The heat has done us in.  In this quest to push our physical boundaries we’ve found our limits.  I now know I can ride 40+ miles in 90 degree, high humidity heat if it’s relatively flat and there’s a breeze.  I cannot climb hills, day after day, in the same heat, humidity, and direct sun.  As much as I’m loath to admit it, it’s beyond my physiological limits.

It began two weeks ago, in the low, rolling hills outside of Mazatlan.  It was the start of the section of our journey that both Kelly and I had been the most worried about since we began planning over a year ago – a 3 month expanse of high temperatures and high humidity from mainland Mexico until we reached the highlands of Colombia.  In our planning we had hinged the success of The Long Road South on the adaptability of the human body.  For the first 2,500 miles of the trip, our bodies responded to the stress we placed on them better than we could have hoped.  Kelly’s legs got used to moving an additional 120lbs of weight on her bike.  My arms slowly adapted to churning up multi-mile climbs.  Both of us became accustomed to riding for hours upon hours, often 40-50 miles or more (our longest day to date was a 69 miler), day after day.  But entering mainland Mexico, we felt like we were starting all over.  Kelly dreads the heat and I simply don’t function in it.  I’d hoped my body would acclimate.  As we kept pushing south, towards Manzanillo and some rest with my parents, into bigger hills and ever-muggier weather, both Kelly and I started struggling more and more.  My body was trying to shut itself down, which forced Kelly to shoulder an even heavier load of our daily tasks.  The breaking point came as we pushed our last two days into Manzanillo.  I’ll take you there now…

We stop for a bite to eat in the meager shade of a roadside oak.  We’re at the top of a climb, the third 500 footer in the past 10 miles, but there’s no breeze.  Even in the shade the stagnant humidity rests on my skin like a blanket.  35 miles into the day and another 12 to go.  So far we’ve been lucky.  Through a constant flow of rollers, some high some low, but all feeling steep to my arms that’ve been heavier than normal for the past few days, dark clouds have kept the worst of the heat at bay.  But now, at 1pm, they’ve finally blown through and the full force of the sub-tropical sun is beating down.  Over the past 3 months I’ve gotten pretty good at suffering; pain and exhaustion are familiar companions on this journey.  But the past few days have been different.  The signs have been creeping in that my body is trying to shut itself down in this heat - headaches, insatiable thirst, fatigue that doesn’t break after multiple rest days.  Now the strength seems to be leaching out of my arms.  Kelly and I eat some animal crackers and down some coffee.  She goes to refill the pressurized water tank that runs to a spray nozzle pointed at my face.  One of the connections has been leaking so I’m going through a tank in 7-8 miles when it’s this hot out.  More stops mean more time in the heat.  More refills mean one more thing for Kelly to do during our time on the side of the road as we try to nurse my body through the heat.  When she just wants to be sitting in the shade, resting her legs, she’s up filling bottles, refilling my tank, grabbing food for us to eat.  For her, the rest is no rest at all. 

It’s time to move or we’ll never make it to Punta Perula, to the hope of a bed and some air conditioning.  We start down a sizeable descent, the wind whistling some relief, and I find that I can’t concentrate.  Kelly’s back wheel, my brake, steering round a bend, thick vegetation whipping by at 35mph, I can only lock my attention to one thing at a time.  My brain keeps trying to reach for the dozen other things I need to process while descending but it feels like my thoughts are caught in a hamster wheel that’s spinning too fast.  Blood sugar? I think.  Could my blood sugar be dropping too quickly?  I try a mental systems check.  No, nothing else feels like blood sugar.  But what else could this be?  The terrain levels out and I have to start pedaling, but the world still feels like it’s moving in fast forward.  I try to pedal through.  Just keep moving and it’ll get better, I tell myself.  But it doesn’t.  “Can you look for a spot to pull over?” I yell ahead to Kelly. “I need to check my blood sugar.” 

Thinking it’s urgent Kelly pulls off where’s there’s an angled concrete ditch.  “Pull down in there and I’ll come to you,” she says.  I don’t process what she’s saying and pull right next to her bike.  “What are you doing?” she asks, exasperated.  “I’m still out in the road, why the hell didn’t you get off the shoulder?”

I have no idea what she’s talking about.  “I…” I start to respond and find myself grasping for words.  “cannot…process…anything right now.  I don’t…know what the hell’s going on.  But…I…need instructions.” 

“Okay.” She goes into action mode.  “Can you pedal a little farther to find a better spot.

“Yes.”

She pulls back onto the road and finds a shady pullout a quarter mile down the road.  She grabs my meter and I check my blood sugar.  Not low, high.  Higher than normal, higher than it should be, but not high enough to be causing serious issues.  This is worse than being low.  At least being low would explain my spinning mind.  “It’s not my blood sugar.” I say.  I’m worried.  I feel like I’ve ridden myself crazy.  Kelly pulls out the thermometer and I check my temperature: 100.8.  The messed up thing is that this doesn’t even seem that high. 101-102 degree temps have been common since we entered heat and humidity of mainland Mexico. We didn’t know it at the time, but for the past few days I’ve been exhibiting many of the signs of heat exhaustion.  Having quadriplegia, with a compromised thermo-regulatory system and the inability to sweat obviously exacerbates my susceptibility to heat-related illnesses.  Having Diabetes makes me even more susceptible.  Now, I’m creeping closer to heat stroke.  If I wasn’t so confused, I’d realize that our trek through Mexico and Central America is going to be much shorter than we’d hoped.

The confusion and hamster wheel head start to dissipate after about 10 minutes.  They’re replaced by a profound fatigue.  It’s 89 degrees in the shade, but I feel like I could fall asleep sitting in my bike.  “You want to get out and lay down?” Kelly asks. 

“No,” I respond.  I’m afraid if I lay down I won’t be able to move when I get up.  Heat exhaustion or not, we still have an 850ft climb and 10 or so miles to go before we’re somewhere we can sleep for the night.  Riding there is our only option.

We make it to the top, but by the time we get there I can barely move my arms.  Cresting the hill the breeze returns and soon we’re flying at 35mph the last few miles to Punta Perula.  As soon as it flattens out Kelly starts pedaling and quickly puts a 100m gap between us.  I pedal but no power is going into the cranks.  She slows and we limp into town.

The next day is supposed to be easier.  Only 32 miles to Manzanillo, maybe less (nothing is as straightforward as it seems down here), only a few climbs between 250 and 550 feet.  But there are no clouds in the morning.  I do fine climbing until the heat descends at 9am.  Then my power evaporates as quickly as the spray on my skin.  We have a descent shoulder, which means no shade.  By 10am my temperature is 101.  Kelly refills my spray tank and I struggle 3 miles to the next town with cold water.  One day at a time transitions to 100 meters at a time.  I can’t think of anything but cooling off.

A few hours later we make it to the condo my parents have rented for Christmas near Manzanillo.  We cool off.  We drink some beer.  We recount our past few days to my parents.  Hearing the struggles and symptoms out loud makes us realize how dangerous this riding has become. With no relief for three months, until we get to the mountains of Colombia, we decide to look at our options.

The Long Road South is now going to be shorter.  Slightly.  On January 8th we’re getting on a plane and flying to Bogota, Colombia.  We’re exchanging southern Mexico and Central America for the high-altitude Andes.  Most of the distance we’ll lose by flying to Bogota, we’ll make up in southern Patagonia. We’ll spend a week in Bogota, acclimatizing to the 8,500ft altitude.  Since we’ll now be months ahead of our original schedule, we’re going to push to ride the length of South America, covering 6,300 miles to Tierra del Fuego and the end of the road: Ushuaia, Argentina. Instead of dreading the next three months, Kelly and I are excited about the riding.  Another ten days of resting our bodies and minds, of hanging with my parents in Mexico, then it’s time to get back to work.  We still have a long way to go. 

Thank you, again, for your continued support.  It has kept us going as our struggles have threatened to overwhelm the trip.  There’s no way we could’ve been able to make it this far without you.

It feels a bit weird getting off your bike for a while after you've been on it for 6+ hours a day, six days a week for 2 1/2 months.  While Kelly and I vacationed with her parents along the Sea of Cortez, everything felt amazing - plenty of  sleep, and leisurely mornings sipping coffee on our beachside patio, American football on a pirated Canadian satellite feed, a full kitchen and home cooking.  We'd gone from spartan days cycling across the desert to a comfortable facsimile of home.  After three days I forgot all about the irrepressible fatigue I'd felt on the stretch from Guerro Negro to Posada Concepcion.  On that second peninsula crossing, I'd dreaded getting on my bike in the morning for the first time on this trip.  My arms felt leaden and the morning sleepiness that normally burns off after a few miles of riding would haunt me throughout the day.  It was for that fatigue that Kelly and I decided to take an extended rest when her parents came down. For those first few days, the rest felt as wonderful as it always does.  But in the middle of our vacation I'd find myself exhausted for no discernible reason, I felt foggy most days, and my muscles more sore than they'd been since the first days of the trip.  Out of the rhythm of riding, my body was finally letting itself recover and it didn't feel good.  Kelly was in the same boat, but getting to spend so much time with her parents made everything a little easier.  She'd wake at 6am to chat with her mom over a cup of coffee and leave me passed out in bed.  I did not complain.

When our vacation was up, and Kelly's parents had to fly back to Ohio, we packed our bikes on top of their rental Durango and took a ride to La Paz.  We made a conscious decision to sacrifice our final stretch of the Baja (259 miles and third desert crossing) to the internal combustion engine.  The rational was this: we needed the rest. We couldn't take more than a few days without getting far behind schedule.  Behind schedule we'd have to wear ourselves right back down to catch up. This is the problem with trying to cycle 10,500 miles and having a hard deadline to finish: most decisions yield to an unforgiving calendar.  Both Kelly and I knew we'd made the right decision for ourselves and for our journey, but as we started down the road from Loreto I couldn't help but feel a cheater.  Sitting in the air-conditioning, speeding along at 100km an hour, floating up a twisting mountain road like gravity wasn't really that powerful after all, devouring chunks of desert in 45 minutes that would take us a long, hard day to ride, it was luxurious and foreign and made me grumpy as hell.  Gone was reading minor wind shifts, analyzing terrain, monitoring what effort was sustainable, smelling a change in environment before I could see it, or having a continual conversation with my body.  Instead it felt like were in a sealed capsule with the only purpose of getting from A to B.  It reinforced my appreciation for what makes traveling by bike valuable.

Unfortunately, our arrival in La Paz was only the start of a stretch of motorized transport for us.  Our plan had been to ride the 18 miles from La Paz to the ferry terminal and catch a boat to Mazatlan. Problem was that all the ferries to Mazatlan were booked clear through to January.  While this seemed a bit fishy, we weren't about to wait around an extra day for a boat and not be able to get on.  The only other option was to take a boat back north to Topolabampo and then load our huge pile of gear onto a bus to get down to Mazatlan.  Suffice to say, by the time we made it to Mazatlan we were fully ready to get back into the rhythm of riding and see what mainland Mexico had to offer.

Getting out of town was a shit-show as bad as Tijuana.  It felt like a different country compared to our past few weeks on the Baja. Here there were a helluva lot more people, and they were in a hurry.  Schwan compared it to riding through Kansas, then getting dropped in the middle of Manhattan on your bikes and having find your way out.  But find our way out we did, and soon we were out amongst the fields and farms and marveling at the greenery.  Plants that aren't thornbrush and cacti!  Look, this bridge has actual water underneath it!  That side road is actually paved!  It was all very exciting.

The road cut inland, amongst the low foothills of the Sierra Madres and we were confronted by the force of the mainland heat.  We rode 47 miles the first day, then 57, then 52.  We didn't want to ride that far but there was nowhere else to stay.  The roadside was thick brush and standing water, bugs,  furry white jumping spiders, and 2-3inch diameter snake carcasses.  Not exactly anywhere to pitch a tent.  We'd wake at 4:00am to be loaded and riding at sunrise.  A few hours of pedaling before it became too uncomfortable, longer breaks when the sun was out in force.  It was a good thing we'd rested, because the heat exhausted us like the steepest mountains.  After three days we made it to Tuxpan, and the only place we could find to stay was the shittiest motel Kelly and I have seen yet.  Grime smeared walls, toilet with no seat, the sheets and floors were clean but the mattress puffed dust and dirt that could've hid all manner of bugs when Kelly pressed it.  So we laid our sleeping pads and bag on the tile and cooked outside.  I tried to write. "Writing from the shittiest hotel we've had yet.  Last option though.  Rode 52 through some brutal heat," was as far as I made it before my eyes got the dry scratchiness that means I need to close them and focusing long enough to transfer thoughts from head to paper became near impossible.

At 6:45 the next morning we were bumping through the motel's  courtyard, over cast stones that ride worse than cobbles.  The traffic was already heavy: those who have cars speeding to work, those who don't walking in single-file groups along the roadside.  It was already 70 degrees when we left town and headed back into the minor foothills of the Sierras.  It was our first climbing of noticeable length since we hit the mainland.  The heat came early, and by 9:20 we'd stopped at a Pemex, Mexico's national oil company's gas station, for cold water to dump on our heads.  So the day became a series of leaps between shade and water stops.  94 degrees by 10:30, topping out at 96 about noon.  I've never seen Kelly so hot, her face red and dripping with sweat like mine after a spray.  Perversely, seeing Kelly's struggles bouyed my spirits.  Knowing she was that hot made my perceived suffering seem justified.  For her part, Kelly did an amazing job not getting grumpy from the heat, resigned as she was to the inescapability of it (although she can sweat, Kelly has a profound hatred of the heat). On we rode.

Our fortunes have improved immeasurably since then. I'm finishing this post on the tail end of two days of rest that we've earned from our 4 long days of riding.  We've been eating delicious meals in a sleepy little beach town and lounging by the pool and in the courtyard of our wonderful hotel - an old rail building dating to 1883.  Life swings pretty quickly from pleasure to pain when your on a trip like this, gotta enjoy the good stuff while you have it.

When Alejandro Bukovecz speaks of his father, Antulio, his eyes glow and an irrespresable grin spreads over his face.  It's the same grin in the weathered photo he has placed on the table for us to see.   In the photo, the grin is framed by wrinkly cheeks, sun-browned to the color of tanned leather.  The eyes are shaded by a baseball cap but still squint against the bright light of a Baja afternoon.  "He was always smiling," Alejandro says.  "That's just how he was, no matter how he was doing, or how hard things were, he always had the same smile on his face."

Looking beyond the smile, Anutulio sits atop a boxy metal frame painted orange.  The orange steel extends in front of him to a headtube that attaches a bicycle crank assembly, chain, and 20" front wheel with a knobby tire.  A stringy leg straddles one side of the wheel, and on the other, a fleshy stump rests just behind the edge of his shorts.  

Anutulio was a life-long bicyclist and racer before he was in a car accident out in the desert near Cataviña.  Losing one leg and most of the function in the other, Antulio languished in the hospital.  "I'll never forget the first time I saw him after the accident," Alejandro says. "He was sitting in his hospital room looking out the window and he looked like a bird in a cage.  He looked so sad!  Like all of the life had been drained out of him.  I mean his skin looked yellow! He says to me, 'I need you to talk to a welder.  I have an idea for a tricycle.'"

I smile as Alejandro shakes his head in wonder.  It's a mindset that I can identify with.  For an active person, a debilitating accident leaves you feeling like the foundation of your life has been suddenly stripped away.  Your most fundamental connection to the world, the ability to move through it, has been severed.  At that point, there are only two real options - to despair or to figure out new ways of moving.  Antulio decided to get moving again.  

So he began designing, and with Alejandro's help, fabricating his own handcycles.   I suppose no one told him what he could or couldn't do now that he had a disability, or perhaps more likely, he was too stubborn to listen.  But Antulio started riding his new bike like he had before - 100 kilometers a day, often riding 8 days from Mulegé to Ensenada, then back again.  Anutulio toured without calling it touring, he was simply going for rides and they took him across Mexico.  With a modicum of tools and supplies strapped to the back of his bike he would ride, for days, weeks at a time.  Sleeping behind roadside bushes, underneath highway bridges on sandy arroyos, he lay wherever he needed to. 

One time, he had ridden all the way across Mexico, and was passing through Veracruz when a big para-cycling race was about to take place.  Antulio had raced before his accident and decided to try it again.  Riding his homemade trike, with his tools and gear still strapped to the back, he finished second in his classification behind Mexico's reigning national champion.  Antulio figured he could have beat everyone if he hadn't had to change his own tire mid-race.  "That was fun," Antulio told the champion. "I'll come back next year and beat you."

And he did.  Antulio, the wrinkled man in his 60's, won the event for the next few years.  The former champion complained that Antulio had too many gears in his handcycle.  "Next year I'll bring another bike, you can race in that, and I'll still  beat you," Antulio responded.

We show Alejandro my handcycle and he revels in the similarities to the bikes he helped his dad build, marvels at the fancy new materials.  Alejandro ask how far we're going."Argentina," I say.  

He puffs his breath out in a silent whistle.  "That's great," he says.  "The farthest my dad made it was to the border with Guatemala.  He always wanted to go all the way down there, but we'd tell him, 'No, no. It's too far, it's too dangerous. '"  For the first time since he started talking about his dad, a brief look of sadness, or maybe remorse, passes over his face.  "But I think he could have done it."