Grappling With Post-Bike Tour Depression

Diary entry from February 2024, post New Zealand bike tour.

I cried today.

What was a great start to the morning- waking up at 7, making my coffee and oatmeal, FaceTiming my best friend from back home, getting a lot of work done at the pride center with a chai latte and croissant to make me feel special, then coming back to make myself a slutty grilled cheese with soup. It was a great morning… until it became a funky afternoon.

Things in my head started to get a bit weird. My financial anxiety was coming back up. I began hating the idea of work again. Why do I have to work anyways? Why is everything so expensive? Why do I have student debt? Why do I feel afraid to spend money on doctor’s appointments? What’s going on with my relationship with this person I am staying with? Why is everyone depressed and anxious and burnt out? Is there a way to escape that? Why are my taxes being used to murder Palestinians and fund Israeli healthcare, but not used to cancel predatory student debt or provide U.S. citizens with their own healthcare? Why are my two options in life either to work a job I hate and earn a sufficient amount of money for things like retirement, or to make little money doing something I love, choosing happiness over financial stability? Why is everything so complicated all the time? The never ending barrage of questions pondering life’s meaning and my place in it all came flooding in my mind. The existential overwhelm has become an all too familiar feeling these days. I just want some clairity for once. Is that so hard to ask?

I doubt that post-bike tour depression (PBTD) is very different from any other kind of post-adventure, post-thru hike, post-solo travel adventure that lasts for over a month (although post-adventure based travel depression is likely radically different from general post-travel depression due to the endorphins of exercising and being outside every day). I think any and all of us who are travelers- adventure sport travelers- are susceptible to feeling this type of way at the culmination of tour.

I only acknowledged the potential that I was suffering from post-bike tour depression after a friend asked me if I had considered it as the culprit while I was crying with him on the phone at St. Albert Park here in Melbourne. After buying myself some salsa chips and a double scoop of gelato while watching the sunset on the beach, letting the tears dry and the puffiness of my face deflate, I came home and began googling “post-bike tour depression”.

Upon the quick google search and Reddit thread, I found this quote that helps illustrate the thought process of the traveler’s mind:

An old vagabond in his 60s told me about it over a beer in Central America, goes something like this: The more places you see, the more things you see that appeal to you, but no one place has them all. In fact, each place has a smaller and smaller percentage of the things you love, the more things you see. It drives you, even subconsciously, to keep looking, for a place not that’s perfect (we all know there’s no Shangri-La), but just for a place that’s “just right for you.” But the curse is that the odds of finding “just right” get smaller, not larger, the more you experience. So you keep looking even more, but it always gets worse the more you see. This is Part A of the Curse.

Part B is relationships. The more you travel, the more numerous and profoundly varied the relationships you will have. But the more people you meet, the more diffused your time is with any of them. Since all these people can’t travel with you, it becomes more and more difficult to cultivate long term relationships the more you travel. Yet you keep traveling, and keep meeting amazing people, so it feels fulfilling, but eventually, you miss them all, and many have all but forgotten who you are. And then you make up for it by staying put somewhere long enough to develop roots and cultivate stronger relationships, but these people will never know what you know or see what you’ve seen, and you will always feel a tinge of loneliness, and you will want to tell your stories just a little bit more than they will want to hear them. The reason this is part of the Curse is that it gets worse the more you travel, yet travel seems to be a cure for a while.

None of this is to suggest that one should ever reduce travel. It’s just a warning to young Travelers, to expect, as part of the price, a rich life tinged with a bit of sadness and loneliness, and angst that’s like the same nostalgia everyone feels for special parts of their past, except multiplied by a thousand.

Traveling is one of the greatest experiences allowed to us with our short time here on earth. Bicycle touring is its own unique form of travel, because you are so completely alone, left to your own devices. The bike is an extension of the body, of yourself. It is your main mode of transportation. Your only reliable home. If you cannot take care of it, take care of yourself, you may be stranded. You can only go as far as your body will take you. Sometimes you fight your body- you want to do more, but your body resists with all its might. Sometimes you lose the fight and must accept the loss, other times you triumph over your limitations, celebrating the win, loving your body for sticking with you through thick and thin, or wondering if it was worth pushing yourself past the limits when stress injuries and saddle sores arise. Sometimes the weather wrecks you with rain or wind. And sometimes it rewards you with a rainbow or a push from behind. When you bicycle tour, you enjoy some of the rawest form of adventure- it’s like Lord of the Rings, but instead of some kind of personal destiny to dispose of a ring that may destroy humankind, it’s a story of you with and against the world as you pedal closer and closer to some undefined mission end. It’s what makes touring so amazing, but so challenging.

When I was finishing up in New Zealand, I was tired of touring. I was crying, unhappy, and feeling exasperated significantly more than normal on the saddle. My spirit was low. I was fatiguing after only three hours of cycling. The biggest wake up call that I needed a break were my developing painful saddle sores- a distinct sign that I was pushing too hard and had to stop. Now it’s been exactly one week that I have been in Melbourne, after having taken a week and a half off in Auckland. I am getting antsy. Mentally, physically. I want it all. To live in the city. To eat all the good food. To have a shower and have a bed every night. I want to bike outside of the city. To get down deep with nature. To keep traveling. To meet more people. Melbourne seems like the “Shangria-La” mentioned above. Part of me wants to move here, escape American politics, and live the city girl life where I can plant my seeds, water my roots, and watch my growth from the dirt to the skies. But part of me knows that I will feel trapped. I will feel eager to get out and keep traveling. That the 4-weeks of annual paid leave won’t be enough for me to be happy living a more mainstream life in Melbourne.

Two commenters on the Reddit thread provided similar solutions for post-bike tour depression: “Spend time outside, find a way to get to low-population density areas. Maybe go camping for the weekend. Honestly, that helped for me; taking my bike on some short camping trips to ease back into the world.” and “Frequent mini-tour camping trips. It’s like methadone for a long tour and helps ease you back into things.” Next weekend I will go on a weekend bikepacking trip with some friends and strangers in the Melbourne area, and I am feel consoled looking forward to the mini adventure. When I think back to the multiple bikepacking trips I did in 2022 while working my big girl job post-Europe bike tour, I can confirm that weekend trips do provide a temporary relief to the insatiable hunger of outdoor adventure, despite simultaneously contributing to the desire to go for a longer tour.

I have no solution for post-bike tour depression. I have completed four bike tours in my lifetime, and none have resulted in post-bike tour depression quite as severe as this time around. My first tour, from Atlanta, GA to Baltimore, MD post-college graduation resulted in me flying out just a month later on an impromptu tour across Europe- any potential post-bike tour depression was clouded by the titillation of my upcoming tour. After biking across Europe for 4.5 months, I was burnt out and genuinely needed stability (and money). When I came home, a thousand things happened at once (moving four times in five months, starting a new job, family problems, a relative’s death, getting covid a second time etc.). Again, the PBTD was overshadowed by life’s other screaming demands. After biking across the USA with the Ulman Foundation in the summer of 2023, I was happy that it ended, because there were some teammates who caused me daily overwhelming anxiety who I was eager to get away from, and I didn’t even like the idea of touring the US (it feels like a waste of time to me when the rest of the world exits, waiting to be seen, smelt, touched, experienced). Now here I am, in Australia, having finished biking across New Zealand, and I am hungry, starving for another tour. But I need to make money. I have a cat back at home who needs taking care of (I have a sub letter living in my apartment who leaves when I fly back home). I have things, in general, that need taking care of. I don’t want to go home, but I have to (besides, my flight is non-refundable).

If you’d like to read up a bit more about post-bike tour depression, you can find a short article from BicycleHobo.com here about one person’s experience, and a more systematic breakdown of the causes of post-trail depression from Gossamer Gear here. Right now you may be enduring an endorphin crash from the sudden lack of exercise and sun exposure. Get outside, go for a run, find a park to read a book in. Talk to your travel friends about post-bike tour depression, journal, meditate, do anything to take care of yourself. Remember that post-bike tour depression isn’t as idiosyncratic as you may believe it to be. You are not alone