The Middle

How to keep going in pursuit of your goals

Travis Gale

• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781990931666
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Successo personale

On 1 January 1999, Travis Gale (aged 17) and Stephen Bonaconsa (aged 27) left Johannesburg on a mission to cycle across four continents and raise R1 million for children living with, and affected by HIV/AIDS in KwaZulu-Natal. They pedalled out of Johannesburg, riding mountain bikes equipped with panniers, carrying the basic requirements for an adventure. They rode unsupported. No Instagram or Facebook. It was just the two of them and the open road. The pair successfully cycled over 16 000 kilometres, across four continents, through 16 countries, raising R1.7 million for their cause.

When asked to share about his experience, Travis very rarely spends time talking about the start or the finish of the tour. The stories Travis shares are from The Middle. It's The Middle that tests us with challenges, yielding a multitude of emotions. It's The Middle that involves the raw and often painful need to dig deep, to push through the barriers that stand in our way, and show ourselves what we are capable of. The Middle is what we, as human beings, were designed for.

We can all pitch up at start lines. We can all celebrate a finish. But no finish is without a Middle and every Middle is where WHO WE ARE is revealed.

This book, The Middle, includes eight stories, drawn from eight key days of a world cycle tour, which will encourage and equip people through The Middle, the territory we must navigate in pursuit of our goals.

Keep going.

Increase momentum towards meaningful goals.

Develop grit and resilience in the midst of tough terrain.

Push through barriers that consistently get in the way.

Learn practical frameworks for making things happen.

Stretch yourself to do more than you thought possible.

Finish well!

BLOEMFONTEIN – TROMPSBURG
(SOUTH AFRICA)

123.64 KILOMETRES

Taking a break from the tough ride to Trompsburg.

We spent the first official night of our journey in the Free State town of Parys, just over the border with Gauteng. Parys is the Afrikaans translation of Paris, but it is clear that whoever named this town was not translating from a lived experience of having visited the real deal. Let’s call it an ambitious translation. Nevertheless, Parys had charm and will always be the very first town Steve and I arrived at on tour.

After just a day’s cycling we had crossed our first provincial border and we would be hosted in someone’s home for the first time. Steve had done the ride from Johannesburg to Cape Town before and understood full well that whilst pitching a tent and firing up the gas cooker was all part of the adventure, a comfortable bed, a scrumptious home-cooked meal and good company at the end of a long day on the bike made the trip just that much sweeter. He had reached out to his network and organised accommodation for us in most of the cities and towns along the way. I never grew tired of meeting new people, listening to their stories and sharing ours.

We left Parys on Day 2 and made our way, mostly through farmland, further into the Free State. We blitzed passed ostriches, cows and fields of sunflowers in full bloom. We crossed over the Tropic of Capricorn, which felt like a rite of passage for any adventurer! Of course, we took pictures. It felt good to be cruising the open road. Just four hours and 90 kilometres later we arrived in Kroonstad to spend the night with the Armstrong family.

The next morning the Armstrongs took hosting to the next level by cycling with us as we left for the small gold mining town of Virginia, a short ride of 69.95 kilometres via the back roads.

On the way there we stopped for lunch in Hennenman. A woman who had seen us on TV came to greet us and gave us R20 towards our cause. Our first official donation! It was a small dent in the grand total we looked to raise, but it was progress. She scuttled off and promptly returned with her two sons, asking if we would pose for a photograph with them. I am not sure if the boys were even interested, but their mum gamely arranged us all for the portrait, focused the 35mm instamatic film camera and snapped a pic for posterity.

I was quite moved – and I’m still not quite certain whether it was because this was our first donation or because it came from this complete stranger, a platteland Afrikaans woman with whom I had nothing in common, or both. Her spontaneous act of generosity blew wind in our sails and I felt quite chuffed that our simple daily routine of pushing a bike forward for the sake of others was inspiring enough to warrant a picture with her boys. Day 3 was a breeze and took us just over three hours.

A tail wind pushed us out of Virginia, a welcome start to a day that would see us cover 145.5 kilometres, a little more than double the distance of the day before. The roads had started to get busier as people began to return to work, facing up to another year. We also experienced our first summer storm, which meant navigating some heavy rain as we tackled the last 15 kilometres. We were only four days into our journey and already I felt as though we had had an epic adventure. We had endured sun and storm. We had crossed lines of latitude. We had met people and told our story. We had raised money towards our cause. We had settled into long stretches and found our stride on the bikes. And ahead of us was a full year of this goodness.

And then Day 5 happened.

We woke up in Bloemfontein, 438.75 kilometres from Johannesburg, ready to tackle the next 123.64 kilometres to the small farming town of Trompsburg that would take us ever closer to Cape Town.

This trip – from Bloemfontein to Trompsburg – would be our first time cycling on one of South Africa’s national highways, the N1, since leaving Johannesburg. Our departure from Bloemfontein was met by a cool breeze that swept the earth, a welcome reprieve from the sizzling heat that had accompanied us from the start of our journey. Steve and I, where possible, always left early to knock off as much distance as we could before the day warmed up. Our average speed over the past four days had been 22 kilometres per hour. We were cruising. It felt good. It was just us, our trusty steeds and the world.

As we left Bloemfontein behind us, the breeze grew a little more steadily and consistently than the days before. By the time our bikes were pointing south, we had a headwind bearing down on us exactly from where we needed to go. Today the weather was going to push back. The easy start that we had become accustomed to simply hadn’t materialised. It quickly became evident that on this day we were going to have to work hard. Very hard. The headwind continued to grow in strength and the heat rose in an unwelcome flourish.

The message from the elements seemed quite clear: ‘You two have gone far enough and we’re not on your side!’ But we had resolve and the battle was on. For the first time our legs felt weary and every kilometre passed by achingly slowly.

What really ground me down was how we were scratching for mileage. It was mentally unnerving to grit hard for an hour, pedalling with every ounce of strength, only to discover you’d cycled a mere 13 kilometres. All that work for a measly 13 kilometres! What made it worse was just how many more kilometres lay ahead. When I started doing the maths – calculating our average speed and the distance we still had left to travel – my heart sank.

At around 30 kilometres into the ride, a sense of dread washed over me. Of all the feelings I had anticipated and experienced up until then – excitement, trepidation, awe, wonderment, pride – dread was not one of them. For the first time I felt as though reaching our destination was unachievable. I was consumed with doubt. The remaining distance seemed impossible.

There had been tough moments during the first four days but they were overshadowed by the euphoria of the great adventure we had embarked on. We had been wrapped up in the epic start, the recognition, the adventure of it all. Now the toughness was being amplified.

Day 5 brought me face to face with how gruelling this tour was going to be. All my visions of grandeur were fading and being replaced by the harsh reality of what it was actually going to take to pedal a bicycle between all the exotic destinations I had spent the past few months dreaming about. Even the water in our hydration packs had not been spared the unremitting heat. I sucked the tepid liquid resentfully as I staved off dehydration. I saw very little, given my head was permanently down, avoiding the onslaught of the wind, and the dust and insects swept along by its force.

The public seemed to have developed amnesia – no, worse, apathy. Cars raced past us without a hoot or a wave. I envied their pace, their comfort – their windscreens – and their ability to get to where we were hoping to be in just a matter of minutes. We still had hours left on the road. What I would’ve given for a pat on the back and an ice-cold Coca-Cola! We were now two cyclists, heads down, pushing as hard as they could towards the goal, unsupported, unacknowledged and completely alone.

The narrative in my head began to shift. Up until then, while on the bike, I had spent most of the day thinking about what was to come. I dreamt about crossing Australia, the USA, the UK and Europe and, finally, the grand traverse down Africa. I tried to imagine the terrain we would cover. I planned the talks that we would give. I wondered about the different people we would meet, who I would encounter and what strange and interesting moments we would enjoy.

And – even though it was so far away – I would occasionally picture our homecoming. We would ride back down the very road we had pedalled out of Johannesburg, almost 365 days later, having successfully completed both the distance and the goal of raising one million rand for the children. Friends and family, possibly even some strangers, would line the streets and cheer as two rugged adventurers returned home.

On Day 5, all of that disappeared and I was left wondering whether I would even make it to the very next town.

My mind wrestled with questions.

Can I actually do this?

Was this whole thing a mistake?

Why am I here?

Will this be all that I thought it would be?

As much as I tried, I could simply not avoid the questions. This mental onslaught was as unrelenting in its intensity as the weather.

Moving forward became an even greater fight.

In that moment, pushing into the Karoo, I realised that maybe I had got caught up in a dream without truly understanding the reality of what it would take to realise it. Had I been swept up in a pipe dream? Now it was real and all of a sudden it didn’t feel good. I didn’t know if ...