What Happens After Bikes Is More Bike

There were a few flashes of consciousness throughout the episode. They lasted for days. It would build like a wave over weeks and then crest and crash over days in bursts of insane rageful behavior. The devastation started weeks prior through various public conflicts with bartenders and patrons as I’d drink through routine evenings on the town. It peaked with the hard walk off from the job, a rage-quit. The rationalizations built over past weeks or months of regular heavy drinking and self loathing, validated the action. The only thing keeping me in a mortgage in Flagstaff was now gone. That was the aberration: a flash of white comes across my eyes like the opening sequence of and Incredible Hulk episode. The stressed clenched fist of rage in my chest. Everything that I used to fight for wins with in the peloton? It now manifest as this. It has always manifested as this. This is not about the bike. And then the snap: irresistible, like the final 250 meters of a sprint. Full volition. Full gas: the smashing of the laptop. The fury exposed. Some kind of “fuck you” to my boss. All rationalized as valid actions in my mind. Tech job done ane gone.

And then what I had amassed was sent down the camino nightly. The antiques, eventually the car. All the furniture, really. Everything. I just put it on the curb and it got absorbed by Sunnyside in minutes. Surreptitious as hell, they’d come out of nowhere, grab the dresser like moving men, and haul off into the night. And I had a swift old cyclist friend turned realtor hock the place in a matter of days. It was the most tragic collapse of my life and I did it myself. It devastated my entire existence from my abandonment of my son, to giving away everything I owned. It was absolute hell directed from my mind into fruition. I am lucky to be here. There was no intervention. It was a personal fight. A white man has no value in a state of utter collapse. I always think of Scott Miller when I consider my luck like that. #IYKYK

I kept my bikes. I stashed them. At worse they would be good fodder they’d find later on, and hopefully they would find a good home. Then I boarded the train for Baja without a plan but to continue riding south until I found a ditch to lay down in. It never came to that, obviously. From Flagstaff I got so far as the cartel paradise of Mazatlan before confirming that I if I’m going to breath – a hope inspired by Baja itself, then I was going to work/fight for this life. I was in a trench and I only saw one path until then. It was completely apparent at that point that if I was going to not kill myself, then the alternative is, ironically, to fight to live. This was a seachange as my sojourn progressed.

I pummeled myself across the rock and sand every day for 2000+ miles as if each day was an individual race, not months of touring. 50-90 miles per day on a loaded mid fat touring sled. The riding that I did was bliss and grueling just as I asked for. There was a baseline of grief. I had just ridden away from Flagstaff and the pain of my losses there created a pit of despair in my gut that I would pedal with throughout my journey. It exists within me today and it is essential. This was a good thing. This is the part where I tap back in. I pulled the plug and returned from Mexico.

When I retuned from Baja I had the bikes, some clothing; A box of keepsakes, a few pictures – evidence of what was. In what became the beginning of recovery, I would realize that I needed to become less abstract. I had no skill set beyond the tech work I’d been doing for the past years. I had nothing but bike shop experience as a backup; a thing I did for years throughout my racing career. It was clearer than ever that work would be my cathartic act. And even more, it was clear that I could control how that work is applied to the world so that I can feel less sad. That was the primary realization I came to in Baja. That by devoting once again to the bicycle, I could at least gain a foothold and start clawing back into the living world. In this way I am pronouncing a dedication to a vocation about bicycles. This is what I am willing to labor over after some self discovery in the middle of the desert. And in saying that, I am saying that there are boundaries to what I will do. This is a practice and it requires daily vigilance to remain authentic in the face of endless demand. This in sum crushed me, and put me into a fiercely destructive bipolar pattern over the decades, until that final crash that was only 5 years ago which is what woke me up.

All these years as a cyclist and this is a fundamental restraint I practice because of it: To live small and simple. This aids my survival and this is therapy as well. It is not perfect but it is exactly what I should be doing. I should remain in the realm of bicycle for my working life (restraint), and much of my private life. I have been nothing but about bikes for my life and so I am simply letting that truth flourish in my later years again. After two decades of competition that kept this pattern in hiding, I would spend the following years furiously trying to discard bicycles for more money: A plan of failure given what I am. In realization if this overextension of my cognitive capabilities I am instead investing the same vigor in shop life as I did as a pro cyclist. This is how it began:

Upon return from Baja I picked up my first shop job in Sedona working for Mike Raney at Thunder Mountain Bikes. This would be my first effort to step back into the pit and I am forever grateful for Mike and Thunder Mountain Bikes for that opportunity. It is my favorite shop besides where I work now, and it didn’t work out because I needed a place to live. Sedona has an issue with housing for its impoverished service workers, as with anywhere I suppose. And so I cracked after sweating my ass off in the van on the back lot for a summer. There is also the new stigma: A new aversion to setting foot in Flagstaff because of my exit. Queue new job opportunity. Queue new life entirely.

My life is run by polarity and in that everything has been eccentric. So after Baja and while there was an interlude in Sedona, Alaska appeared on the horizon. It was a simple thing. A seasonal job ad in BRAIN, housing included. Consider me on the clock! I applied and not only was I going to get the job, I was probably the only one who applied. Going from Baja and the southwest, to Alaska was bipolar in physical form, and the experience has been as well, from winter to summer. This fact of life makes it very easy to continually acknowledge my true self. My whole being which includes this little rageful beast that will forever live in me because he is me is attuned to the extreme nature of Alaska. I live a bipolar life from the inside out, well managed, atoning and gaining strength. This is proverbial to me.

I’ll be coming into my 3rd season working in Alaska this spring. I am in command of collaboration in what is more than a bike shop. It is a company. I am its operator. It is about bicycles. We funnel thousands of guests through this city on bicycles every summer. I am proud of what I advocate for and I enjoy the labor of what I do. After my 30+ years of bicycles, I absolutely love talking bikes with custy’s, educating, and doing deep dive work on typically external-cabled bikes! So this is one story of what happens to bikes after bikes.

With the extreme polarity of the seasons and daylight here, I will have the opportunity to maintain a seasonal life, living in the southwest for winter months sometimes when the bicycle work here freezes up… wait. I know. Yes there is fatbiking and tons of winter cycling in the Interior, but this is Southeast Alaska. A rain forest where it rains and rains all year long, with intermissions of snow in the winter. SEAK can never be a winter cycling destination. it is half frozen muck much of the time. The selection is limited. It’s hard enough riding in the summer here. More on that as it goes…

So now that I am here I meditate on the path that I have traveled. I listen to the nuance of the monster that I can become. I sit with him and I direct new ways of thinking with him. A kind of CBT. I can identify him. I work through what is helpful and what is harmful in my minds creative flow. I learn to speak with myself in a loving way. I slow down. He is me. He is my Jungian shadow. I reach out to him. He has been suffering through my entire life. It is good and it is hard to do this but this is what forgiveness looks like. If only I could have done this so many many years ago

Lastly, there is also intent, if I can speak to moving forward. I want and need it to be known that my experience was life changing if that isn’t obvious, and in that I am conciously, daily, living ni atonement for my life. What I mean is, there is an effort required to live, and I know for a fact that many of my fellow sufferers of similar disposition there is a lack that remains in them tethering advancement in the understandings of their own life and in this, so begins suffering.

There must be intent in order to assimilate. To assimilate all your self is the goal. You will never discard your shadow self. You can only integrate their disposition, speak softly and with responsibility for what can happen when one lets the world eat them. Instead, you must become the authority and you must maintain that presence. It does not happen through sloth. This is the work of living.

And so here I am, untangled and forever atoning for my minds lifetime achievements of eccentricity that very few truly witnessed. This overview outlines the fulcrum of change, and what comes next is the path itself. It is because of the bicycle that I am still here. I will be devoting the rest of this series to it’s own website: bipolarcyclist.com will come online in short time to expand and ultimately conclude the story of this journey out of bipolarity and into regulation as a viable member of society. This will all manifest and center around the bicycle. I guess in a way I am giving back to the machine I love through my tenacious work ethic and my mastery of cycling.

About Gnome

David "The Gnome" Herbold is a lifelong cyclist who manages bipolar depression through an multimodal atonement process recognizing past harm,, various therapeutic approaches (physical and mental) and a vigilance of practiced love in the face of fear.