By: Alenka Vrecek
In solitude I found a very different kind of strength, one I’d never experienced. I was purging poisons from my body and mind. I was cultivating the soil in which fresh seeds of life could be planted again. And for that, I needed to be alone, as painful or as lonely as it sometimes felt.
I wrote these words a month into my 2500 mile bike journey. Every day I would spend endless hours pushing my bike up impossibly steep and long climbs, following Sierra and Baja Divide through remote and often hostile environment. I needed the physical pain, the raw feeling of vulnerability on the fringes of life and death, precisely so I could feel alive. During the long stretches of alone time, I created space into which fresh life energy could flow. I captured my thoughts by typing them into the iPhone on the side of a dusty trail, or at lunch break, or laying exhausted on a deflated pad in my tent at night before they vanished. Just like on my long, difficult, and often dangerous bike journey, I was healing during my writing process. Each day I learned something new; I was reinventing myself.
The idea to ride a bike from my home in Lake Tahoe, to my second home in Baja, Mexico, was born on a short bike ride between my daughter’s games at the soccer tournament in Medford, Oregon. My husband of fifteen years and I were in the process of a complicated divorce. There was plenty of sadness, confusion, fear, and uncertainty. Desperate for a change and an adventure, I wrote the idea on the back page of my Rumi poetry book, which was my constant companion.
Years went by and life with work and three kids was busy. Then I met the man of my life and six years later we married on the top of the mountain overlooking Lake Tahoe. It was a crisp, sunny, winter day. We found happiness in a home we created for our blended family. The kids were growing older and one by one they left for college. Then, all at once, life unraveled. A devastating ski accident ended my thirty-year-long ski coaching career and with that I lost my identity. While recovering and still on crutches, I felt the lump on my right breast and instinctively knew it was not supposed to be there. Surgeries, chemo, and radiation followed. During the last round of chemo, I had my first routine colonoscopy. It revealed a carpeting of polyps. I was fifty-two-years old and facing the end of life for the second time in the same year. Everything was slipping away in a hurry. While waiting for the removal of my entire colon for which the date was already set, my husband announced he had Parkinson’s. His self-diagnosis was confirmed by doctors only a handful of days later.
One day, lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself, I reached for my worn out Rumi poetry book and it just so happened, it opened on the page where I wrote the words fifteen years earlier. The idea of riding my bike from Tahoe to the tip of Baja Peninsula was now an inner command. I had that many more reasons to follow my dream and go on this long and crazy bike ride.
The kids were grown up and didn’t need me much anymore. My cancer and my husband’s Parkinson’s diagnosis gave me full permission to do something greater than myself. Sick of hospitals, I deferred the removal of my colon. I was running out of time and I did not want to have regrets.
On my two month-long journey I wrote a blog to share the experiences with family and friends. People I didn’t even know, encouraged me to write a book. Sure, I thought, what a great idea. I’ll just turn my blog into a book, send it to a major publishing company and they will love it so much, offers for the book deal will rush in. Ha!
I quickly learned how wrong I was. Receiving rejection letters one after another, made me realize how much I had to learn. I asked for help and received it. I wanted to learn more, and I took every opportunity to do so. I continued honing my writing skills by taking as many online courses as I could and attended writing conferences.
COVID insinuated itself into our lives, and I had no excuse but to write. It was a cathartic, cleansing and a healing process. Collaborating with accomplished writers and working with editors, I was learning, creating and experiencing personal growth. Word after word, page after page, She Rides was born.
Life throws challenges at us all, and even in the darkest of hours, we somehow find the way to survive and the strength to move on. Like the parched desert after the soaking rains, we spring back to life. We all have to find our own way, but reading stories about adventures, struggles and triumphs of others, can inspire us and show us we are not alone. I hope that by sharing my story, others will relate and find the strength to get out of their comfort zone and follow their own long forgotten and deeply buried dreams.
Alenka Vrecek was born at the foot of the Alps in Slovenia, a part of former communist Yugoslavia. Born with a spirit for adventure, she came to America at twenty years old with a backpack, a pair of skis, and a pocket full of dreams. She was a ski coach and a director of Pedagogy for Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows Ski Teams for thirty years. Alenka owns Tahoe Tea Company and lives in Lake Tahoe, California, with her second husband, Jim, their four children, three grandchildren, and a Golden Retriever named Monty.