Beyond Pain: An Interview with the 21-Year-Old Pan-American World Record Cyclist

“I’m less worried about beating other people and more obsessed with finding where this theoretical ceiling is…I feel it’s impossible to ever truly reach your limit.”

Untitled, Kit Knuppel

Elan Kluger is a 22-year-old writer from Michigan and editor of The New Critic studying History at Dartmouth College.

Bond Almand is a 21-year-old professional endurance cyclist, climate activist, writer, and student at Dartmouth College.

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I started following Bond Almand IV in the same way many other Dartmouth students did: via his thorough, vivid, and thrilling journal entries as he completed his record-breaking Pan-American route, a 14,000-mile cycling journey from Northwest Alaska to Southern Argentina, in 75 days. Almand broke the previous world record by almost nine days, a record that had been established by an athlete with a whole team to change his tires, cook him food, and provide other aid. Almand was self-supported.

I spoke with Bond about his motivations, hallucinations, writing, and pain.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ELAN KLUGER I’ve heard a rumor — I’m not sure about the details — that in high school, in some race, you broke your legs and crawled to the finish line.

BOND ALMAND IV There is a route through the [Great] Smoky Mountains National Park, which is right next to where I grew up. The Appalachian Trail runs straight down the middle over the tallest peaks in the park. The Appalachian Trail through the park is 72 miles. There’s a run called the Smoky Challenge Adventure Run, [but] everyone calls it the SCAR. I was obsessed with setting the fastest known time on the Double SCAR, which is running it one way and then turning around and coming back the other way. It was a 144-mile trail run that I was trying to do in one go with 36,000 feet of elevation gain.

Senior fall, I attempt it my first time and I get halfway 72 miles in, and am feeling alright, but it is the middle of the night, and I’ve never done an endurance event through the night. I turn around and start climbing back up the mountains, and I fall into really deep sleep deprivation and just can’t really understand what’s happening to my body and start having crazy hallucinations.

And so I have these stress fractures in my tibia that are getting worse and worse with every step I take, but I don’t really register how bad it’s getting because I’m just completely out of it. And then around 4:30 a.m. as the sun is coming up, around mile 86 or so, I hear a snap in one of my tibias. The stress fracture had gotten so bad that it split, and I had a pretty clean stress fracture.

I passed out on the side of the trail and woke up as the first rays of sun started hitting me about 45 minutes later. I couldn’t really walk at that time, since I’d passed out from the pain. Everything had gotten really tight, so on the downhills, I had to kind of crawl.

I was 14 miles from the nearest trailhead. I kind of broke my leg in the worst possible spot. So since both legs were messed up, since I had a stress fracture in one and a fracture in the other, I couldn’t really walk that well. But yeah, I was obsessed with it. So I healed up and tried it again a couple of months later, and I got a stress fracture again and bailed again. Each time I made it 104 miles. It’s still elusive. The 144-mile Double SCAR is still to be conquered. Hopefully, the third time’s the charm.

KLUGER I’m curious about a lot of things, but one of them is the origin of your obsession for physical feats. Has that always been true for you with all domains? Or just sports? Was it new with that race?

ALMAND I’m pretty obsessive in that I’m goal-oriented to the max. I get an idea in my head and can’t let it go. I have to really give it my best shot, even if that means destruction.

How that came to be is [that] my dad, when I was growing up, did a lot of marathons and Ironman [triathlons], and I was inspired to run my age on my birthday. I started when I was probably like six or seven. On my birthday, I would run my age.

Then for probably my twelfth or thirteenth birthday, I wanted to do a trail run in the mountains as my birthday run, so I mapped out this route I wanted to do. And I was like, yes, I really need to do this route. This looks sick. It goes over the coolest peaks. It does part of the route that is the SCAR. And then I added up the mileage on it and it was like 50 miles. And I was like, “Well, I already said I was going to do this route. So I’m just going to do it.” And that was my first really big endurance event that was on my own. But I just had that goal and I really wanted to get to it. That’s where I would say the origin of my goal obsession comes from.

KLUGER Does your dad operate the same way? Do you compare strategies?

ALMAND I think it’s a little bit different for him. I think I am more obsessive over it for sure. And I think he is a little bit more competitive. He raced cross country and track for Duke and has always been in the race space, and I have always been in the space of racing myself and trying to get as gritty as possible and find that limit. I’m less worried about beating other people and more obsessed with finding where this theoretical ceiling is because I feel it’s impossible to ever truly reach your limit. Getting as close to that as possible is a very interesting challenge.

KLUGER I read a lot of your excellent online journals. Has writing about your experiences helped with riding? Has learning to articulate experience with clarity, with style, changed the experience itself?

ALMAND It has changed the experience insofar as when I have questions that I don’t have an answer to, writing it out really helps me find my truth. But I never fully answer my personal questions to my own satisfaction, so I’ll get it a lot closer to where I want it to be, but there’s still this edge. And so I take that edge with me on the bike and whittle it down a little bit. And then I come back to writing, and one definitely influences the other, but they kind of work together — I refine what I learn on the bike with my pen, but without the bike I would have nothing to write about.

KLUGER How did you get into cycling?

ALMAND I had a little tricycle that I basically was biking around my house before I could walk. And then I just grew up cycling a lot. My dad did his Ironmans, and as a little kid, every kid wants to be like their dad, but I especially just wanted to be exactly like him and thought his bike riding and running was so cool. He qualified for the Ironman World Championships, and I was like, “I really want to be able to do what you do when you take me on the Ironman bike ride with you one day.” That’s a 112-mile ride. So when I was ten, that was my first really big bike ride. He took me out, and I kind of just sat in his draft all day, and we finished it. And then I got into racing in seventh grade and got addicted to it for a bit. I went like three or four years before I lost my first race, so for a while I didn’t have super strong competition to compare myself to.

I had these dreams of ending up in the Tour de France because at the time, I was just really good for my age. Then I plateaued a little bit in high school, and everyone else got way faster, but I didn’t get as much faster. Then I started realizing that the longer the ride was, the better I did than everyone else around me. I also realized that I had more fun doing these longer things and there were more things that I wanted to see. Racing didn’t give me as much fulfillment anymore, and these really long rides and runs did. So I just started going longer and longer, and then Covid happened, and the only thing I did was long runs and long bikes. And that’s really where I am today.

KLUGER I think we should talk about the Pan-American. Can you explain the ride and the origins of your idea for [completing] it?

ALMAND The Pan-American is a 14,000-mile route from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska — the northernmost road you can get to in North America — to Ushuaia, Argentina, which is the southernmost road you can get to in the Americas. It is a point-to-point bike. However, crossing the Darién Gap is highly illegal and dangerous. For the official record for the Pan-American, you fly from Panama City to Cartagena, Colombia. There’s this 40-mile section of Colombia [where] there are no roads, and it is highly illegal to cross. Of course, every year hundreds of thousands of migrants cross it. And so it can be done. But for my ride, I didn’t do it. At some point, I would like to cross the Darién Gap. However, my biggest qualm with it isn’t the danger. It’s more that crossing a migrant route for my personal gain, for some record or for some media clout, seems pretty reductive and insensitive.

But anyways, I completed the Pan-American route in 75 days. It took me through 13 countries. And I set the new world record. [The] previous world record was 84 days. It was a phenomenal experience. I did it during an off-term from Dartmouth College in the fall of 2024. So a year ago today, I was somewhere in Ecuador or Peru, I think.

But there were also some incredible lows that really challenged the relationship between me and my bike. Because of the suffering, it changed everything I thought I knew about myself to an extent where I became delusional about who I was and lost all sense of self. And it took me a long time to build back from it. Even if I present myself similar now to [how I did] before, I am a fundamentally different person. The way my brain works is completely contrary to how it used to work.

KLUGER Was that change because of fear of death, risk of death, the extended isolation, or the physical toll?

ALMAND I kind of think of it as [experiencing] my mind as an onion.

To truly cut deep and see the inner layers, all the outer layers have to be scraped away one by one. And I had never laid bare who I truly was before. Peeling back these layers of yourself is incredibly difficult. It’s the type of thing where as I progressed in my ride, I grew physically and mentally more distressed and started losing the capacity for parts of my character. So the social part of me just disappeared because I wasn’t talking to anyone. My need for comfort just disappeared because I [was] camping on the side of the road and in horrible pain all the time.

And so all these things that are so fundamental to daily life normally started dropping away because I didn’t need them. Because at the end of the day, I’m just riding my bike all day, every day, which is an incredibly simple task. To be good at bikepacking is to take very simple things very seriously. And so by the end of the trip, all of these layers had just fallen away, and I was down to only the things I needed.

I liken it to what was happening to my actual body. I was losing all this fat until all that was left were the bones and muscles that were propelling me forward. And so at [that] point, I could truly see my motivations and see inside myself and had [a] connection to who I was that was kind of unrivaled. But I still had weeks left on my bike when I got down to my deepest layers. I kept going because I had to finish. There was nothing to do but finish.

And I went further than I should have. I peeled back too many layers. And then I lost everything that made me who I was and felt this deep sense of alienation because I didn’t understand what was happening to me. Everything that I ever thought was important to myself no longer was important. All my relationships seemed trivial and non-existent. There was like a week where I just didn’t respond to anyone’s calls or emails. I just biked. It became deeply disturbing to not know who I was anymore.

KLUGER What has been the process of building that back?

ALMAND For the first month [after I got back], I felt like I was wandering around an empty snow globe. I was just going through the motions of living and everything felt superficial. There was an element of shock at being back in “normal life” that felt incredibly welcoming but also incredibly alienating. I knew that [the] people I was close to knew I had had an incredibly brutal time, but they also could never truly understand what [had] happened out there. It was the type of thing that only I, in the moment, understood what was happening to me. Even looking back on it, I can’t even begin to understand or replicate the mental or physical suffering. And that’s just human nature — like, that happens.

I think when you get close to the edge, it’s just an unreplicable emotion and it’s not unique to cycling. It happens to other things. I think about times I’ve broken my arm. You can’t sit here and think about how bad it hurt to snap your arm in half. It’s a pain you can only truly understand in the moment. And so it took a long time for that to dull and for me to start processing things. I was seeing so much every day and feeling so many emotions. I had all the stuff that was coming into my mind, and [it] just sat there because I didn’t have the bandwidth to process it. When I finished, I had only processed the first week or two, so I just had to slowly process the rest of it. A lot of that meant just trying to write things down, trying to understand things, and then some things [were] just got forgotten. Some of the things, I never got around to processing. They’re gone and I’ll never be able to capture that again, which is something that makes me really sad.

But then I sank into this depression for a couple of months. I called it the post-trip blues where it was like, I’m so glad I’m done, yet also I still wish I [was] doing this because the simple purity of riding your bike all day through new places is just unrivaled. Coming back to school was a shock, a little bit. I felt like I had to relearn how to be myself.

KLUGER What about the actual encounter with death on your ride? What did that do to your thinking?

ALMAND The encounter with death came in Mexico. I was riding my bike, and I [had] just entered Mexico a couple of days before. I like to say that the first 4,000 miles through Alaska, Canada, and the United States was like the warm-up. It’s like, if I’m having a hard time riding through these places that are relatively known to me, like my home country where it feels reliable and routine, then it’s going to be really hard to ride through a place like Mexico where I’ve never been before. I was really worried about going into Mexico just because there [are] so [many] unknowns. I [was] going from English-speaking to Spanish-speaking, [from] brands that I’ve shopped at my entire life to all of a sudden everything [being] new. I had no idea what to expect from Mexico.

It was my first day in Mexico where I felt really happy with what I had done. I was on track to do a 270-mile day. And in the late afternoon, I’m getting closer to Mexico City. And in Mexico, from my experience, it’s like all roads lead to Mexico City. So the roads are just getting busier and busier as highways start combining, and I’m on the road that I now know is the most dangerous road in Mexico, and there’s no shoulder, and I get buzzed by a semi-truck. It passes me so close that its draft pulls me in, and my shoulder hits the truck, and I’m kind of freaked out a little bit.

And then about 30 minutes later, there’s a broken-down semi-truck in the shoulder — the very narrow shoulder that there is. So I have to come out onto the road. I have plenty of space — it’s a four-lane divided highway. And so I just take up the right lane, and just the very edge of the right lane. But a semi-truck passes me right as I’m coming around the parked semi-truck and closes off my gap. There’s about a six-inch to a foot-wide gap between the parked semi- and the moving semi-, and I’m going 25 miles an hour, and I don’t have time to react. If I had held my line, I would have gotten in the middle of these two trucks and literally gotten torn apart like shredded meat — [it was] like a meat grinder. There’s zero chance I would have survived. So I just had a split second to turn into the back of this semi-truck — just like a wall — at 25 miles an hour. I was really freaking out.

I was relatively unharmed. I was pretty banged up but could get back on my bike. But I had cracked my front wheel, so at any time it could theoretically just snap and [I could] go straight over the bars. It’s really bad. And so the roads get more dangerous, more dangerous. I end the day [having completed] like 256 miles, but I get a hotel that night, and I’m just shaking. I remember checking into my hotel and the dude was like, “Are you okay?” And I couldn’t really say anything. I just wanted to cry because these cars had been buzzing all night when I’d crashed. My back light had broken, so these cars couldn’t see me in the dark. And it wasn’t just that the road was busy — it was that the trucks were actively malicious. This semi-truck ran me into the back of the other semi-truck on purpose. So I wake up the next morning and really struggle to get myself back on the bike because these roads are unbelievably dangerous. There’s just nothing in America that can ever compare. And my wheel is cracked, so at any point I could just get hit by a car, or it could snap and I could roll under a car.

And so I get towards […] a city of a couple million [people] outside of Mexico City, and I look over on the shoulder right where I’m biking. It’s like a six-inch wide shoulder, and I hear sirens from behind me, and it’s a cop car pulling up because a man who had been walking in the shoulder I was biking [on] had just been hit by a semi-truck, and he was dead, and his body was mangled and horrifically graphic. And I remember trying to look away really quickly, but the image was burned in my mind. It [had] happened maybe two minutes before I got there. The idea of [how] that could so easily be me, which is impossible to separate from… And so I had a full blown panic attack. It was debilitating. I couldn’t stop, but I also felt like I couldn’t keep riding. And then the road closed in and there were like barriers on either side. It was like a ten-lane divided highway now. The only thing I could do was keep biking. It really rattled me. And for the next morning when I tried to get back on my bike, I had to keep stopping to stop myself from shaking because I was shaking so bad from nervousness that I couldn’t hold my bike straight. That experience with seeing a dead person was incredibly haunting and did some pretty traumatic damage to my mind.

And then 15 [or] 20 days later, I’m down on the Colombia-Ecuadorian border. On the Colombia side of the border, I see a man who’s been on a motorcycle through one of these tunnels coming down a mountain, and he’s crashed and is dead. And I bike right by him. The crash happened maybe five minutes beforehand, and I felt nothing. And then the next day I saw a motorcyclist who had been hit by a semi-truck and was dead on the side of the road. And the police were pulling the sheet over his body as I biked by. And again, I felt nothing. And I had this crisis where I felt no sympathy, I had no emotions around seeing these dead people, whereas the first dead person I’d seen only a couple of weeks earlier was so visceral. And I just didn’t know what was happening to me and I felt like I was turning into a machine. I remember writing in my journal, “I just want to go home and be a happy child again and be able to experience the feeling of joy again,” because I hadn’t felt it in weeks. And I was incredibly scared that I would never experience those things again, that I was turned into a machine that could only bike and wasn’t capable of being human again.

KLUGER How did you come out of that?

ALMAND It was one of the things that I couldn’t process. I put it on a mental shelf and was like, “I need to revisit this.” Spending my days on the bike in Ecuador and Peru worrying about how I’m incapable of feeling sympathy for a dead person on the side of the road is not productive to my mission at hand. It was like, I need to unpack this, but I just can’t right now, I don’t have the bandwidth to do this. And so it just went away. I put it on the shelf and it was one of the many things I had to unpack after I was finished.

I don’t know if I ever really gave myself a sufficient answer for why I felt no emotions the second time and third time I saw a dead person and why the first time was so violent. I had been desensitized to a degree, but it still just seems to run contrary to human nature. And it was one of the things that the immediate trauma of it disappeared and it became less of an issue, whereas in the moment it was a huge problem for me. It was an irreconcilable problem — how can I consider myself a caring human and also lack any emotion to care? And then I just began to realize later that I was in such a reduced state that nothing seemed to matter anymore. My own well-being didn’t matter to me. I began to realize, how can I expect myself to care about others’ well-being if I can’t even care for my own well-being? It wasn’t a suicidal thing, it was just abject apathy to everything. Every emotion was dulled except for pain. There just wasn’t room in my mind to dwell on those things.

KLUGER You’ve alluded to hallucinations in the past. What do they entail?

ALMAND Yeah, so hallucinations and delusions started to emerge when I was around South America, because I was constantly sleep-deprived for months on end. And more than hallucinations, I had delusions.

The difference between the two is [that] a hallucination is when you see something that’s not there, and then a delusion is when something is there but then your mind turns it into something that it’s not. So for example, I would be riding in the middle of the night and maybe see a tree stump and think it’s a person. That would be a delusion. I had very few hallucinations, in terms of seeing something that absolutely wasn’t there. But the delusions became a part of riding every single day. I would see people where there were no people in the shadows.

The delusions were [a] pretty good proxy for how I was doing mentally. If I was doing very poorly mentally, the delusions would be scary. The shadow would turn into a man running towards me with a knife. And if I was doing well, the shadows would be something more fun or lighthearted. They would become animals, as opposed to people. It was a very, very direct window into my subconscious that is very unique. It’s like [how] Jimi Hendrix used to write songs when he was intentionally sleep-deprived because he thought he could reach a part of his brain that wasn’t accessible otherwise. For me, it’s similar. There [are] things I can learn about myself when I’m incredibly sleep-deprived that just aren’t accessible otherwise, but it’s also a very dangerous place to be, in terms of safety and mental processing, because your capacity and clarity for thought [are] so reduced. And your conclusions can be impactful, but they’re often meaningless. So you come to these conclusions that you think are fantastic, and they mean nothing. Just living in that state for months on end was very interesting but also pretty damaging. It just became [that] how I saw the world was through these delusions. Some people talk about having permanent hallucinogenic trips, [where] it’s like, you see the world like you’re always on some type of hallucinogenic, and after a while it just becomes the way you see the world. For me, it was very much the same. It was like these sleep deprivations [were] just these little tweaks out of the corner of my eye that [were] always there during the ride.

KLUGER I found this quote from your published journal where you write,

“Sometimes it feels like I was put on this earth to explore the wall of my bike and push myself in the process because damn, I really enjoy this more than I should.”

I’m curious about that refined sense of purpose.

ALMAND Ultra-endurance riding is objectively fucking miserable almost the entire time.

It’s really punctuated, for me at least, by extreme highs followed by extreme lows. And so when I say, “It shouldn’t be this enjoyable,” on paper, [what I mean is] I’ll write about a trip that 99 percent of the time was just miserable, or maybe even 100 percent of the time [was miserable], but I feel this magnetic force [that]I’m drawn back to doing it again. And I’m drawn back to doing it better and pushing harder. One of the questions I’m still trying to refine on the bike is, why is that?

I think I’m getting closer to the answer, and the reason that it’s so hard to answer is because there [are] like 20 different factors that I have written down that contribute to this magnetic pull to push myself farther on the bike. But when I say, “I feel like I was put on the earth to do this,” I often fall under this trap where I don’t believe in predestination — or, [that] people were “meant” to do things — but I feel like, at the same time, if I [was] supposed to be anywhere, I’m in the right spot. So I can often fall into this language of predestination, because it feels so right, even though I don’t believe in that.

For a long time, I struggled with meaning, because while I feel like I’m in the right place with my bike [now], I didn’t always feel like that. I really struggled, especially when I started training for the Pan-American, [in] reckoning with riding my bike, which is objectively a selfish thing that at the time, in my eyes, didn’t really have an impact on the world. I think you can argue that that has changed and [that] what I do on the bike now does have an impact on the world. But at the time, I really struggled with that and finding meaning because I felt like the way I found meaning in the world was [by] trying to effect positive change through climate work. I thought that was what I was going to do and what I wanted to do.

Biking didn’t really feel like it was contributing to that goal. I was thinking one day while I was riding, and I was like, well, what’s so important about what it [is] that I’m seeking? I’m seeking meaning in life, essentially. At the end of the day, that’s what everyone is seeking. That just manifests in many different forms for different people. Some people, for them, the meaning of life is just making a lot of money and maybe providing for their family and having nice things. For other people, it’s creating beautiful art or beautiful poetry. And if some person’s meaning in life is counting the blades of grass in their front yard and that’s what makes them happy, then who am I to say that they shouldn’t be doing that? There is this concept of needing to contribute to society I fell into for a long time. I think that’s a very capitalistic construction. You have a role in this machine that you have to conform [to]. I broke away from that thinking, and it allowed me to explore what gives me meaning in life, because at the end of the day, cycling is what makes me happy.

KLUGER I know you’re working on a book, so obviously you can’t spoil everything, but what is your current sense of your own motivations for your cycling?

ALMAND One piece I pulled out recently is the role my childhood had in giving me this drive to bike really far. People used to say, “Oh, what are you biking from? You must have skeletons in the closet. No one just does this.” And I was always like, “No, no, no. It’s just my love. It’s my love for this sport.” I was genuinely convinced that there was nothing in my past that had made me really susceptible to that. And then the more I thought about it, I realized that was stupid, and my childhood absolutely had a role in my desire for pain. It’s masochism, to an extent. I wouldn’t consider myself a masochist, but on paper, I seek out suffering. And that is masochism, in a way. So I looked deeper into my childhood.

On paper, I had a very standard childhood. My family is pretty well-off. I was never faced with financial hardships. I had a pretty typical, happy childhood until my parents got divorced. And then my bike became a way for me to get away from everything. When I felt like I didn’t have anywhere else to turn or anyone to talk to, I would just turn inward, and my bike kind of allowed me to truly turn inward by taking me away from everything. When my parents got divorced, I couldn’t drive yet. My only way to get from one parent’s house to the other was by biking. I went through a period of time where I didn’t talk to my mom for a couple years on end because it was a pretty messy divorce. But I was supposed to be at her house 50 percent of the time, so I’d get dropped off and then immediately get on my bike and leave. And it just became a way for me to escape. It became a very powerful tool. In a way, it became the way I saw the world. The way I was moved through the world was only my bike. It was a freedom that was unrivaled, that my brother and sister didn’t really have access to because they were younger and didn’t bike, and so it gave me this edge. And I think that [was] just subconsciously really important to me, how my bike was able to free me from these things that really were challenging to me in life. [They were] the first hardships I really ever faced, and the bike was the answer to [those] hardships. So I think that’s something I’ve pulled out recently. It’s a string I’m continuing to pull to try to understand a little bit more.

KLUGER Do you worry that in laying bare your own motivations that they will cease to motivate you?

ALMAND No, because when I lay bare my motivations they become more clear. Every time I talk about it, my mind makes connections that hadn’t been made before. Thinking about these things on the bike can get me really far, but there’s something to be said about saying them out loud. I also think even if I don’t consciously do it, [with] every person I talk to, I’m trying to spin a slightly different narrative, ] so I approach it from a slightly different angle. There’s never been a time where I’ve talked about these things in depth where it hasn’t been beneficial to me. I think if I can understand my motivations better, I can corral them and harness them to my benefit.

KLUGER Tell me about this book. I saw online you’re working with Adam Skolnick, David Goggins’s ghostwriter. Is that true?

ALMAND Yeah, he is helping me. He’s been advising me a decent bit on how to formulate my pitch and giving me feedback on some of the things I’ve written. It’s pretty fantastic to work with him a little bit and hear his feedback because he’s been in this adventure-writing space for a really long time.

I listened to David Goggins’s book Can’t Hurt Me twice during the Pan-American, somewhat satirically. But also, for all of David Goggins’s faults and all the things I disagree with him on, there [are] some things he says that resonate very deeply with me. It was interesting to listen to that book and have arguments with David Goggins in my mind.

But Adam Skolnick not only ghostwrote that book for David Goggins, but he [also] narrates the audio book. So talking to Adam Skolnick gives me crazy flashbacks to the Pan-American because his voice is very deeply tied to images of me biking through the Atacama Desert in Peru and Chile. Every time I hear the voice, I just get these flashbacks.

It’s really cool to work with him, and he has some really cool insights, especially since the other people who are reading my book are mainly Dartmouth students. When I get feedback, it tends to come from a very narrow perspective in the sense that they’re all college students who have a much different perspective on what a book should look like than perhaps Adam Skolnick [does]. So it’s a wonderful balance.

Some of the things he’s told me I really look forward to incorporating into the book. And it’s interesting to see [how for] some of the things he thinks would be beneficial for my book, I don’t know if I want that aspect in my book. I have been struggling with creating my own unique product and knowing which criticisms or suggestions to ignore and which to take. Originally, I was falling into the trap of, “This guy knows so much more about this than me, [so] everything he says, I should do.” It’s been an interesting process to not pick and choose but [instead] think really long and deep about what he has told me and take lessons from everything he has told me, but maybe not take what he has told me word for word all the time.

KLUGER How has the writing process been?

ALMAND The process has been, frankly, quite difficult. Coming into it, I was pretty naive in thinking I would just bang out this manuscript. I kept a very detailed journal during my Pan-American, which comes out to over 175,000 words when you add it all together [and] is significantly longer than you need for a book. A manuscript generally is around 80,000 words when you take it to a publisher. And so I kind of was like, “I’ll just write it over the summer. I have a three-month block.” And then I just couldn’t find my writing voice. I was writing, but I just wasn’t happy with what I was writing. It took me two months to find my voice, and then the summer was gone. Now I know how to write, but my manuscript is 20 percent done.

I’m very thankful for all the writing experience I’ve had so far, but I have very little to show for it. And now that I know how to write, it takes me an hour to write a paragraph. And I write that paragraph. It gives me a wonderful sense of fulfillment and pride in what I’ve produced, but it’s just going incredibly slowly. [I’m] trying to reorient my goals and make it less about finishing the manuscript and more about making something that I’m proud of. And that’s been a tough transition, especially as I try to move toward cycling full-time after I graduate college, because there’s not much money in cycling and there’s no money in writing a manuscript, so to do both at the same time is really difficult. It’s a balancing act that I’m having to learn about.

The bike helps a lot — I can take a passage that I’m writing and think about it while I’m biking and come back with some clarity. But sometimes, I’ll get back from a bike ride and it’ll take me like four or five hours to start writing again. So they have to exist together. I couldn’t write this book without riding at the same time, but sometimes it feels like writing while I’m riding is very detrimental. So yeah, I’m definitely still learning. Some writers talk about falling into a rhythm, and I’ve never really found that rhythm. Some days, I will write [for] 12 hours and have [produced] a ton of brilliant work, and then some days I’ll sit there for 10 hours and have nothing to show for it. I’m not one of these writers who says, “Okay, I’m going to write 2,000 words today and then I’m going to be done.” It’s, “I’m going to sit here and give it my best. And if it’s not working, I’m going to go on a bike ride.”

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