewithgps.com 

This particular route starts in Chattanooga and connects gravel, singletrack, and roads to Cloudland Canyon State Park on the Georgia side of Lookout Mountain. The route begins on trails managed by the Lookout Mountain Conservancy, the National Park Service, Georgia state parks, and various private landowners like Covenant College and Lula Lake Land Trust. That's a lot of bureaucratic cooperation in one overnight bikepacking trip. And it works! How neat is that? 

Except for the glaring little detail of how it was acquired from indigenous people, America’s public lands are among my favorite things about this urine-soaked hellhole. But the sordid history of land acquisition in the United States is not to be forgotten. There is one other map tool worth exploring when planning your microadventure: native-lands.ca  

Here you can discover what Native Americans or First Nations the land originally and rightfully belonged to. You can read about the territories and treaties and histories as well as visit the tribe's official pages. I suspect some readers will find this exercise performative SJW virtue signaling. Whatever. Native Land Digital tells indigenous histories on indigenous people's own terms and challenges non-indigenous people to learn about the lands we live on. As a social studies teacher and outdoor recreator, I think that matters. You might not. We all reserve the right to be wrong about everything and about this you would be. 

Cloudland Canyon State Park

Microadventures are democratic in the sense that they open up adventure to "normal" people. There is of course a degree of privilege -- the body you inhabit, the equipment you own, or the land you're on -- and the goal ought to be broadening the sense in which every person really can enjoy human-powered outdoor recreation and adventure. I think that bikes and public lands are a great place to start. 

If you live in Chattanooga and have a bike and sleeping bag, you can start here. The route is a mix of gravel, singletrack, and road. With a little bit of walking or guts, even the vintage, rigid, 26" mountain bike gathering dust in your parents' garage can do it. The entire route is on Cherokee and Yuchi land. Stay the night. Make some coffee. Reverse it back home or find one of the scenic highways to bomb back down to the valley. See you out there. 

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Analysis: IPAs By Decade

November 2016, Josh and I headed up to the Big South Fork to climb the Standard Route of the O&W Wall. The Big South Fork is remote and wild, and the cliffs are intimidatingly tall by southeastern standards. At the top, Josh and I cracked open some cans of barley soda and enjoyed the gorge at its golden hour before making our descent. 

Once we returned to civilization and cell service (a McDonald's in Oneida, Tennessee), Josh posted a photo from the evening on his Instagram. Within minutes, vitriolic comments about our beer of choice  began blowing up the notifications on his phone. People did not approve of Busch. 

It was the 2010s, the height of the craft beer movement, and the Age of the IPA. Beer Wars was on Netflix, Fat Tire was no longer "fancy," and every town in Colorado had its own micro-brewery (8.4 breweries per every 100,000 21+ person, to be exact). Busch, and other single-name, macro-brewed, American-style lagers that retail for around $1 a can, were considered "cat piss.” According to Josh's refined friends and followers, we might as well have been a pair of slack-jawed yokels.

But that's all changed now. Beer taste has horseshoe theory'd back to the macro-brew, and now IPA's are the butt of jokes and memes. Micro and craft breweries have even started cranking out their own light lagers. But a six-pack will run you about $9.99 while a 12er of Busch costs and tastes about the same. That's basic economics. 

Speaking of economics, Busch and many other beers like Busch are union-made. And we should support labor unions. Unions are why our employers do anything remotely humane for us. And in the face of a fifty-year neoliberal onslaught on the working class, we should build worker power however and whenever we can; whether buying PBR or democratizing our own workplace. So here's a helpful list of union-made beers to get the revolution started. 

 

all-time great can design; bring it back, Busch.

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The Common Grace of Tailgate Beer

(Independence Pass, CO)

Benjamin Franklin was a syphilis-ridden inveterate skirt-chaser who thought the turkey should be the national symbol but he was right when he said that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Wait. Google has informed me that Benjamin Franklin never said this. This, despite its numerous sources on sidewalk kiosks outside bars and breweries. We can all go back to thinking Mr. Franklin was just a chubby ol' creeper with a penchant for electricity and bad ideas (looking at you, Articles of Confederation [though, admittedly, the Constitution pretty much sucks too]). 

Whoever did say it was on to something. Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. 

The biblical book of Ecclesiastes is the author's written wrestling with the theological dilemma of existence and the perceived absence of God. The book has been referred to as the world's first piece of existential philosophy. The author lives in a world with a volatile economy, judicial problems, and new and disparate socioeconomic classes (no, not America; post-exile Persia) and confesses an existence that is contradictory and absurd, yet tries to make sense of it all. 

There is a common theme throughout Ecclesiastes that gives me great joy and hope: enjoyment.  

"There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in their work. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?" (2:24-25)

"I know that there is nothing better than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God's gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their work." (3.12-13)

 

"This is what I have seen to be good: it is fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the work with which one toils under the sun the few days of the life God gives us." (5.18)

"So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them through the days of life God gives them." (8:15)

"Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long approved of what you do... Enjoy your life with the one you love and whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might." (9.7-10)

 

"Have you had a PBR with lime? It's the reason I still go to church." (my friend, Payton)

That last one isn't from Ecclesiastes but it works. The gulf between God and humans is bridged in these moments of humans receiving and enjoying the good gifts of creaturely life: food, drink, friends, and even meaningful work. The German theologian and Nazi resistance leader, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the message of Ecclesiastes: "We ought to find and love God in what he actually gives us; if it pleases him to allow us to enjoy some overwhelming earthly happiness, we must not try to be more pious than God himself." I grew up in a teetotaling culture that tried really hard to be more pious than God's own self. 

Oh, if the elders at Timberlane Church of Christ could have seen the pile of empty cans that accumulated throughout our stay in El Rito, New Mexico. Josh and I spent every day clipping bolts on beautiful, steep conglomerate walls in the dry desert heat and finished every night by a campfire with Doc Watson on the BlueTooth and a PBR in our hand. I spent the previous year in a "dark night of the soul" of sorts. But that week in New Mexico I saw the Deep Mind of the Cosmos in the panoply of stars. I heard the Everlasting Song of the Universe in the howls of coyotes. And I felt the Spirit of Creative Transformation in the conversations between two brothers, alone in the desert. 

Every can of cheap beer enjoyed on the tailgate of a truck or around a campfire with friends is a foretaste of the life of the world to come. At least that's the preferred vision for the future of Saint Brigid of Kildare. Brigid was an abbess in fifth-century Ireland known for her Christian virtue and “as a woman who likes to feast with plenty of ale and divine company.” She is purported to have prayed, “I would like a great lake of beer for the King of Kings with Heaven’s family drinking it through all eternity.” This is my entire eschatology.

Happy summer, megasplitter friends. I hope it's full of swimming holes, gravel rides, and tailgate beers. May the common yet good gifts of creaturely life mediate the presence of the Divine Mystery, whatever your religious persuasion. 

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The Buddha and the Pain Cave

Running hurts. Anyone who tells you otherwise probably says wheatgrass juice tastes good too. (It does not.) Some want to pretend that running is always social media-worthy, but running will almost always bring you to a point where you look like death and everything sucks. That, to me, is part of what makes it so beautiful. 

My favorite running photo is of the finish line of a hundred-mile trail race. A middle-aged man weeps as he struggles to make it across the finish line before the cut-off time. He's fighting, with everything he has, for dead last place. And everyone around him is going berserker to cheer him on. It's heartbreaking and beautiful and I wish I could find the link to it. I like running because it pushes the body and brain beyond the threshold of discomfort. It requires the runner to dwell in the pain cave.

The "pain cave" is a term used by endurance athletes to describe the deep, dark place where physical, mental, and emotional fatigue coalesce. It sounds bleak and yet you'll find about 3,830,000 google results for "embracing the pain cave." Many feature ultra-runner Courtney Dauwalter, who is largely responsible for popularizing the term. If you don't know who Courtney Dauwalter is, her ultra-running rap sheet is impressive. My favorite tidbit is her performance at the 2017 Moab 240 (that's 240 miles). Dauwalter finished in first place, kind of a big deal. She also finished 10 hours ahead of second place, which is a remarkably huge deal. Close your computer and ponder the world's greatest athlete you've never heard about. Courtney Dauwalter knows a thing or two about pain and how to deal with it.

Pain is the language our body uses to tell our brain that it does not like what is happening. I love this line from Haruki Murakami's, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." It's a Buddhist saying. The implication is that the body feels pain but the brain chooses what to do with it. You could give up. You could quit. Or you could delve deeper into the pain cave. Descend into the recesses of your mind and find the inner mental strength to carry on.

Watch any Courtney Dauwalter interview on youtube and she's grinning ear to ear as she talks about the pain cave. It could be her bubbly personality. Or it could be a peculiar love for this dark and agonizing mental space. For Dauwalter, the cave is the place to grow as a runner and a human being. 

Some runners transcend the pain altogether and achieve a "runner's high." I am not one of them. When I enter the pain cave, I bring an imaginary tent and sleeping bag because I'm going to be hurting for a while. I don't always tap into my inner-Dauwalter. Sometimes I have a pity party and cut my run short. I am not a world-class endurance athlete. I hesitate to call myself an athlete at all. But I do know that if I dig deep enough, enough times, my brain actually can dominate the body. And I've got pretty good at settling into the pain and suffering my way through things. Even when I hate it, I love it. And I almost always want to do it again.

I teach comparative world religions to eleventh graders in high school. I love my job. My favorite unit to teach, but the hardest for my students to grasp, is Buddhism. The First Noble Truth uttered by the Buddha is that life is suffering (dukkha). It is always interesting how my students respond to this assertion of the world. For many, it seems bleak or pessimistic. Still, others nod their heads in affirmation. Divorce, sickness, loneliness, death, poverty, bullying. Many students are acutely aware of the reality of pain. 

Last fall, in the middle of my Buddhism unit, our school experienced an awful object lesson in the truth of suffering. "If we are afraid to touch our suffering," Thich Nhat Hanh explains, "we will not be able to realize the path of peace, joy, and liberation. Don’t run away," he continues, "Touch your suffering.” This is the meaning of the First Noble Truth. And so that's what we did.

We didn't run away. 

We touched our suffering. 

We entered the pain cave. Sat with it. Kept company with the pain and suffering. Only then, the Buddha says, one can be on the path of release. But that's hard work. We'd much rather stuff it down, compartmentalize it, or run away. We put smiles on our faces and say we're good when everything seems like it's falling apart. This emotional bypassing is a pathological condition among Western folks, especially Western Christians. I mean, consider the great American folk song but the God-awful theology of the hymn, "I'll Fly Away:" 

Some glad morning when this life is over, I'll fly away!  Just a few more weary days and then, I'll fly away! Yeah, when I die, Hallelujah, by and by, I'll fly away!

This is either the ramblings of a psychopath with a death wish or a neo-platonic perversion of the gospel. Either way it's dirty brown water trash. Instead, the Buddha instructs us not to escape from life "but to help us relate to ourselves and to the world as thoroughly as possible" (Hanh). Yearning for a better life after death is passive. The Buddha encourages us to be active. Lean into the suffering and work towards its cessation here and now (Cūḷamālukya Sutta). "To be truly happy," insists Arya Namdol, "one must be intimately connected to and bear witness to suffering" (Namdol). That's a valuable lesson, even for non-Buddhists and, especially, for Western Christians.

Life, like running, involves tremendous suffering. But that is not the whole of it. The Buddha indeed taught the truth of suffering, but he also taught the truth of "dwelling happily in things as they are" (Samyutta Nikaya). And that, to me, is the meaning of the saying, "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." And that, to me, is the work of the pain cave.

So the next time you are edging toward the dark gaping mouth of the pain cave, physical or existential, set out for yourself a metaphorical meditation cushion. Maybe one day you'll reach enlightenment or whatever.

Further Readings (and Listenings):
Courtney Dauwalter on Embracing the Pain Cave (ep. 234 of Running On Om podcast) 
Courtney Dauwalter: How to Embrace Pain in Our Lives (Rich Roll podcast) 
The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh

Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor 

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5 Honest Strava Achievements

I love Strava. It's a fitness app that's equal parts training log and social media platform. Users can track their performance on routes and compare their efforts to other users on segments. Like Instagram and Twitter, users can give "kudos," leave comments, and be "rewarded" for their achievements. These rewards are great motivators, I just wish they'd be a bit more honest about them. Below are what I imagine would be honest Strava achievements.

1. Kudos

And mommy's baby is ready for his yum-yums. 

2. Top 10 Finish

I recently scored a Top Ten trophy on a local loop, which is really an embarrassment for the entire Chattanooga trail running community. I shouldn't have a top ten finish in anything. My high school basketball coach told me I ran like a 40-year-old man was fifteen. By that math, today I run like I'm 88.  

3. Local Legend

The Local Legend is a recent(ish) addition to Strava that rewards athletes who log the most attempts on a segment over a rolling 90-day period. TBH, I love it. It is the achievement I covet the most. To be a Local Legend, you don't have to be fast, you just have to be persistent. Or, you just have to be the only person on Strava ripping through that obscure back alley segment. 

4. KOM

Coming in hot with a side of bacon! We all have seen that guy (always a guy) blasting down the trail heat-seeking the much-sought-after "King of the Mountain" crown. Often, these bozos are so trophy hungry they forget they're not the only ones on the trail. 

5. No Bathroom Breaks

The data scientists and app developers at Strava Inc. need to make this achievement a thing. The only thing worse than a sloppy poo-poo sliding out your sweaty buttcheeks on a muggy summer day is an unplanned sloppy poo-poo sliding out your sweaty buttcheeks surrounded by poison ivy and mosquitos midway through your long run. Its avoidance should be celebrated. 

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