“Physically you are ready,” he told me in June. “I cannot do any more to prepare you.”
I may have been physically ready, but I was completely unprepared in every other way. I still had not found a sponsor, which was hardly surprising, as nobody believed I would make it all the way around. And why would anyone invest in almost inevitable failure? I had originally intended to set off in April but delayed my departure in the hope of securing funding that never arrived. I could feel my resolve weakening as each day ticked by. If I didn’t leave soon, I knew I never would. So ready or not, I chose July 23 as my departure date and vowed to stick to it.
Then on July 11 I received an email from Guinness World Records, informing me of a change in the rules.
Dear Record Attempter,
We are writing you to let you know that after much discussion within the Guinness World Records Records Management Team (RMT) regarding the records for “fastest circumnavigation by bicycle, true,” (male) and (female), Guinness World Records has decided it will now recognize records only for full trip duration (including transfers, rest time, etc.) and not specifically for cycling time only.
As no female record has been set in this category, there is no previous attempt to surpass. However, the time requirement acceptable for any successful first attempt is now 150 days, with a minimum total distance cycled of 18,000 miles (28,970 km) and the total distance traveled by the participant exceeding an equator’s length, i.e. more than 24,900 miles (40,075 km).
This decision was made after much deliberation and discussion internally within Guinness World Records and with external consultants. We feel this decision will add more uniformity to all attempts and also maintain the spirit of circumnavigation records, aligned with the remainder of our database.
We apologize for any inconvenience, but thank you for your understanding and wish you luck with your record attempt!
I was floored. It made no sense. None of the men’s records had been completed in less than 150 days’ cycling time—let alone total time, including transits, which was what Guinness was now demanding. So why were they imposing this new stringent time constraint for the first women’s record? I could only surmise that whoever had written the new rules either did not know what they were talking about, or that women were being held to higher physical standards than their male predecessors. In order to ride eighteen thousand miles within the new time frame, I would have to cycle, on average, almost 125 miles every day. There would be no rest days. And I would have to catch the earliest possible flight whenever I arrived at an airport, and begin pedaling the moment I collected my bike from the carousel.
I emailed Guinness, asking for the reasoning behind a rule change that seemed to apply solely to my attempt. Receiving no reply, I called both the UK and US headquarters and was passed around between a number of officials within the organization. Nobody could give me a straight answer. It appeared that 150 days had been chosen simply because it was a nice round figure that sounded good to someone who had no idea what it signified in reality.
Apparently, though, I was not the only one kicking up a fuss about the rule change. A week later, just five days before my scheduled departure date, I received a second email:
Dear Record Attempter,
After many enquiries and comments from participants (both male and female) regarding the time established for the female category of 150 days being too difficult, we at Guinness World Records have decided to change it to 175 days or less.
Thank you and good luck with your record attempt!
Yours sincerely,
Guinness World Records
At least this was more realistic and gave me a bit of breathing room in case of sickness or missed flights. The obstinate side of me could not let it go, though. If they wanted 150 days, then that was the target I would set myself. However, to achieve it, I would need a new strategy.
I decided to change from the comfortable but heavy hybrid I’d been training on to an ultra-lightweight carbon-fiber road bike. I would need to clock up maximum mileage in the shortest possible time. If I wanted the record, I would have to fly. Everything had to be light and aerodynamic. “Can you build me a bike that weighs no more than fifteen pounds?” I asked Mario. Working with Mauro, he designed and built a sleek white machine whose frame weighed in at just fifteen pounds.
I ditched the bike rack and the big saddlebags and ordered a small, light pack that attached directly under the seat, shaped like the abdomen of an insect. I planned to carry only the most basic essentials, aiming for a total weight of just forty-four pounds, so I had to pack smart. My saddlebag held a change of cycling clothes, two pairs of socks, a rain jacket, a pair of gloves, a T-shirt, mid-calf-length trousers, and a small toiletry bag containing deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, sunblock, and face cream. The middle frame bag was packed with tools, spare tubes, and other maintenance items. Finally a small handlebar bag held a first aid kit, medicine, and vitamins. A GPS Spot tracker attached to the bike frame would send regular updates of my speed, mileage, and current location to the website I had set up. This would allow Antonio to track my progress even if I was out of phone range. To reduce the risk of that, I would carry two phones with me: a strong, clunky little Nokia with my usual Italian number, and a smartphone that I would use with a local SIM card from whichever continent or country I was traveling through at the time.
Any number of problems, mechanical breakdowns, weather changes, or other unforeseeable events could ruin a day’s ride, which meant that booking flights or accommodations more than a day or two in advance was impossible. Each day would be a fresh adventure, and I would never know exactly where I would end up that night.
My original route plan had been to head east, toward Asia, which had been the direction chosen by almost every other world cyclist. Apparently the winds tend to be more favorable in the direction of the earth’s rotation. But the delays to my departure meant it now made more sense for me to head west and hit North America first. Given the choice between cycling through the Asian monsoon or into a headwind, I chose the latter.
Just a few weeks prior to my final departure date, I had still raised only around four thousand euros for the journey. The majority had been donated by a few close friends as well as Antonio and his partners from the Hickory. Most of my online supporters, who followed my preparations and offered to meet me on the road or put me up along the way, were people who, like me, had been born and raised in cults. We call ourselves “ex-kids.”
I grew up in the notorious religious cult called the Children of God. It was founded in 1968 by a failed preacher who gathered together a motley following of disillusioned hippies in Huntington Beach, California, by preaching “revolution for Jesus” and “let’s break away from the system.” My parents’ generation had wanted freedom from society, so they set about building their own utopia, then, ironically, imprisoned themselves and their children inside it. By the time I was born in 1981, the cult had spread to over one hundred countries and it boasted forty thousand “members,” at least half of whom were children born and raised within the group. My childhood was an isolated existence spent behind high walls, in a world dominated by rules, restrictions, nos, don’ts and you-musts. My future was meticulously planned and preordained, my own desires and dreams sacrificed for the greater good of the group. Born into my parents’ one-size-fits-all solution to life’s problems, over time I naturally came to question their version of truth.
A utopian society works only when everybody shares the same aspirations, and the larger the population grows, the more unlikely that becomes. Thus, to control dissenters, the society becomes a dystopian dictatorship. I was quickly branded a rebel, and rebels never fare well in someone else’s utopia. For this crime, I underwent a multitude of punishments in an attempt to “retrain me”—in other words, to break my mind and my will. In the land of shining happy people, I lived on the fringes with the other outcasts who dared to question the rules and the ideology. The more th
ey tried to pound me into their mold, the more I rebelled.
Ever since I could remember, I had thought about escape. I used to sit on the rooftops watching the birds and envy their wings. I always carried within me the desire to know, to experience, to see beyond the confines of the bubble in which I grew up. While I did not know what I wanted or even expected from life, I did know that my parents’ dream was not it. I yearned for the freedom to follow my own path and make my own choices. I wished my younger siblings would be allowed to do the same.
In 2004, not long after my eldest sister, Celeste, left the group, I made up my mind to follow her lead. The two of us and another sister who had managed to escape earlier, Kristina, then wrote a book, Not Without My Sister, which exposed the abuses and lack of fundamental human rights we had suffered when growing up in the Children of God. We established a charity that eventually merged with the Safe Passage Foundation, a not-for-profit organization founded and run by ex-kids that provides resources, support, and advocacy for others who find themselves alone, clueless, and grossly unprepared for life in the “outside world.”
One problem many ex-kids encounter when trying to integrate into mainstream society has been the idea, promoted by irresponsible sections of media, that children who have suffered abuse are inevitably and permanently “damaged.” It’s a stigma that ex-kids carry like a moldy coat that can’t be removed. In fact, most ex-kids hate being defined by the usual assumptions that accompany the “cult” label.
There are few questions I find more difficult to answer than the common polite inquiry “Where are you from?” because I dread the exchange that inevitably follows when I truthfully answer, “Nowhere.”
“Oh, come on! Everyone’s from somewhere.”
“I’m not.”
“Be serious now. What nationality are you?”
“German.”
“So you’re from Germany. Whereabouts in Germany?”
“I don’t know. I never lived there. I got my mother’s nationality.”
“Where were you born, then?”
“Greece. But I never lived there, either.”
“Well, where did you grow up then?”
“Everywhere. In over thirty countries across Asia, Africa, and Europe.”
“Oh, right. I guess you really are from nowhere!”
Even that is only half the truth, though. The whole truth is just too much when meeting someone for the first time. It’s simpler for ex-kids to assume new identities, invent new backgrounds, try to pretend we’re anything but what we really are, because we refuse to let our pasts define who we are and who we want to become.
It takes courage and a certain mental toughness to leave behind everything you know. To walk away from your family, your friends, and your identity and start again with nothing, without any money or possessions, without a formal education or even basic knowledge of simple things like how to open a bank account, write a check, compile a CV, or apply for college. Few people know what it means to start life over from scratch. When you reject everything that was your life, discard everything you knew, and lose everything you loved, believed in, and lived, when you uproot yourself and turn against your own identity, when finally there is nothing left to lose, you lose the fear of loss itself, and that is perhaps the greatest self-emancipation one can experience. Many of my ex-kid friends are some of the strongest, most self-aware and empathetic people I know.
If we are the sum total of our experiences, then if anything, a childhood growing up without parents and moving constantly taught me independence, self-reliance, and adaptability. I have a really tough head on my shoulders, and I can endure a lot of pain, physical and mental. No wonder I felt up to the challenge of cycling around the world, no matter how arduous it might be. Hendri often said the strongest metals are forged through the hottest fires. That was where I planned to go: through the fire. To push my mind and body to their limits, to find out how far I could go and what I was capable of doing and enduring. Maybe at the end of it all I would find some kind of self-realization, or maybe I would still be as clueless as ever. Ultimately, though, the finish line was not the objective. It was all about the ride.
Pegasus, as I christened my new white stallion, arrived, and Mauro assembled it in his little shop. I had ten days in which to learn how to ride this ultra-light road bike. The riding position was entirely different from that of the hybrid; it felt awkward and unstable at first. I went out with Mauro’s cycling team in a bid to improve my technique. The older cyclists in the group patiently followed close behind and gave helpful tips, such as the best positions for different terrain, how to stand on the pedals, and when to hold on to the middle of the handlebars on the uphill sections. Pegasus and I wobbled down the roads and took a few tumbles. In the unforgiving chaos of the Neapolitan traffic, I was like a baby deer just finding its legs in a stampeding herd of buffalo. It felt less about improving my poor bike-handling skills than about getting really good at falling.
Mauro joined me on a couple of rides so he could assess my riding position and cycling technique. His final diagnosis was grim, but he didn’t have the heart to tell me in person, so he pulled Antonio aside instead. “Juliana isn’t ready,” he said. “It takes time, years even, to become a good cyclist. She can’t possibly cycle around the world the way she rides now. If I were you, I would convince her to wait a year.” Antonio dutifully passed on the message.
“By the time I come back, I will be a good cyclist,” I told him. But I was thinking, If I come back.
Darker thoughts of this nature clouded most of the days leading up to my departure. The whys, hows, and what-ifs crowded my waking thoughts. At night I slept fitfully, disturbed by strange, ominous dreams. In one, I tried and failed to defuse a bomb that was about to explode. Seconds before the detonation, my final thought was: I wonder if my consciousness will survive, or if it will be as though I never existed? At least now I’ll find out. Then there was a roaring explosion, and I felt my body disintegrate until I was nothing but ash that blew away in the wind. I was air and formless, without any of my senses, yet somehow aware that if I’m having this thought right now, I must still exist. Another night I found myself floating, weightless, looking down on the room and my own sleeping body.
Perhaps my subconscious was taking on the introspection and self-doubt I tried not to entertain as the unknown loomed ever closer. The reality of what I was about to undertake had started to sink in, and despite all my bravado, I was full of doubt. Did I have what it would take to pull this off? I couldn’t believe I had gotten as far as I had. They say half the race is getting to the starting line. It certainly felt that way.
I had spent eight months planning and training for D-Day, but when it finally arrived, I was simply relieved not to have to think about it anymore. Friends kept asking me if I was emozionata (excited), but I felt only calm detachment, a cessation of thought, silence in my head. There was no more questioning of myself or my motives for going. I could not be any more or any less prepared. This was it. There could be no turning back now.
There was a sense of finality to all my actions this morning. The end of something rather than the beginning. Rolling out of bed, packing up my gear, locking my apartment door—all were performed like last rites. I knew that if something were to happen and I didn’t make it back, it might well have been the last time that I did any of them. The finish line is in some relative future, reliant on many obscure ifs. All I know for sure is that in less than an hour, I will clip in to my bike and pedal out of Naples.
Mario is already at the piazza with his family and staff, setting up the start line. TV cameras and reporters are arriving, drawn to the scene by the presence of the actress Maria Grazia Cucinotta, self-proclaimed patron of the event. The mayor, a couple of politicians from the Green Party, and a popular Neapolitan singer I’ve never heard of turn up for the photo op. I feel like a mascot everybody wants to pose with.
“Ju, it’s almost eleven. Time to sign the logbook and
leave.” Antonio is standing at my elbow, experiencing enough nerves for both of us.
Pegasus and I have been adorned with an ample array of chili charms, the Neapolitan symbol of good luck. A cluster of tiny red peppers dangles from the handlebars, courtesy of the Professor. Others hang off my pockets and bike bags. I think, If chili peppers attract luck as garlic wards off vampires, I should be well fortified against misfortune.
Antonio hands me the blue leather-bound logbook, which the Guinness World Record rules stipulated I have to fill in daily. Opening the first page, I write at the head of four columns: “Date & Time,” “Location,” “Name,” “Signature.” The dignitaries and celebrities gather around to sign. It’s all a bit surreal, as if it were happening around me, not to me. Cameras flash, a group of Schiano cyclists fall in behind, ready to escort me out of the city, and the crowd parts to make a path. Then, in one unanimous voice, the countdown begins.
“Dieci . . . nove . . . otto . . . sette . . .” I clip into the left pedal. “Quattro . . . tre . . . due . . . uno . . . Vai! Go Julianaaaaaa!”
I am off, out of the cobbled square, onto the Via Domiziana, the old Roman coastal highway leading out of the city. Only then do the threatening clouds explode. Pedaling through the deluge, I start to think, What the hell have I gotten myself into?
EUROPEAN CROSSING
JULY 25, 2012
The mountain refuge near Massa on the way to Genoa offers a comfortable bed and a hearty meal shared by guests at a long, rough wooden table. Italy is full of such rifugi, inexpensive mountain huts networked across the country. Spurred by enthusiasm and adrenaline, I’ve made good progress up the west coast from Naples, cycling four hundred miles in three days.
Tonight the fatigue has finally caught up with me, though. I feel like a zombie, watching platters of salami and prosciutto being passed around by a chirpy German family. Germans seem to turn up in the most unlikely places. The more abandoned and remote the village, the more likely you will find a random German traveler wandering through it. Only one or a couple, however. Equally bizarre is their absolute aversion to discovering other Germans within their immediate vicinity.
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