Adrian Stingaciu: Final Reflections

This is Adrian Stingaciu, making my last call in via e-mail, post race, the day after finishing. I'm writing this from Long Beach, CA. on July 8 at 3:55pm. I guess I just wanted to wrap this up and say a few things which managed to slip through the cracks of my mind. I'm not sure if I can say this in a coherent way, since I've had less sleep in the last few days than during most days in the race. But yeah, just wanted to thank all the race organizers for putting this whole thing together so others can race the route from beginning to end, and thank you for that wonderful shirt, you guys are so awesome and giving of yourselves. The ACA's Great Divide Mountain Bike Route is such a beautiful route, no words will ever capture the feelings, light, love and joy of riding the whole thing. There have been moments of despair and moments of pure absolute bliss. I have been asked if I would ever do this race again, and my immediate reaction has been "no way", I do not want to repeat such pain and suffering twice in my life. But the more I think about it, the more the race becomes a legend in my mind, a beautiful story in which I felt honored to be part of. There have been only a few moments in my life where I have felt so alive as I have on the Great Divide. Oh, so alive !!! The camaraderie on the route between riders as well as people and other sentient beings who crossed our paths has been awesome. I don't know if I can ever duplicate the feelings of love and happiness that I felt on the route. I came to the Tour Divide Race to test myself and to punish myself like I've never done before. I came to find where the possible meets the impossible but instead I have found where the Great Divide meets the Great Divine. It is exactly at the point where I most fail to look, right in front of my face, right between the eyes, dead center, right now. The Great Divine is not hidden, it all there right in front of me, from the ant and mosquito on my arm, the dragonfly hanging from the inside of my hat in a rain and hail storm, the lady bug sitting on my knee for 2 miles so she can get a free ride to somewhere, and the many other things I failed to see because I was too busy with something else. These things have taught me that all life is Sacred, that all life is Divine. You know I never carried an i-Pod like some of the riders, the music was always playing in my head, and when it wasn't playing up there, it was playing out there in the Wild. The best moments in the Tour Divide for me have not been on the bike actually, they have been off the bike, when I stop to use the WC hear the silence and the birds singing and the insects humming. The last few days while riding alone through some sections I began to hear Imagine in my head and then sang it out loud to the trees and to anyone that would listen, except the version that I heard included all the people, the 2-legged, the 4-legged, the 8-legged, and even the 1000-legged people, the feathered people, the furred people, the tree people and even the no-legged people, all of us living in peace and loving each other as One. Out on the Great Divide I actually saw that happening, one day. One last thing about food on the route. I have tried to do this race only on sun-dried raw vegan food. I have tried and failed miserably. But it is better to try and fail than to not have tried at all. Matthew Lee advised me against mailing food packages but I did not listen. I had to forge my own path and tried anyway. Unfortunately it is the only way to get raw vegan food in small towns. Due to the many variables I cannot control on the route, the logistics of this has been really difficult, but I still managed to make 3 of my 4 food drops at the Post Offices. It has helped in some ways to have the best fuel on earth, but it has hurt in other ways having more food weight to carry and waiting for food drops. Though I was not able to eat only raw vegan food on the route, I was thankful to be able to at least eat vegan on the whole route. I had 3 mistakes where I unknowingly ate something that was not vegan/vegetarian due to misreading the ingredients and my exhausted and starving state, but I was never forced to eat something knowingly that was not vegan. There is plenty of vegan food out there that it was never an issue for me. So this was my second US crossing while pedaling on vegan food, which was awesome. It was great to have 2 vegetarian and 3 vegans at the start up, and to have 2 vegetarians and 1 vegan finish the Tour Divide. It was really awesome riding and pushing myself to keep up with the UN team over the last few days of the race, and I really enjoyed their company. So that's all I have to say. Peace and love to all. God bless the Earth and Sky and everything in it.

Adrian Stingaciu

P.S. Yesterday we got caught in a tornado in Arizona while driving back home. Kind of scary, we had to pull over and park under a bridge for a while, the car was swaying violently, rain and hail and really strong winds, we were worried the winds would send an 18-wheeler truck sliding into us and flatten us out into a pancake. Luckily that never happened. A few minutes later it calmed down enough that we could drive away out of the storm and into 110F Arizona sunshine.