Day 14: Las Animas to Pueblo, CO

Two weeks into our 10 week journey…it is amazing how fast time flies! Today we rode from Las Animas to Pueblo, CO, and I dedicated my ride to a couple I was talking to last night at dinner whose family members had been affected by various types of cancer. My hosts last night were awesome and this morning gave me a souvenir—a Colorado license plate. The kids had signed the back, and they wrote a note to remind me they would be thinking of me on the journey. It is going on my wall when I get back to Austin! All of the host families stuck around as we packed the trailer this morning and then we had a police escort out of town. The ride today was great. There was relatively little wind and I rode with a pack of six or eight other riders the whole day. We arrived this afternoon around 2:30p in Pueblo…just before a few angry looking clouds. The sun seems to have peaked back out without raining though and the forecast is for a beautiful day tomorrow. Tonight a Texas 4000 alum, his girlfriend, her family and some other friends will be feeding us dinner. We will actually be meeting up with several alum in the next few days, and I am excited to have a two-way conversation with them…up to this point, they have been telling all the stories and we have been asking all the questions. Now we have our own stories to share though! We also lost a rider today (temporarily). The rider I mentioned earlier who had hurt is ankle actually broke a couple bones and he got a ride into Denver this morning from one of our hosts last night. He’s going ahead to see a doctor and figure out what needs to be done to get him back to health, and he’s planning to meet back up with us before we leave Colorado. We’ll be seeing him in a couple days though when we get to Denver. Other Texas 4000 alum in the Denver area have been keeping in contact with us and offering to help. People say that you grow very close to your teammates during the Texas 4000 journey, but an equally important connection is made between all of us and the alum. Personally I have received a lot of very useful advice from them, but maybe more importantly, they have given me a support network who will laugh with me about how difficult it is to get 20 twentysomethings moving.

I have been having a lot of interesting and sometimes random conversations while on the bike, but also had plenty of time to get lost in my own thoughts. I’m the oldest person on the team and in a PhD program, so if anyone should know what they want to do with their life, it should be me. But honestly, I don’t know. My teammates have asked me what I want to do when I’m done with school and my response every time is that it depends on the day, but all of the options are related. They include some combination of academia, research and clinical practices. This may seem like a broad range of categories, but I study how people walk, so its actually feasible to want (and obtain) all of the above at the same time. Last spring, I worked in the Kinesiology Department at the University of Hawaii (which has graduate programs in athletic training) and a friend there told me early on that he thought even if I never became an athletic trainer, I would like the knowledge that I would have. He’s absolutely correct. I never considered doing anything clinically related in the past because I just didn’t like blood. After watching a bunch of surgeries though, I realized that blood didn’t really scare me at all. I fully admit that I have issues with modern medicine, but working in a hospital for the last year or so and the experiences I have had on this trip so far have (are) driven home the usefulness of modern medicine. When my rider fell the other day, I asked him a couple questions and based on his responses, I had a gut instinct that it was broken. He wanted nothing to do with the doctor and wanted to wait for a couple days to see if the swelling subsided. He repeatedly asked me what the time lines were for breaks vs. sprains, which having known enough people who have done that before I have a general idea. After telling him this though, I heard myself telling him that the only way to know for sure what his timeline for recovery would be was to get an x-ray ad see if it was broken. From someone who again has had issues with doctors, I was kind of shocked to hear myself recommending this right off the bat. Maybe even more importantly though was the feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was helpless to help him more. Yes, I may have had some intuition, but I have no clinical training to help someone…and I would like that. I took a leap of faith leaving my PhD program in oceanography, and some days I miss it. However, I feel like many of the experiences in my past and present have been directing me to do something that involves health issues and interacting with people combined with problem solving and constant change. At the risk of anyone thinking I want to leave my current PhD program, don’t worry, I don’t want to leave it. For the last year, I have been working with PT-PhDs, ATC-PhDs and a bunch of research-minded MDs, who have enabled me to see the interaction between research and the clinic. No decision on where to go from here has to (or will) be made immediately, but I’ve been eyeing an MD/PhD program offered through my current department for about a year and have definitely considered PT and ATC program. My experiences on this ride—from the little questions I get regularly about stretching and nutrition to the big questions about broken bones—are speaking to me, and they are saying things consistent with things I have been thinking about a long time.