Truly speaking, it was for the first time that I found myself out of my comfort zone and that too not for a day or two but seven straight days. This was the period when I watched the life going by in slow motion where the only measurement is minutes passing by, pedaling.
I, and Pardeep knew one thing, surely, that this may not happen again in our lifetime. So, we want to be makers of our own destiny this time around. After some of our friends dropped out of scheme of things, we both were more determined to go ahead without a hitch. We decided the dates, the route, the check points, stuff to be carried along on our cycles and we decided to do it all without a back up vehicle. The grit was strong enough.
This particular route, Manali to Leh is first love for adventure seekers and rightly so as it offers tremendous beauty along with challenges of different nature and level. If it was physically difficult one day, next day would test your mental toughness. There are peaks to conquer and every time you ride, the serpentine road that you see in front of you spanning over few mountains teases you and you know that you need to conquer that road, climb that ascent to reach the peak to be able to breathe easy. Every turns brings with it a hope that you have done it but that very turn also shocks you with a steep ascent that is yet to be conquered. Most of the time, the cycling was done with eyes on road just ahead of the front tyre, shoulders not down but acknowledging the competition and mind fully focused on completing the next revolution of pedaling. The nature of strain in our wrists, neck and lower back assured of one thing that we are on to something significant. The grit was strong enough.
Every time bikers, cars coming from front passes by, they salute or give thumbs up or offer water and other eatables. They knew, and we knew, we are not doing anything easy. This simple but strong gesture only lifted us and rejuvenated us for another mile. The kind of labor we needed to put in can be gauged from the fact that we used to spend the day cycling covering about 65 kms, on average, but were burning some 3000 kcal of energy daily which were almost 5 to 6 times of daily intake at the time. Every morning looked so familiar. The routine throughout was so constant that we use to get up 5 in morning, get ready by 0630 hrs and leave by 0730 hrs. We use to pedal throughout the day and generally reached our checkpoints around 1600 hrs, look for accommodation, get fresh, get dinner and go to bed by 2100 hrs. It did not matter whether the weather is hot, cold, windy with strong headwinds or rainy, sweat had become a new normal. But the grit was strong enough.
Out of seven days that we took to reach Leh, almost 04 days were without any evidence of mobile network so there was no way of getting in touch with each other, let alone the rest of world. This exclusiveness with ourselves, on one side, gave us a chance to know ourselves even better in different circumstances but also blocked us from relaxing mentally by talking to our loved ones at home. We were not ready for this exclusiveness and the impact it can have on us. But the grit was strong enough.
We ticked one of our things to do in these seven days but are equally thankful to the nature that it gave us a chance to go on this expedition. The weather remained favorable throughout, the cycle did not ditch and the people we met were just awesome and seemed like planted everywhere to make our expedition great and successful. Before we took this on, many famous sayings were simple lines for us but as we did this, we came to understand the real meaning. One such quote that become the completely defines our cycle expedition:
Grit is having the courage to push through, no matter what the obstacles are, because it’s worth it.
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