Pushing Limits And Looking To The Next Big Adventure

     Over the past week I have been thinking a lot about possible future adventures and I have come up with a few more to add to the to-do-list; I say add but in reality this new wave of ideas has become my to-do-list. Coming up with all of these fun ideas has left me wondering, why is adventure addictive? what makes a big dream big? and why dont more people follow their weird and outlandish dreams? This all sound a bit odd at the moment but bear with me and I'll show you what I mean. hopefully it will inspire you to come up with your own adventures, I know when people talk about travelling to me it makes me want to leap out of the door and head somewhere far away...    

View Of Vang Vieng, Laos by Worakit Sirijinda

     So as I said, recently my to-do-list has become a lot longer, but before we get to what has been added I'll tell you about what was on the list (if you can call it that) before. 
 
The Far East
     For about a year now I have planned to go travelling after university, call it an adventurous spirit, or maybe just avoiding the real world. Whatever it is, to me it has been a strong urge that pulls at me on a near daily basis. So I figured, why not give in and give it a go?

     The (very rough) plan is to fly out to Nepal and then spend as much time as possible working my way over land to Vietnam; going through countries like Bhutan, Thailand, Laos, Burma and Cambodia. Once I hit the south coast of Vietnam I was thinking of doing a bit of island hopping around the Philippines. Obviously there are a lot of logistics involved in this, and the biggest thing is definitely funding, so I am going to have to work pretty hard to achieve this. To most people (and if I was sensible, me) this is more than enough adventure to have in the pipelines at any one time; spending 6-12 months travelling around an entirely different world to the one I currently live in is definitely worthy of the title of 'Big' , and is certainly bigger than a weekend trip to the Lake District! But even with such lofty ideas shimmering somewhere on the horizon I find that It is not soon enough, and in some ways not big enough for me. This is where the new list comes in.

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Nothing Quite Like Posing By A Lake In Lycra; Cheers For The Free T-Shirt BikeTart

     It is just under two months untill I set off on my One man, Two wheels, Three countries, and And Amazing Cause bike tour (yes I have been counting down the days; It's a mixture of fear and excitement!). I am really looking forward to this 3 week adventure as it is going to test me both physically and mentally; spending 3 weeks alone in a foreign country whilst doing strenuous activity every day is definitely a mental game. 

     I cant claim to have spent my entire life trying to push myself, infact I used to avoid it as much as possible. However within the last 3 years or so I have slowly but surely been trying to extend my outer limits, sometimes successful... sometimes not. Once I started on this road I couldnt get off, and thinking about it I dont know why I would want to. I'm definitely addicted to competing with myself, and suppose thats what I like about all this "adventure" stuff, seeing what I am capable of. 

     Even though I havent yet completed my first bike tour and I have absolutely no idea if I will love or loathe it I have not been able to stop my brain coming up with other tour ideas; 3 to be precise, all of which I want to complete in the next year and half and each getting progressively harder as well! This is where the point of "what makes a big dream big?" starts to show itself, but more on that later...

Conquering Italy (2011)
    The first of these bike tours to pop into my oddly shaped head is to cycle the entire length of Italy. In September 2011 I plan to jump on a plane with my bike and head to Innsbruck in Austria, from there I will cycle down to the very bottom of Italy. En route I will be passing through some amazing landscapes; the Dolomites are definitely going to be a highlight, and hopefully I can check out the Colosseum as I pass through Rome. (I suppose now is a good time to confess that I am an epic geek when it comes to the film Gladiator and thats the reason I want to see the Colosseum; just typing this sentence has made me want to watch it again for the millionth time!)

The Colosseum by John Whiles

    Now to most that sounds like a pretty massive undertaking, and to be fair it is. The fitness required is not so huge that it is out of reach for normal people (I should know, I am one), but it does require a certain amount of training beforehand to make it any thing other than torturous. 

     To me this seems like a perfectly attainable aim, and I think this is due to something that every human has in them. When you push your comfort zone you get used to your new position and eventually become comfortable with it. If you add to this a certain level of addiction, you find yourself constantly pushing yourself further and further. I'm pushing my comfort zone quite a lot with my bike tour to Geneva and back again, but whilst I have been organising and training I have also become used to the idea, and now want to push even further, to see what I can do at the limits of my ability.

     In reality cycling the entire length of Italy is a shorter distance than my upcoming tour (google tells me it is about 1020 miles, 371 miles shorter than Geneva and back again). Obviously the Alps are a bit of an obstacle (I love how easily I can dismiss epic obstacles; thank you lack of common sense!), but I plan to avoid the really high bits as much as possible; which I suppose is easier said than done when talking about one of the largest and highest mountain ranges in the world!

Spanish Villas by Matt Banks

Oviedo Or Broke (2012)
     The second bike tour I have come up will take place some time in April 2012. I plan to cycle from home (Potton; if you havent heard of it you are missing out!) all the way to Oviedo, Spain. This one came together fairly easily, I am basically going to go visit a friend that is going to be out there at the time. En route I thought it would be a giggle to try and make it in to Andorra, which may prove to be a bridge to far considering it is in the middle of the Pyrenees. Google Maps (very helpful in allowing stupid people to make rough plans that are big) tells me that all said and done it will be about 1500 miles. This one is both longer and harder than Geneva. But again, now my comfort zone has shifted a bit it doesnt seem to big, or too hard, just another challenge to try and overcome.

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TransEurope (2012)
     The third and admittedly biggest, hardest and most badass idea I have come up with to date is something I have decided to call (in some what of a pretensious fashion) TransEurope. Hopefully the name tells you what I have in mind, but if not this map should clear things up. (I couldnt get google to let me get a ferry to Cyprus, but in reality thats where I will finish)

View Larger Map

     This one is a biggy, and at the moment is definitely outside of my comfort zone! I want to cycle across the entire continent of Europe, which would not only be an awesome experience but also tick something off of my bucket list. 

     Upon watching the film "Bucket List" I made my own bucket list; basically it is a list of things you want to do before you die (I might share mine with you at some point). One of the things that I put on this list was to walk across a continent, and now that I have moved on to cycling I thought it would be good to combine the 2 ideas, and so the TransEurope trip popped into my head.  

     I have been a bit cheeky with this one and used a few different standards to decide the start and finish points. I will start from the most westerly point on the European continent, Cabo da Roca (Portugal) and finish up at the most easterly point in the EU, Cape Greco (Cyprus). I have used the two different standards so I dont have to start in the Azores (beautiful little islands in the Atlantic that are oddly part of the EU) and finish up in Finland (where the weather is way to tempermental for me!). This adventure seems pretty massive to me at the moment and in my head atleast, seems to be approaching somewhere near the level of challenge that my heroes have done in the past, albeit to a lesser degree.

So What?    
     So there you have it, one week of daydreaming and 3 bike tour ideas later I have realised that before I've even completed my first bike tour I have ambitions to go bigger, and I dont even know If I will like the first one or not! I suppose thats the point of this post, is it part of human nature to always dream bigger than whats in front of you? and if so why dont people do it more?

     A few months ago when the idea for a charity bike ride was just coming to me the thought of cycling to Geneva and back again seemed absolutely massive. I struggled to comprehend how people like Mark Beaumount and James Cracknell* had not only managed to complete their own epic distances/dreams, but also had the guts to dream that big in the first place! Now my ride seems a normal, managable size (cannot wait till I prove myself wrong in June!) and I have started to dream bigger. Italy will pose a challenge due to the Alps, Spain will prove a challenge due to extra distance and the Pyrenees. And obviously TransEurope is a challenge of fairly big proportions, but what happens If I reach the starting line of TransEurope and start thinking about the next trip. what if the next trip is never big enough?

     Some people might think that I have just got a bit carried away, over excited, and all of these ideas are just pipedreams; but why do they have to be? Why cant a person come up with large tasks and follow through with them?

*I chose some big names here just to make it a bit more accessible to less bike crazy people. There are literally thousands of people with insanely epic plans riding about as we speak!

Me After Running My First 10K Run; At One Point I Was So Unfit I Could Only Run for 8 Mins Before I had To Rest

     Im not trying say everyone should do big long bike tours, or go up mountains. What im trying to say is that maybe pushing your boundaries, jumping outside of your comfort zone, can be a good thing. It keeps driving you to new things and places, rather than stagnating in a rut. 

     Att the moment you might walk the dogs once a day but have always wanted to do a 5k or 10k run. Why not sign up for one right now, what is the worst that can happen? (Kind of hoping none of you have seen the Dr Pepper ads, otherwise you'll know that some bad things can happen!) From experience I know that once you have something commiting you it is a lot easier to find the motivation to do the necessary prep work and then the event.

     This is where the reason why people dont push themselves more often comes in. If i had to guess I would say people dont follow there dreams because they dont think they are capable, or lack the willpower to follow through. Consider this little anecdote;

     Sir Ranulph Fiennes is adamant that he is a lazy man, (straight from the horses mouth, I've read this in atleast 3 of his books) and yet look at what he has been able to achieve! (Trust me, the list of things he has done is epic! check out Ranulph Fiennes for more info) Your thoughts about him might well be different to mine, perhaps you think he is reckless (well he did chop his own fingers off in a shed...) or a show off, either way you cannot deny that he has done some truely inspiring things simply by pushing his boundaries one step at a time.

     This alone has led me to think that peoples perceptions of lazyness and lack of willpower are very dependant upon their aims. He aimed for the very highest and anything short of that standard was lazy; I'm suggesting that us mere mortals start of a bit lower on the scale and push for our own versions of greatness.

     Hopefully you will take from this that big is just a point of view, anything is possible. So dream big, you might just find out that you didnt dream big enough!

It would be cool to get a few comments on this, so share your thoughts on what I have said (good and bad are welcome!), your plans for travel, adventures, doing something outside your comfort zone,etc, it would be good to hear about it all so I can get inspired too!

Commenting is super easy, so get involved, push your limits : )

Sir Ranulph Fiennes Going Big And Pushing His Limits During His Attempt At Making The First Solo Crossing Of Antarctica (1996)

If you made it all the way to the bottom of this excessively long post then congratulations! A victory biscuit is in the post and on the way to you as we speak!

Cheers, Jamie