More Than Our Story
Mark Herbst
Mark Herbst shares his extraordinary journey as the oldest person to cycle around the world, raising awareness and funds for cancer research in honor of his late wife, Jackie. He discusses his ‘Epic Ride,’ the challenges he faced, and highlights the importance of stepping beyond our comfort zones.
Highlights
Jackie was diagnosed with a stage four squamous cell cancer when she was 48, so quite young… She went through essentially seven years of treatments, and finally, it got the best of her.
One of the things with cancer - it doesn't care who you are, how great shape you're in, how old, how young.
From a fitness standpoint, I didn't really have to do any special preparation. I've been racing bikes for over 40 years, so I've always got a decent base of fitness.
The challenge was more from a logistics standpoint, and arranging things that I needed, equipment, where I was going to be, food, water.
Mentally, that was the tough part. That was the part that I couldn't really prepare for because I was on my own for over 300 days. I'd meet people along the way and have conversations, but I was on my own. I’d wake up every morning, and I’d go, “Oh my God, you know, I got to get on my bike and go again.”
There were days I would wake up, and I would start crying because I'd go, “Oh my God, I still have 250 more days of this to do.”
It really was giving myself a good kick in the butt most mornings… ”Don't think about it. Don't think about the big picture. Focus on what you have to do today. Get on your bike, get going. You'll be one day closer to finishing.”
There were times that I'd be going along, and all of a sudden I would feel like I was getting this big hug, and, you know, that helped me get through it.
The people that I met along the way, too. So many people, everybody has a cancer story.
The things that people were going through. I was so humbled by the fact that they would go, “You know, we really appreciate what you're doing here. This means a lot to us.” I felt like I couldn't let these people down.
I would try to take a day off about every 12 to 14 days.
On the most memorable moments from his trip:
It usually comes down to [the] people that I would be meeting along the way.
On the person he met just outside of Santa Monica:
[He was] going through exactly the same thing that I was at that moment. We were both thinking about our wives, and the universe brought us together, and we had a great connection. It was therapeutic for both of us.
On crossing the Mojave Desert:
He was sitting there going through the same thing I was. He was about to cross the Mojave Desert on a bike, and he didn't want to do it on his own. He was afraid. So we teamed up when we rode together for a week, and we just, you know, had this real bonding experience. We didn't see another cyclist that week. So again, here's something where we both had this need, and something in the universe made us diverge and join forces.
[My] bike, the brand is called Open, and it was started up by one of the guys that started Cervélo.... So it's actually a gravel bike, which is pretty close to a road bike, just a little wider tires, a little bit more comfortable for long rides. And I decked [it] out for bikepacking, so on it, I had panniers with the clothes that I would need, camp stores, my tent, my sleeping bag, any food that I would get along the way.
The back tire, I was going through like crazy. It was about every 1500 kilometers I would have to get a new tire because there was so much weight on it.
When I was going across like Greece and Turkey and Albania, it was like thousands of kilometers before you get to another bike shop, and then you'd hope that they had something that you could use. That was a big part of logistics, and it was really nerve-wracking.
It's actually pretty difficult to map a safe route around the world now. You know, at one time, any time when anybody was doing this, they would go through Russia. Well, that's a no-go area right now. So, you know that forced you to go further south, and you're looking [at] Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.
I had originally planned on going through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, but one of the challenges of that… was that it was going to be at the end of my trip, and there was a good chance that I'd be running into snow.
The reason why I picked Bangkok was that I was trying to find weather patterns. What time of year, and where am I going to start, where I'm going to have the best weather? The downside of Bangkok was that when I got to Australia, it would be at the height of their summer, and I had to cross the Australian outback, the Nullarbor [Plain]. It was over 40 degrees every day, and it was a headwind for thousands of kilometers.
One of the things that occurred along the way was that there was a woman out there who was trying to break the speed record. I was looking at her route, and [it] actually went down the West Coast of the [United] States, and then across, and then up further north in Europe… so what that allowed me to do was cut out Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and get rid of that concern that I was going to run into snow at the end of my trip.
On how he decided to ride around the world:
I was looking for something that would give me some purpose on a day-to-day basis just to keep moving forward… I read two books, one by Jenny Graham and one by Mark Beaumont, and they're both from Inverness, Scotland. They had both broken the speed record for around the world, and I was reading their books, and I'm looking at it, I'm going, I've done a lot of ultra endurance racing before, and know what it's like… So, I thought, “I wonder if there's a record for the oldest person to ride around the world?” So I checked Guinness, and there was, and at the time, it was a guy, who's an Irishman, who's 56 years old… I said, “I can do that.”
At the end of the day, it was really about the journey and about the ride. The record was just a bonus.
How he felt when he completed the journey:
Relieved. You know, it was kind of anti-climactic because I got back to Bangkok. When I left Bangkok, I had somebody there filming me. So there's somebody there to share it with. I was at the Canadian embassy in Thailand, and, you know, they acted as witnesses for me. When I got back to Bangkok, I just rolled in. I had to go back to the same spot I started, and I was the only one. There were all of these tourists, all over, and I rolled up, and I stopped, and I'm looking around and going, “Yeah, okay, I'm here. I guess I’ll just go find my hotel?”
The next day, I was kind of chilling out, and I’m also now going, “Oh my God, I just rode around the world. I said I was going to do that, but I actually did it, and I'm going, wow, that's pretty cool!”
We're all capable of amazing things; this was just something I set out to do.
Set a goal. I think anybody can do that type of thing… Not like, necessarily, riding around the world, but challenging themselves to just get out of that comfort zone because we can do anything we want.
I believed I was capable of doing it. It was just a matter of having all my ducks in a row and everything working out, and having some luck, which I had a lot of.
It taught me to get out of my comfort zone from the standpoint of asking people for help when I needed it, or when people would offer help, to accept it.
People ask me if this is the hardest thing I've ever done. No. Not even close. The hardest thing I ever did was watching Jackie die… People say, “You really understand what I'm going through.” I really don't; I was an outsider. I was certainly part of the journey, Jackie’s journey. I didn't have cancer. She had it. What I can relate to, though, is how helpless you feel as someone who just wants to fix things and, you know, and you can’t.
Just keep moving forward. That's all I can say.
Mark's Epic Ride
Join Mark on this epic journey of nearly 30,000 km through 20 countries!
Support Mark's Epic Ride
Donate to The Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation in Jackie’s memory.
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