Tomorrow, I begin my second big cycling trip of 2023: the Erie Canal trail, all the way from Buffalo to Albany. It’s an organized ride sponsored by Parks & Trails of New York. Although I don’t (yet) know anyone else who’s riding, there should be a couple hundred other cyclists on the trail. Like the Grand Illinois Bike Tour, it’s a camping tour, with truck to haul everyone’s gear from site to site.
I feel pretty good about my readiness for this ride—my “rideworthiness,” if you will—largely because I’ve been able to do a lot of biking since returning home from Stage 1 of Route 66 in May. You see, on the Tuesday after Memorial Day (my first day back in the office after Route 66), I was abruptly and unceremoniously “separated from my employment.” In retrospect, I should’ve seen it coming; I became something like the 7th or 8th senior leader to leave (or be forced to leave) in the past eighteen months. New brooms sweep clean: when I started the job almost thirteen years ago, the subsequent two years saw almost a complete turnover of the people who reported to me, so I get it. (Although, to be honest, there were only two or three whose departures were directly engineered by me.)
Long before the events of May 30, I’d already begun contemplating my post-career occupation: the things that will keep my legs moving and keep me going forward. (And, to a lesser extent, keep me getting paid.) Those plans are underway. I’m a little anxious about it all because much of it is terra incognita for me. But even at the time that I was launching this blog—before I become unemployed, and before I had to come up with other things to do—I deliberately chose the name “Rideworthy” because I knew then that I would have other, new, different roads ahead of me.
Title credit goes to my dear friend Katherine Eggert, who didn’t coin it—there are other “rideworthy” handles out there—but who used it in a text and got me thinking about what a fitting word it was. As I contemplated my post-career avocations, I knew that I wanted distance cycling to be a significant part of it, and that I would be looking for routes (like Route 66 or the Erie Canal) that were “rideworthy.” But it was a term of personal development, too: it was about ensuring that my own life was rideworthy and fulfilling. If my life’s journey is a route, I want that route to be worthy of my time spent traveling on it; I also want myself to be worthy of the journey, and capable of traveling on the road(s) that lie ahead.
A couple of weeks ago, Caroline (daughter/princess) introduced me to the “Smartless” podcast: Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes started doing weekly Zoom interviews with friends and other interesting people during Covid, and have kept at it for three years; it’s plenty self-indulgent, but it’s fun. Anyway, the title of today’s post comes from their interview with Steve Carell, when they were talking about his decision to take on the role of John DuPont in Foxcatcher. It was a big reach for Carell at the time, but he said something to the effect that saying yes to a role that you know you can do didn’t strike him as especially courageous. Then Jason Bateman chimed with a comment that I had to rewind and hear again: “I’ve found that courage lives on the other side of trying.”
That sounds about right. I didn’t feel that I needed courage in just trying to be rideworthy, but events of the past six weeks have pushed me to the other side.
Tomorrow: “We’ve hauled some barges in our day….”
Rideworthy 