Written by: Meredith Fitzpatrick
My legs feel like lead, my chamois is irritating me like crazy, it’s too hot, I’m hungry, I need my own space, I’m tired, did I mention my legs hurt… but I just keep pedaling.
It’s truly incredible how far we’ve pushed ourselves at this point. We’re now well over the halfway point on this incredible cross-country bike adventure and currently making a lot of progress into the South with only three weeks left of the journey. To get here we’ve ascended 
and descended several mountain passes, went through the desert and salt flats, have endured rain, wind, snow, crazy heat and now my favorite—humidity! We’ve also gotten up to beat said heat at 4:30 in the morning several times and at this point it all feels really normal. We’re in a rhythm and somehow it works. We’re a funny little family of people that would have never come together under any other circumstances and I’m having the best time with all of them.
As the country singer, Miranda Lambert (who I listened to a lot as we went through Texas and Oklahoma this past week) sings, “ever since the beginning, to keep the world spinning it takes all kinds of kinds.” And this really couldn’t be more true. I couldn’t do this trip without these people and I can’t believe we’ve conquered everything we’ve conquered together. I also can’t believe we’ve all existed together in some of the small spaces we’ve slept in for the night. You could say we’re gypsies, or as one of my fellow riders said: “We’re like rockstars touring and 
we’re in a different city every night.” I like that comparison the most because we kind of are rockstars. We’re putting our bodies through so much every single day, we haven’t slept in our own beds in over a month, we often do not remember which city we started in for the day, we share all sorts of bathroom spaces and we like to sing to each other a lot. Or maybe that’s just me—I definitely sing to everyone all the time: about my bike, about how much I love the food we’re eating and when we make our way through a cute main street—especially if it has a cute coffee shop. But I digress…
Through it all we just keep pedaling and through it all we’ve become a team. And even when we think our legs really can’t take it anymore—like after our fourth century in a month—we get back on the bike the next day and do 70 more miles and support each other like a team every step of the way. I say again: ROCK. STARS.
The terrain gets tough, sometimes our living situations are weird, and/or surprisingly awesome, and we just keep pedaling because WE ARE ROCKSTARS!
