NEWSLETTER - vol. 6
Have I Jimmy Carter'd my life so far?
That's the question I asked myself as I drove across the country last Tuesday and Wednesday. Half as a joke, half as not a joke. I wondered after reading a case for Carter as the most punk rock president this country ever had. Not for his collections guitars or proclivity for wearing leather jackets (to my knowledge, he had neither). Instead, for the DIY underneath all of it. He ran an outsider campaign that skipped the machine. He walked down Pennsylvania Avenue instead of riding in a sealed limousine. He preferred a cardigan and a fireplace to a suit and a desk. He sold the presidential yacht instead of using it. The part that actually struck me came after he left office. Most former presidents cash out, corporate boards, six-figure speeches and book deals. Carter went home. He went to the same house he'd owned since he and his wife built it in 1961 and then spent decades building houses with his own hands instead. Read enough of that and the question stops being a joke.
Some of it holds up for me. Almanzo grew from an idea and a handful of folks in a park to fourteen hundred riders and a movement. I walked away from it before it could become entirely about me, but after I’d already let that creep in. I left Trek the same way, careful, documented, without torching anything on the way out. Both of those are real.
What doesn't hold up is the rest of it. Job search still open with two names in it and an eye on a growing list of others. An app idea sitting untouched. A podcast idea sitting next to it. A re-imagined concept parked at seventy-eight pieces, which is probably a book that hasn't decided to be a book yet. Carter's second act worked because he narrowed hard and stayed narrow. Mine, as of last week, is still spread across half a dozen lanes I haven't closed. This is the story of my life.
Hedging feels like keeping options open. It behaves like an undertaking of its own, one more thing pulling attention that the closed doors never asked for. Every lane I keep half-open is a lane I'm tending instead of finishing. When I can step back from it, I can see it exactly for what it is…exhausting.
With this in my brain, I sat down on Friday morning and did some cutting.
When I made the decision to relaunch the Almanzo brand, I wanted it to be something that folks to visit if they wanted to and leave fully alone if they didn’t. I intended to keep it simple. It was to be a riding club that hosted group riders in all the places I’d travel this year. I wanted it to be very basic…and then I left Trek, with every intention of simplifying my life for the summer and working to examine what exactly it is that I want the rest of my time on this earth to look like.
I’ve ridden bikes for as long as I have been able to walk. They have always existed in my life. It felt natural to rebirth the Almanzo as a riding club.
Somewhere between that idea and what the site has morphed into, simple picked up weight it was never supposed to carry. The site that came out wasn't complicated exactly, but it wasn't the thing I started with either. I didn't catch the drift until late last week, while I was staring straight at it.
The cycling club version of almanzo.cc had a primitive header with two paths, Rides and Rules. It read like a binary offering and left a ton of questions unanswered. It was very Jimmy Carter.
What evolved was a different register than everything I’d set out to deliver when I made the decision to relaunch. I explored some new ideas. I birthed a concept that had me having conversations with others and aiming to hold them accountable. I reframed the rides into a broader spectrum of movement. I kept the rules, even though with the lesser focus on bikes, they grew to feel abstract. I added and I added and I added. I even tended to the garden that has grown into this very newsletter, and, had I not had the thought of Jimmy Carter and his punk rock undertones, I’d probably be adding more this morning.
All of that to tell you that I am not.
I left Trek to simplify. I walked away from the six figure job to write and work at the rink and take a good long look at what I deem to be necessary and what I deem to be extra.
As I write this in the quiet of a cabin on a farm in Vermont, I can tell you that my emergence into this week will be more simple. What I am driving back across the country with later this morning is flatter. Cutting things out of the website wasn't about the header, or even the website itself. It was about deciding what's load-bearing and what was only there out of habit.
That same instinct appeared again yesterday in a completely different room. Nora had just finished the Vermont 100. The third leg of her Grand Slam summer. I’m sitting down and reviewing the efforts of her and myself and the crew. Exhausted, I’m making mental notes about what went well and what could be improved. In this examination of things, a thought occurs to me. Instead of one long list, what if I split it into three to use for the final event in Utah? Primary is getting her to the start line and through aid stations with what she needs, when she needs it. This is knowing where she is, where she needs to be and is she well enough to be there. Secondary is the day of travel. This is the rental car, the meals, the sleep rotation for the crew. This is good enough instead of optimized. Non-necessary is the stuff that looks responsible and isn't. This is traveling to and from the event itself. This is adding things to an event that become secondary events. This is over-preparing for contingencies that won't happen and trying to control what was never mine to control.
Building the framework for the Utah list is when it hit me; balance through this summer was never about doing less. It's about deciding which few things are load-bearing and letting everything else run loose. Under-tiering the secondary and non-necessary stuff isn't sloppiness. It's what leaves room for something good and unplanned to happen on the road. This is the summer. This is cutting the excess from the top of almanzo.cc. This is the whole purpose of the decisions I’m making right now and it’s becoming more clear what everything is.
I can build a tier list for a hundred-mile race in twenty minutes. Narrowing down the rest of it like the job search, the apps, the podcast, is slower work. I still don't have that list, but now I do know it’s out there.
Music this week: Moby, Play - The Complete Recordings - spare and stripped down to what's load-bearing in each track, which is the same instinct this whole issue is chasing.
Thanks for reading. See you next Monday.