Somewhere in Germany, I fell off my bike. I fell in the outskirts of Berlin, trying to thread the needle of two bollards and failing before a small audience of horrified Volkswagen drivers. I fell in the rural backyard of a man with a howling dog, the sandy soil interrupting my momentum with cartoon slowness. Wherever I fell, I acquired a new bruise the size of currency: a two-euro circle on the left of my knee, a dollar bill-sized stripe along my thigh, a not-insignificant gold nugget on my derriere.
Bikepacking, as the name suggests, combines backpacking with cycling: traveling long distances on wheels, with everything you need to spend a night stuffed into a nylon sack. I chose to bikepack from Berlin to Copenhagen unassisted—with the hubris requisite of such endurance efforts, sure, but also with deep doubt about whether athlete is ever an identity I could claim. I grew up climbing to the top of swing sets as a toddler and running 5Ks at a competitive pace before I reached double digits. I was proud of my body, its leanness and mobility and cooperation. I assisted its agility with the cruel arithmetic of girlhood: mentally logging the number of miles I ran, how many nights a week I ate dessert, what digits would keep me in the underweight BMI category. Then, in the fifth grade, a new unit of measurement blotted out my previous fixations: the Numerical Rating Scale.
The NRS, as it is abbreviated, allows patients to quantify their pain: 0, no pain, is illustrated by a smiling stamp of a face; 10, worst pain possible, is a crying face. I got to know this chart in various clinicians’ offices after pain began to interrupt my sleep, and soon, my movement. Usually, I pointed to the vaguely grimacing, middle face: it wasn’t so much that I was experiencing pain as it was perpetual discomfort. I couldn’t fall asleep, couldn’t sit still or sit straight, couldn’t run—that thing I prided myself on being able to do.
By middle school, I was sitting out PE and seeing a chiropractor weekly. On Wednesdays, in a biofeedback practitioner’s office, I would try to sync my breathing with the rhythm of animated hot air balloons. I went to an acupuncturist despite my fear of needles, once, and passed out. A rheumatologist, after listening to me describe my persistent but ambiguous pain, my aversion to touch, and my exhausting attempts to sleep, suggested fibromyalgia as a diagnosis. A team of pain specialists disagreed—it’s much more common in adults than ten-year-olds—and I was left in a hypersensitive, fatigued, movement-averse body whose affliction was nameless.
The coping strategy I developed was disengagement. Rather than pacing my breath or stretching, I would shut down sensation altogether. I stopped exercising, and situated my ambitions squarely in the intellectual: my body was a necessary prerequisite for being in the world, not an aspect of myself to attend to. After all, I believed it had failed me. In retaliation, I failed it right back. For a decade, I avoided facing the contours of my somatic experience. It wasn’t that my discomfort limited my range of mobility, but rather that discomfort diminished how intensely and, therefore, how competitively I could move. The pain made movement difficult, but the shame of new limitations was what made it impossible. I chose to refuse movement altogether rather than risk the embarrassment of occupying a changed body.
So this summer, when a friend mentioned she planned to bike the three-hundred-something miles from Berlin to Copenhagen, I surprised myself by saying I wanted to join her. In the near-dozen years between the suggestion of fibromyalgia and the day I bought plane tickets, my relationship with my body had atrophied. I had experimented with small spurts of movement, but nothing sustained. Somehow, though, talking through it with my friend—we would bike around 45 miles a day, camp at night, and eat tinned fish lunches—made the trip sound like something I was capable of. It’s difficult to explain what gave me this conviction; I think it is the same reason I try to drink whole milk every year or two, as if my body might forget its lactose intolerance the same way I forget how dairy riots in my digestive system.
We did a test 40-mile ride out from Brooklyn to Long Island, and I was surprised by its ease. The trip wasn’t without hiccups; I fell so hard on the Rockaways pier and bled so much that I had to lie down, knees up, gazing at the cool glaze of the ocean. (Four months on, I still have a racing stripe of a bruise on my left calf.) Regardless, I made it. It was something my body could do.
Embarking from Berlin that first day of the ride, I tried to move with humility. I failed, almost immediately; not even six miles out I fell attempting an overly ambitious maneuver, bled, and waited horizontally on the sidewalk for the queasiness to pass. When we got to our first camping spot—the cabin of a photographer we had met, who offered us his yard as a destination—I was too tired to notice the fear that pitching a tent at a stranger’s rural property might have inspired, were I more awake. The next day, our route took us through a four-mile stretch of sand that was impossible to ride on. We carried our gear-heavy bikes the whole way, dusted with spurts of rain.
The day after, we biked a steep hill several miles in the wrong direction and paid twenty euros for a shower. The next, my riding partner’s gear shifter broke, and two bike shops told us it wasn’t fixable. (When the men spoke to each other in hushed, fast German, I caught the word kaput and understood we would need to take the train to our next stop.) A pannier bag broke. We ran out of cash. I got so hungry I couldn’t see. A man yelled at us for peeing in the wilderness. A chorus of men yelled at us, from cars, for missing the turn into the bike lane. I wiped out, over and over, against new scenic backdrops. On our penultimate night, my friend’s bike got a flat tire and we had to admit the most devastating of camping defeats: staying in a hotel. It was fixed the next morning, and we rode the fifty miles into Copenhagen precariously along the highway, counting down the distance with more impatience and exhaustion than triumph.
Coming into the city and off the bike, there was pride that I had completed the trip mixed with some sadness that, maybe if I had been more willing to meet my body where it was, I never would have needed to abandon athletics. I might have better navigated the pain if I had been willing to accommodate the new limits and affordances of my pain-affected body instead of ignoring it entirely. It was a failure of imagination, not a failure of my body, that estranged me from the joy of movement.
We spent the last days of our trip striding around Copenhagen, victorious; our hostel bunkmates, two scrawny girls from Utah, were amazed at our perceived athleticism and bravery. I absorbed the pride, the narrative that the journey was not just an experience of physical endurance but a feat of mental toughness.
Then it was time to go home, so we boarded the plane, arrived at a layover in Frankfurt, and found that our connecting flight to Newark had been canceled. We were to spend another night in Germany. I cried briefly, then took the bus to a lake, stripped down, and laid out in the sun.
The Freikörperkultur (FKK) movement took root in Germany as a strategy to resist the stress and shame of modern life by celebrating nudism and communion with nature. The night my riding partner’s gear shifter broke, the night we had taken the train to a third and final bike shop and then rode out to our campsite, we met a fellow bikepacker who taught us about FKK. The right to public nudity was fought for by the German populace in the early 20th century and, eventually, won. It was then co-opted by Nazis as an aesthetic celebration of the German body; “Jews and Communists” were excluded from this eugenicist vision. Nearly a century later, we shared a gentle, defiant pride as our bodies, Jewish and Black as they are, lay naked in the sun.
It feels fitting to have ended the trip not as planned but at an FKK beach, thorny history and all. The movement has since moved towards neutrality and plurality, but that history of racial hygiene is a reminder that deciding which bodies are desirable, and which are worthy of being in the light, has always been a violent practice. Separating my athleticism from my value means questioning all the privileges my body has afforded me: my body is white, it is skinny, it can move up stairs without assistance. To release the belief that my ability generates my goodness destabilizes other scaffolds to my security in the world. It is, precisely because of that, a necessary shift. I want a world that is embodied, one that values how a body feels, not what a body does.
Having a body is awkward, unruly and hungry and animal thing that it is. Having a body that experiences hypersensitivity, fatigue, discomfort, and straight-up pain without provocation is, maybe especially, awkward because its strangeness feels that much more legible to me. I want to be a person who is not deterred by discomfort. Really, though, what I want is to move without shame. And my body does not dishonor me when it needs stillness. The shame doesn’t come from chafing against the perimeters of my body’s abilities, it comes from believing that those frictions are failures.
Coming back to my body from the saddle of a bike, spending four or five hours a day in silence as I churned my legs against metallic gears, I practiced engaging with sensation. I paid attention: How do my toes feel? What do I need to stretch? Am I thirsty? It was the kind of mindful self-evaluation that made me cry as an adolescent, because tuning in back then meant opening myself to my pain. This time, I tried to face what my body felt without judgment or expectation. I let myself ride slowly or walk up the hill when I needed to, let myself eat when I was hungry and when Danish ice cream just sounded good, let that soft animal of my body, as the poet Mary Oliver described it, love and crave and move how it wishes.
Finishing the trip wasn’t overriding my body; it was coming home to it. My body is a lovely, clumsy thing to move through the world in. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes its bruised limbs look like a child’s watercolor of a floral arrangement. Sometimes it is naked and basking in an August sun before wading in lake water the temperature of spit. It is a body worth knowing, without judgment or expectation. It is a place I want to be.