A milestone passed enroute to Nevada. (Photo by Tim Hathaway)
After a two-day layover forced by illness, father and son Elmer and Jeff Jackson were back in the saddle this week, topping their first mountain and crossing their first state border.
Tuesday saw the Red Bank educators climb 3,000 feet while traveling 33.5 miles from Cook’s Station, Calif. to Carson Pass, a leg sagman/journalist/blogger Tim Hathaway called “the most brutal climb of their lives.”
Heat exhaustion got the better of Jeff last week, leading to the tourist-interruptus. But after Tuesday’s leg, he was clearly feeling better. From Tim’s blog:
After conquering their first mountain, I pointed my camera at them, and instead of exulting in the pride of accomplishment, Jeff, the head teacher of the boys classroom at [West Side Christian Academy], used the moment to speak to his students.
“If we can climb a mountain, you can do whatever is in front of you,” he said hunched over his handled bars, searching for breath. “If we can climb a mountain, whatever mountain you have in your life, climb it.”
Yesterday, they clocked 39 more miles, reaching Carson City, Nev. “The ride was fast and smooth,” Tim writes. “The reward for a mountain climb is many miles downhill.”
The bout of illness was doubly trying for Jeff. He writes in his remarkably confessional MySpace blog that he sometimes feels as though he’s
the poster boy for weakness… For two days I had to watch from he sidelines as my Dad struggled for every foot of elevation, and every mile of road, as he climbed a mountain alone. I had to sit and watch while I wondered if I had tried hard enough… Could it be that I was never strong enough to stand, to ride, by my father’s side?
But after a restless night of anticipation in which he prayed, he says he “realized I am no stronger or weaker than God made me in the ways that matter.” And that made the resumption of the ride the next morning all the easier, he wrote.
OK, the next 10 hours weren’t exactly easy, he admits. But he toughed it out. Afterward,
I told my daughter that I had climbed over a mountain, and she said, ‘You are a mountain man, Daddy.’ Today, I am not the poster boy for weakness. I am a mountain man, and no one can tell me different.
Thus far, the Jacksons have covered 257 miles of what they expect will be a 4,244-mile ride from San Fancisco to Sandy Hook. Today, they venture into the desert on US 50, also known as the Loneliest Road in America, says Tim.
Want to donate to the No Regrets Bike Challenge? Please contact Doris Jackson here or call 732. 693.4336. Click here for the full archive of redbankgreen stories about the journey.
