My plan going into Day 3 was that I would think of it as a metaphor for life, whatever was to happen. I was curious what the Lord might teach me, with this lens. The total distance would be 62 miles, but it was supposed to be more flat than yesterday and would include a ferry ride.

I followed the prompts in my trek journal, and set some intentions:

I. What fire will I carry into this day?

I will remember to enjoy the journey.

II. What truth will kindle within me, no matter the wind or weather? 

Nature was created for ME.

(I had been helped tremendously the day before by drawing strength FROM my environment, instead of fighting it. There is unlimited energy in God's creation, and as I imagined flowing WITH it instead of seeing the hills as an adversary, I discovered reservoirs of energy that had been previously untapped. This is what I wanted to remember, that “the earth is full, and there is enough [energy - or anything else we need] and to spare..." D&C 104:17)

III. What shadows may rise to test me?

Since Day 3 is supposed to be an “easier” day, I may be taunted by the failures of my past. I will remember to face the whispers and say, “Why taunt me? Don’t you know that I am an heir of God's covenant blessings?" 

IV. What vow do I make to this road?

That I will love and respect my environment.

V. What sign shall remind me I am the flame?

Every time the sun breaks through and shines on me, I will remember my untapped strength.

_____________

Day 3 - Hamn to Risøyhamn

First, we had to get ourselves 9 miles to the 11:00 am ferry, or we would be forced to wait until 7:00 pm for the next one. This terrified me, because again, I am the slowest rider here, having done the least to prepare. I never know how long it will take me to get over the hills. 

I could NOT afford to miss the morning ferry! 

Missing it would mean traversing through the night with no recovery time before starting all over again the next day. So, to make sure I didn't miss it, I left extra early (alone) before our morning pow wow to get a head start. See the hotel in the distance? The rest of the group was still packing up.

Unfortunately, my plan to "enjoy the journey" was already out the window, as I was wholly consumed with fear that I wouldn't be fast enough to get on the same ferry with everyone else, despite leaving early.

I went as fast as I could, but within 30 minutes everyone started passing me.

I really tried to hold it together emotionally, but had something of a panic attack when I rounded a corner to see a tunnel up ahead. The last tunnel I went through had been an uphill walk of over one, very slow mile. There just wasn't enough time to do that again!

So I texted both Layne and Trevan and said:

“Please don’t let me miss the ferry!”

I didn't know if they would see my text, or how they could even help. Maybe Layne could get in touch with his dad who was driving the van and ask him to get me if I didn't show up early enough. I found out later that his dad had been headed in another direction to help Dave fix his mechanical issue at a bike shop. The shop was hours away on the other side of a mountain range, so it turns out there would be NO pickup available to me if I was too slow.

I arrived at the tunnel and moved into the darkness praying for mercy. To my relief, the road through the tunnel was all downhill! Once I zoomed out on the other side, I spotted Trevan on the far side of a bridge in the distance racing back to meet me, and I cried. It was SO good to see him coming to my rescue! He rode with me the rest of the way, assuring me that I didn’t need to stress because we were almost there.

In fact, we got to the ferry with an hour to spare, so all of my worry had been wasted energy. Ugh!

I know better! Why couldn't I hold myself together and keep the promise I made to myself, to just enjoy the journey and roll with the day's challenges??

I've thought about this a lot since then. It's easy to enjoy the journey when there isn't a deadline! But as soon I find myself racing against a clock, it's harder to keep from feeling overwhelm, fear, and stress.

I do have a mindset tool for dealing with stress, but I was just too worried to use it. (Facepalm)

Answering the Question

This is the tool. I learned it from a marriage counselor many years ago (Dr. Paul Jenkins), who explained that our sub-conscious mind has ONE primary job, and that is to keep us alive. It keeps our heart beating all day long, it keeps us breathing through the night, and manages all of our automatic, life-sustaining functions. But IF it perceives a potential threat to our existence, it will release adrenaline or whatever chemicals are needed to help us escape the threat.

While it serves an important purpose, our sub-conscious mind can get confused, giving us that feeling of panic for threats that aren't actually fatal. It doesn't know the difference, for example, between a threat that is real, and one that is imagined.

In fact, the sub-conscious can consider ANY CHANGE to be potentially life-threatening. If our current situation is miserable, at least we're alive. A change could be potentially lethal, so it sounds our internal alarms to keep us from taking steps forward, even if they are good ones.

So, we have to let our conscious mind be in charge. Our conscious mind is the part that reasons, creates, conjectures, and runs analyses to determine whether or not a step forward is truly wise. But doing all of this can be nearly impossible when our sub-conscious mind is in panic mode. So, to get our sub-conscious mind to settle down, we simply give it an ANSWER to the question it is begging to know:

"What will you DO if this turns out bad?" (In other words, "How are you going to SURVIVE this?")

Answer the question, and it settles down. So because I didn't provide an answer to "What will I do if I miss the ferry," I failed to get out of panic mode.

Well, then, what could I have done if I had missed the ferry? Was missing the ferry as fatal as my sub-conscious believed it would be?

The answers we come up with to calm our sub-conscious mind down don't have to make sense, and they don't even have to be desirable. The purpose of coming up with an answer is to simply get our sub-conscious mind to stop pestering us with fear, so we can stay inspired, guided, and moving in the right direction. In fact, give it almost any answer, and we'll see our fears begin to shrink away.

As I explored "Answering the Question" in hindsight, here's what I came up with. "If I missed the ferry..."

1. I could have checked into a hotel or AirBNB, napped until the 7:00 pm ferry, and rode through the night to the destination (it's not like the sun was going set on me).
2. I could have spent the day enjoying local shops, people, and scenery, and then hopped in with the sag vehicle (which, in fact, also missed the 11:00 am ferry).
3. I could have called my travel agent to get me out of there and onto the next plane home! Haha - I could have let HER figure it out, and canceled the rest of my trip. (Again, the answer doesn't have to be feasible or desirable... my sub-conscious only needed to know that missing the ferry was NOT going to be fatal.)

Had I come up with some answers like these, my anxiety would have diminished, I still would have arrived in plenty of time for the 11:00 am ferry, but with less energy expended and enjoying those 9 miles so much more. As they say, "If you worry about an event and it actually happens, you've lived it twice." (It's better to suffer once, if an experience has to be suffered at all.)

After answering the question UN-emotionally, I could have gone back to imagining (with emotion) the desired outcome, picturing myself feeling amazed, grateful, and happy, sitting on the cushioned vinyl seat watching the scenery go by through the ferry window.

_________

In short, I could have done better and enjoyed myself more. This was one of my more clumsy, desperate segments of the trek, but I made it. Here's a picture of Trevan and our friends relaxing on the ferry:

Arriving at the next island, Andøya:

Gearing up for the last 25 miles of the day:

With all of the ferry drama behind me, I thought I would enjoy the rest of the day, because now, NO more deadlines!

But the drama wasn't over yet. You'd think I could do better where the elevation is flat (compared to the day before), and where we enjoyed most of the ride in sunshine, whooshing past beautiful beaches...

... but for some reason, it was much harder to get back into "fun" mode like I had created for Day 2. 

This day consisted of long, straight stretches through oceanside country with very little variation. We had traded craggy mountains and hairpin turns for a beautiful, peaceful valley with smooth, clear roads. 

Maybe it's because I let my mental guard down, so the sheer distance and time it took to reach landmarks was fatiguing. At least with constant challenges on Day 2, I stayed conscious and intentional because I had to. But during these long stretches of relative ease, I got mentally lazy, which opened the door for less helpful thoughts to bubble to the surface. ("You're so slow... you're falling behind...")

We stopped at a restaurant and met a couple from Germany that Monica talked to for quite a while. We also kept running into them on the road later (they were on e-bikes). 

While I was at the restaurant I asked what they had, and they said, “Only pizza.” There were three choices, the last option being Pepperoni and Pineapple, which is my favorite. In the States, if you want pineapple on a standard pizza, it usually comes with Canadian bacon instead of pepperoni, so I was impressed.

The worker said we would have to buy a whole pizza (frozen) and wait 25 minutes for them to cook it. Well, we didn't want to fall further behind, so we declined and moved on, with just a snack of nuts instead.

Back on the road, more unwanted thoughts rose to the surface. I started thinking about how everyone else was probably 3 hours ahead of us, and would enjoy much more time recovering before the next day's ride. I thought, "If this is supposed to be a pleasant ride of rest and recovery but I am still struggling so much, how am I going to face the next 5 days with rain on the forecast?"

I started feeling sorry for myself, and felt triggered by old sub-conscious programs that life is harder for me than others, that there is no rescue when I need one, that my burdens are all on me, and that I carry too much. Layne says that when old stories show up, get curious, see what they are there to teach you, and then just give them a hug and send them away. I’m not sure I did that very effectively, but I did try to acknowledge them and move on. 

It's crazy that I could be overwhelmed with negative thinking so quickly, forgetting how just a few hours before, the tunnel had been mercifully downhill, that Trevan HAD come to my rescue, and that the threat of missing the ferry had only been an illusion. 

Discouragement clung to me like dead weights on my ankles. The wind was in our face most of the time. I cried, “Couldn't the wind EVER be at our BACKS??” I battled mental fatigue all day, and I couldn't stop thinking that Monica and I would be the only ones not enjoying three extra hours of recovery.

The Power of a Dream / Focal Point

Eventually, I shared with Monica how much I was struggling, so we stopped and brainstormed. She started singing songs, and that helped. I looked ahead and saw a massive cliff in the distance, which, according to the map, we would need to go around. So THAT became our focal point, and my energy returned. 

Once we reached the cliffside, the road became more interesting and the sun slipped behind some clouds. 

I reminded myself that the hills were making me stronger.

I said it out loud whenever I did feel joy.

Counting to Stay Focused

I discovered that when I didn't have a cliff in the distance to focus on, I could get energy by focusing on counting. I would see a hill up ahead, and make a guess at how many rotations I thought it would take to get up it. Whatever I came up with, I would add 20% or more and start counting.

As we neared our destination, I began running out of steam. Based on the map and the hills in front of us, I guessed we’d be there within 500 more uphill rotations (I'd stop counting on the downs), and I was right. I think it actually took about 450, and counting them with my eyes down helped me keep a steady pace and even allowed me to stay ON the bike for the hills more than ever. 

(I just noticed I don't have any pictures of the hills from Day 3, because I had my head down and was focused on counting. Looks like I only stopped to take pictures on the flat stretches.)

The last two miles again were brutal. When you think you're almost there, you let your guard down. I kept letting it down too soon, and suffered over the final hills more than necessary.

We rolled in just as my husband was picking up some dinner from the local market not far from the AirBNB. To my surprise, after being on the road 11 hours, we were only 45 minutes behind the others, NOT 3 hours. I had believed a lie, and that lie had drained me of precious energy the whole day.

Eventually I would hear about how challenging this trek is for everyone, not just me. It doesn't matter how prepared you are, this experience will stretch you, by design. The beautiful thing is it reveals programs that are holding you back in life, robbing you of joy, abundance, or greater opportunities, and give you an opportunity to work through them and rewrite the story. This happens for trekkers whether it is done fast or slow. A person who goes more prepared just might get to have a little more fun on the easy days than I did.

Metaphor for Life

Reflecting back on what I intended - to view the day as a metaphor for life and discover what the Lord might have to teach me - I wondered how much of my energy at home is drained on the daily because of fears or lies that slip in.

Because, the truth is, I wasn't too slow to catch the ferry. The downhill tunnel was merciful. I wasn't 3 hours behind everyone else. Life isn't harder for me than others. There are rescues if I truly need them. My burdens are not all on me, and I don't carry more than the Lord knows I'm capable of carrying, with His help.

These are good questions to ask:

What lies do I entertain? Are they stealing my focus? Robbing me of much-needed energy? Keeping me from enjoying the journey?

Today gave me a glimpse of what I needed to do. I just wouldn't really understand how to DO it until Day 5.

After getting settled in our room for the evening, I discovered what Trevan had bought me at the store for dinner, of all things: a pepperoni pizza and a can of pineapple. I counted it as a sweet message from heaven via my husband that God is mindful of me and sending His love. (And after riding 11 hours, I wasn't about to let myself feel guilty for eating pizza.)

When I asked about his day, he mentioned something that would became my vision for Day 4:

He told me about his ride and that of a few others, and then said he thought Jenn Garrett especially felt strong today.

So I decided that's I wanted for Day 4. I wanted to feel strong.

I imagined rolling up to the next destination telling my friends "I felt strong today!" So I wrote in my journal: "I choose to feel strong. That’s what I’m creating my Day 4 to be about - showing up, and feeling strong."

____________________

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