"To grasp (in each thing) that there is a limit and that without supernatural help that limit cannot be passed – or only by very little and at the price of a terrible fall afterwards."
-Simone Weil, Void and Compensation
Lights are blinking and asynchronous pings are relaying between trackers and satellites right now. They refresh roughly every 10 minutes, or 1/14,000 the speed of a video camera. With each ping a new ‘frame’, image, allusion towards movement, or stasis is generated on a screen somewhere. A live experience, happening before your eyes, slowly and delayed only by the heavens (clouds). Sport as slow cinema.
When I began my project of pedaling The Divide as fast as my body allowed, I rejected wholesale the aura and mythos that surrounded it and promulgated the discipline's aversion to cameras. Narratives about autonomy reject the realities of interdependence that make all dances with previously known limits possible.
It would be presumptuous to claim what the cast of characters who lined up in Banff to race the Tour Divide this Friday the 13th seek. Even more so to guess what they may find. All that’s shared is the force that impels one towards the void, not the inciting incidents that spurred the desire. But, asserting that they are, in fact, wandering down this scraggly line from Canada to Mexico in search of something is a claim one can make with confidence.
Did we do a good job with this story?