Probably Not

Fasting, Riding, Surviving

Mar 07, 2026

The morning routine is a negotiation with yourself that you already know you’re going to lose. Up, moving, grinding through whatever the morning demands, and then noon shows up and the reward is... not breakfast. Skipping the sausage and egg plate because the numbers aren’t there yet. So instead you walk down to that park by the baseball field, the one Snuggles insists is not called Playfair, even though Playfair is a perfectly reasonable name for a park. The frozen grass is tan and flat, the cable-stayed bridge cuts through the winter skyline, and the Rattlesnake peaks sit capped in snow behind it all like they’re waiting for something. You walk. You do not eat.

The park with no agreed-upon name, doing its best.

Then home, back to work, surviving in the way that involves staring at a screen until two or three in the afternoon when the mineral drink happens. Magnesium, salt, some electrolytes. Just enough so you don’t, as you put it, waste away. It’s a low bar. It works. And then, finally, the bike.

Thirty miles of reasons not to complain about skipping breakfast.

Today it’s the Tura run. Thirty miles. Out past the edge of town where the Clark Fork bends through the valley and the hills go gold in the late afternoon light, bare cottonwoods threading along the river, mountains framing everything like they’ve been doing this longer than anyone and aren’t impressed. Thirty miles is a real day. Fasted or not.

Tomorrow the goals might line up. Breakfast might happen. Probably not, you say, with the casual certainty of someone who has made peace with the gap between the plan and the actual day. That gap, it turns out, is where all the riding happens.