A Pair of Books by Women Cycling the Globe

This is a Golden Age of Cycling Books.  There are so many it is hard to keep up with them. Two of the latest are by thirty-year old women with troubled upbringings who take off to travel the world on their bikes.  Both are much more than travelogues, not only with their back stories, but also with one featuring a dog and the other an attempt to qualify for the Guinness Book of World Records.

In “Saving Lucy” Ishbel Rose Holmes intersperses her travels with a dog through Turkey with reflections on growing up with foster parents in Great Britain who had no love for her, only taking her on for the compensation they received from the government. They tire of her rebelliousness and when she runs away won’t let her bsck. She gets around on a bicycle and discovers a talent for racing, developing into a national caliber rider. With her Iranian heritage she has the choice of riding for Great Britain or Iran.  She alternates between the two.

After a crash that shattered her carbon fiber frame she begins seeing a British team psychiatrist who makes persistent sexual advances. After reporting him she decides to leave her racing life behind and take up a new one as a touring cyclist at the age of 34.  Five months into her travels while in Turkey she is befriended by a stray dog who she can’t escape. Ishbel resists her initially.  She’s on a tight budget with barely the funds to feed herself. But she comes to accept the dog’s company, carrying her for spells in a box she attaches to her handlebars and then in a trailer that one of the many people who are following her on Facebook brings over from England.  She relies heavily on her Facebook coterie, who send her funds and find places for her to stay and come to her assistance when she’s in seemingly dire straits.  

Lucy becomes the best friend she’s ever had and gives her a sense of family for the first time. She becomes a body guard, fending off unsavory characters.  Ishbel is regularly pestered by highly aggressive men wanting sex.  It is a relief when a truck driver who gives them a ride doesn’t make any demands.  Their ride along the coast of Turkey takes them through Adana.  

I  wasn’t surprised in the least when my friend Zekriya, an ardent cyclist and English professor at the local college, turns up in chapter seventeen, as I well know he’s the most clued in cyclist in all of Turkey.  He’d caught wind of her on Facebook and arranged for her to stay with some of his students and to speak to his class, just as he did for me.  When I emailed Zekeriya about his appearance in the book, it was the first he had heard of it. He sent along a photo of Ishblel and Lucy in his class and said she had a dynamic personality as comes across in the book.  Her story was so compelling and writing so polished that VeloPress, that specializes in books on racing, decided to publish it, even though it had just minimal references to her racing past. 

Unlike Ishbel, Juliana Buhring had very limited experience on the bike when she decides to ride her bike around the world.  When a friend she had a close bond with dies while kayaking in the Congo she is devastated.  She is living in Italy at the time.  A friend suggests they bicycle across Canada as a means of solace.  Rather than that she gets it in to her head to bicycle around the world and to do it in record time.   She learns from Guinness that one must ride at least 18,000 miles, the equivalent of the earth’s circumference at the equator and that one’s mileage can not include any backtracking.  She begins training and then hires a coach. He’s impressed by her strength, but is shocked she’s been riding in running shoes.  He tells her to get cleats.

Though she’s a novice cyclist, she’s not a novice writer, as she had written a book, “Not Without My Sister,” about growing up in the Children of God cult.  It was a most harrowing experience, that she didn’t manage to part from until she was 23.  She was born in Greece in 1981 to a German mother and Welsh father who were full devotees of the cult.  She lived in 30 countries during that time, mostly apart from her parents at various training centers full of children her age getting programmed.   Her bicycling book “This Road I Ride” regularly flashes back to her time in the cult, particularly when she cycles through India and Thailand where she had spent time. 

Unlike Ishbel she is traveling very light without sleeping bag or tent or even panniers, just a handlebar bag and another jutting out from her saddle.  She’s riding a light carbon fiber bike her local bike shop gave her.  Along the way she has to replace the carbon spoke nipples with stronger ones when they keep breaking.  She needs to average 125 miles a day for five months to meet her goal of doing it in 150 days.  The men’s record in 2012 when she undertook her ride was 92 days.  Initially Guinness told her that even though there was no women’s record, they wouldn’t acknowledge one unless it were done in 150 days or less.  They changed their edict to 175, but Julianna still wanted to attempt 150.  She trains for eight months before setting out. Her start is delayed as she tries unsuccessfully to find sponsorship.  Her delay forces her to head west from her starting point in Naples, rather than east as she preferred, meaning she’ll have to contend with headwinds across the US and Australia.  They are a bane, but she still manages to maintain the average she needs to meet her goal.

Like Ishbel she takes great advantage of Facebook for assistance. One reader pays for her flight from Portugal to the US.  In New Zealand when her money has nearly run out she sends out an alert that she might have to abandon her ride.  The funds come pouring in.  She even accepts the piggy bank  savings of seven- and ten-year old brothers in New Zealand.  What she refers to as “Road Angels” regularly come to her rescue.  One was in Turkey, a driver who fended off a pack of dogs that was after her. She didn’t suffer the sexual harassment Ishbel did in Turkey,  as she lopped off the eastern two-thirds of the country, flying in to Ankara from India. 

Not camping, she was spared many of the frights that Ishblel endured.  The only times she felt threatened by men were in Thailand and India when guys on motorcycles seemed to be stalking her.  It wasn’t necessarily a male-female issue, as I had similar experiences in both countries by guys who were just intensely curious.  It was a particular bane for me in India, especially by cyclists who just wanted to feast their eyes on an object rhey may never have seen before, sticking to my wheel for miles and miles without uttering a word.   Like Juliana, whenever I stopped I was swarmed by men of all ages who just stood and stared.  It was unsettling enough for Juliana that a friend from Italy flew over to drive with her as support.  Her greatest “angel” though was Antonio back in Naples, who she communicated with constantly.  He would find hotels and bike shops for her and whatever other needs arose, including urging her on when she wasn’t sure she wanted to continue.

She doesn’t dwell much on the nitty-gritty details of her ride, rather the many heart-warming encounters she has along the way.  There is no tension about her trying to break a record, since there is none, or trying to do it in under 80 days as one guy attempted.  She doesn’t harp on being in a rush. Or having the time to spend with friends, as she does meet up with many along the way, including a few fellow refugees from the cult.  Her only hint of being obsessive about saving time is the complaint of how much time she loses compared to men when having to take a leak.  It’s not as easy for her to just do it along the road, frequently having to find a “loo.”  The worst experience of her journey was failing to find a toilet in time in India when she was having digestive problems.  She laments, “I have crapped myself like a baby at 31 years of age.”

She takes issue with the many people on Facebook who commend her for being “extraordinary.”  At the start of her trip she was labeled as “crazy” for her attempt.  She doesn’t regard herself as crazy or extraordinary.  Days and days on the bike can breed humility, though in some, the opposite. The truly enlightened touring cyclist acknowledges that anyone can ride vast distances.  Not all could do it though in the time that she did.  She defines the extraordinary as something ordinary people can do with just a little extra effort.  She had plenty of that, though she asks, “Who am I? Nobody important, nobody special, nobody especially talented or athletic.”  

She completes her ride in152 days, a record that has twice been broken, two years later by eight days, and then this past summer down to 124 days. Juliana has continued as an endurance athlete, while Ishblel maintains life as a touring cyclist.  Ishbel  took time to write her recently published book while biking in Brazil.  Julians’s book has been on book shelves since 2016, but was another of those I came late to.  I know there are many more out there to find.  Both these were so breezily written and at just over 200 pages could  be read in a single sitting, just about half the length of Juliana’s first book.  They are a fine addition to the canon of cycle touring books.