LATIF NASSER: Before we begin, this show contains some graphic and it may not be suitable for all listeners.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller.

CAT JAFFEE: Lulu! Hello!

LULU: How's it going?

CAT: Good.

LATIF: I'm Latif Nasser.

CAT: Latif! Hi!

LATIF: Hi!

LATIF: And today on Radiolab, we have a story from Cat Jaffee. Cat is a powerhouse of a radio producer, but she's also just a powerhouse in general. She's an ultra-endurance mountain biker.

CAT: I mean, I'm also really not. That's the thing that I'm finding out as I do this story.

LATIF: And she came to us with this story that's actually about that very thing, about pushing the limits of what one single individual person can endure emotionally, mentally and physically, totally alone—without any help from anyone.

CAT: Let's see. I can't find them now because I had so many notes about this. There's so much I want to tell you! But oh man, where are they?

RACHAEL CUSICK: Do you—do you need some help?

CAT: Okay. Thank you, Rachael.

LATIF: So in a story about doing things all by yourself, we forced Cat to work with Radiolab producer Rachael Cusick.

RACHAEL: Yeah. We have a power team right here. This is great. [laughs]

CAT: We do.

RACHAEL: And so to kick things off, this story actually started for Cat a couple years back.

CAT: Yeah. In March of 2020 I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

LULU: Oh man!

CAT: And the day that I was diagnosed, the hour I was diagnosed was when Colorado was issued a shelter-in-place.

[NEWS CLIP: Breaking news: stay at home. That is the order tonight.]

RACHAEL: Cat lives in Colorado.

[NEWS CLIP: Governor Jared Polis has ordered all Coloradans to stay home.]

LULU: Oh my God!

[NEWS CLIP: Health officials urging the public to practice social distancing.]

CAT: And so my whole cancer journey happened in isolation.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's like a ghost town.]

CAT: People couldn't see me. I did all my doctor's appointments alone.

LULU: Wow.

CAT: Like, it was a lonely time to go through cancer.

RACHAEL: In the weeks and months after the diagnosis, Cat would be sitting at home alone or in the hospital getting chemo treatments—alone. And to keep herself from spiraling out on stories about ovarian cancer, Cat just obsessively started researching this sport she'd come across called bikepacking.

LATIF: Bike—bikepacking?

CAT: Yeah, so it's like biking and backpacking combined, except instead of carrying all the stuff on your back, you put it on your bike. And you could bring anything with you for an overnight or a two-week trip or a pedal around the world.

LATIF: Hmm. All right.

CAT: And I had gotten into these bikepacking races.

LATIF: What do those look like?

RACHAEL: It's a kind of bike racing—I mean, I guess to explain it, like, think of, like, you know, the most famous bike race there is, the Tour de France.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The world's most grueling cycle race nears the end of its ...]

RACHAEL: It goes, of course, all the way across the entire country of France. And all along the way, the whole country is lining the streets watching.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's coming to their doorstep. They're using the cities ...]

RACHAEL: TV crews all over the place.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Oh goodness! Flaherty has crashed!]

RACHAEL: Every moment is captured ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 35 brands.]

RACHAEL: ... and sportscasted.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And I think everybody is ready for a huge spectacle, and they're gonna get it!]

RACHAEL: But in addition to being a media circus, it's also sort of a circus of support.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Goes back to the team car for food and water under the stars.]

RACHAEL: There's cars following along, with all these people and supplies in case something breaks.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Ah, what the heck, it's only a $12 or $15,000 bike. I'm gonna throw it down.]

SOFIANE SEHILI: And you have a masseuse, you have a nutritionist. Somebody who's going to cook for you. It's really, really not the reason why I cycle. I cycle just to break away from all this.

RACHAEL: So this is Sofian Sehili.

SOFIANE SEHILI: I am 40 already. Oh, that sucks! And I'm a professional ultra-endurance cyclist.

CAT: And he's kind of a big deal in the world of competitive bikepacking, which more or less started in the early 2000s. And it sort of looks like the antithesis of the Tour de France.

SOFIANE SEHILI: You have to take care of everything by yourself.

CAT: You can't have a friend bring you food or water.

SOFIANE SEHILI: You have to carry all your gear.

CAT: And you're on everything from crowded roads to dirt paths to no trail at all, like you're just following a GPS track that someone made hoping you're on the right route but there's nothing there.

RACHAEL: This brutal aloneness and self-reliance ...

SOFIANE SEHILI: It's our ethic, you know? Our ethos.

CAT: So I had been the kind of person that could throw my body into anything and it would just show up for me. We were like a pretty good pair, you could say. And then the pandemic happened and I was diagnosed with cancer, and all of a sudden my body, myself, the things that I was feeling, I could no longer trust what was going on inside. Like, I didn't feel like we were on the same team anymore.

LATIF: Hmm.

CAT: And so then I found this little corner of a sport where you have to trust yourself, and the thing that you have is yourself. And I thought that that is just what I needed. And it just became like the center of all my attention. And so when I'm on a table waiting for a doctor to come in, I was like, "I'm gonna just research bikes and find the perfect bike."

RACHAEL: She found the best clothes and socks.

CAT: Waiting for a surgery to start, I designed my own sleeping bag and had it made in Poland.

RACHAEL: She'd get her toiletries. Even make a couple adjustments.

CAT: Yeah, the toothbrushes are very long so, like I'll cut off ...

RACHAEL: Okay.

CAT: ... the stem of the toothbrush so that way it fits better.

RACHAEL: She even thought about entertainment.

CAT: I played Boggle with myself, and I had ...

LULU: Oh my God, you have board games for one?

CAT: Yeah.

LULU: That's amazing!

CAT: And actually, it has totally different rules, but some ...

CAT: The more gear I found, the more I could pack for a world where I didn't have to come back. So I didn't have to be attached to infusion machines anymore. I didn't have to hear the beep-beep-beep of my chemo medication.

RACHAEL: So during her 200 days of treatment, Cat started to train. Even on the worst days of chemo, she'd get on her bike and she'd ride.

CAT: And, you know, the first few days I didn't like it. [laughs] I was like, "This is really hard and miserable."

RACHAEL: But she rode a little bit every day.

CAT: It's not like I'd be out there, like, shredding the gnar on my bike. Like, I took a lot of naps in fields.

RACHAEL: And she got stronger and stronger, until eventually ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cat Jaffee: All the yurts to the bee boxes to these, like, awesome little trailer cars!]

RACHAEL: ... a little over a year after her diagnosis, after surgery, after chemo, after freezing her eggs ...

CAT: I flew to Kyrgyzstan, I brought my bike ...

RACHAEL: And competed in a 1,200-mile race.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cat Jaffee: There's just these carpets of electric green. And the mountains, they look so—oh, I'm gonna cry! This is so magnificent! [crying] [laughs]]

RACHAEL: She was alone, but ...

CAT: All of a sudden I was free, because it didn't just mean, like, oh I get to do this sport, it meant, like, I'm healthy enough to stay out there.

RACHAEL: That race—really, the whole sport of bikepacking, it flipped aloneness from this thing that was so painful into this thing that saved Cat, taught her how to heal herself.

CAT: Going through cancer with that, like, I came out way more independent and kind of individualistic than I went in, just learning to come to peace with being alone during hard times.

RACHAEL: But that feeling, it would get a lot more complicated for Cat. And it all started with one particular bikepack racer. Her name's Lael Wilcox. She's one of the most popular bikepack racers in the world. And she's also thrown into question everything Cat thought she knew about going through hard things alone.

CAT: All right. Here's a challenge I give you since ...

CAT: So last July, Rachael and I flew out to Tucson, Arizona.

RACHAEL: Okay.

CAT: How many different cactus varieties are you seeing just on this drive?

RACHAEL: Okay. One, two, three. Ooh, four.

CAT: We drove into the desert.

RACHAEL: Oh, like those—those things with the pink flowers are technically cacti, right?

CAT: Yes! No, they are.

CAT: To sit down and talk to Lael.

[GPS: Your destination is on the right.]

RACHAEL: Oh my gosh. Which one? This one?

CAT: Okay.

RACHAEL: So we go there, we show up at her house.

LAEL WILCOX: Yeah, I'm Lael Wilcox, and I'm an ultra endurance bikepacker.

RACHAEL: She was super friendly and inviting. And, you know, one of those people that just, like, had an easy laugh.

LAEL WILCOX: But it's like it's funny to think about, like, stuffing hot dogs in a bag as your job. [laughs]

CAT: She just kind of has this face that kind of sparkles.

RACHAEL: Like, when she smiles, she kind of like, leaves her mouth agape and ...

LAEL WILCOX: [laughs]

RACHAEL: ... waits for you to join her in in this smile.

LULU: [laughs]

CAT: And I'm kind of fangirling a little bit because Lael is an absolute badass at this sport.

LAEL WILCOX: I broke the women's record on the Tour Divide twice. I won the overall Trans Am in 2016. Beat all the men.

RACHAEL: And she has inspired a lot of women to take on this sport, which has traditionally been super male dominated. But the reason we were there to talk to her was because of this ride she did on the Arizona Trail back in April, 2022.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lael Wilcox: Time trial starts in one minute. We're at the Mexican border. And it's a beautiful day. Super windy.]

LAEL WILCOX: Yeah, the Arizona Trail is a national scenic trail that goes from the Mexican border to the Utah border, it's 830 miles about.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lael Wilcox: And that's Mexico.]

LAEL WILCOX: There's nobody there. It's super weird.

CAT: She's doing this thing called an independent time trial. People just—they do it to see how fast they can go but, like, she's trying to break a record. So it's not a race, there's no one else out there, it's her against the clock.

RACHAEL: Or so she thought.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lael Wilcox: And that's the start of the ride.]

LAEL WILCOX: I was like, "Okay. 9:03, here we go!"

CAT: And then she just takes off.

LAEL WILCOX: I start riding, and I felt this overwhelming sense of calm. I've never felt like that in my life. I was just like, almost in a daze. You pass through the Sonoran Desert, high grasslands, saguaro cacti.

RACHAEL: And in the beginning she felt great.

LAEL WILCOX: I felt like that for, like, the first four hours. And then, you know, reality set in. [laughs]

CAT: All of a sudden there's a cactus in your tire.

LAEL WILCOX: So sometimes it's totally overgrown with cactus, so you're bushwhacking through cactus.

CAT: She's cranking out all these miles.

LAEL WILCOX: You know, I get to, like, the 70-mile point at dark. I'm just staring down this narrow trail, hoping not to crash, hoping that the shadows are not rocks.

CAT: She's going as—as fast as she can.

LAEL WILCOX: Just consistently moving forward. The whole thing is about your average speed over time. So I was like, "Okay, this is my plan. I'll sleep four hours a night. I will try to sleep at places with water."

RACHAEL: All along the trail, there are these water caches.

LAEL WILCOX: Metal case with water jugs for hikers and bikers in, like, the most remote stretches that are about every 30 miles.

RACHAEL: They're stocked by people called trail angels. So it's in the rules that if something is already there available to everybody else on the course, you're allowed to take it. But these water caches ...

LAEL WILCOX: Sometimes they're empty because other people drink it.

RACHAEL: You don't know. It's kind of like a gamble.

LAEL WILCOX: Yeah, you don't know.

RACHAEL: So early in the ride, Lael gets to the first water cache, and ...

LAEL WILCOX: [gasps]

RACHAEL: ... there's water. Now the audio you've been hearing is actually audio that Lael's wife Rue collected.

RUE KALADYTE: My full name is Rugile Kaladyte and I am a professional photojournalist. I document a lot of Lael's races.

RACHAEL: She partners with Lael's sponsors to make these beautiful videos. So when she was filming the AZT ...

RUE KALADYTE: I did it with my friend Sean. He was kind of acting mostly as the driver. What I would do is I would plan on accessing trailheads, parking the car there, you know, so we'd see her maybe a couple times a day. Just a few seconds.

LAEL WILCOX: Rue often is hiding in a bush while I go by.

RUE KALADYTE: It's better for photos. I don't want to, you know, mess with Lael.

LAEL WILCOX: So, you know, I would see them and be like, "Oh, they're there!" And then that's it. [laughs]

RUE KALADYTE: You know, she's not stopping. She would just be cruising.

CAT: Lael would pedal a hundred miles.

LAEL WILCOX: And then you climb the road up Mount Lemmon.

RACHAEL: 200.

LAEL WILCOX: I'd slept in the post office because it was like 20 degrees up there. And then you descend down the other side on this heinous trail called Oracle Ridge, where you're just walking.

RUE KALADYTE: And then you don't see her for a while. You're, like, up on a mountain, you get a photo of her and you're like, "Oh, I hope she's doing okay." But then it's like, I see Lael when she's sleep deprived. I see her after she's crashed.

RACHAEL: When she's hungry.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lael Wilcox: Because I'm really calorie deprived.]

RUE KALADYTE: And then you're just, like, standing there with your Clif bar and like, oh man, that sucks. Sorry!

RACHAEL: And in those moments, all Rue can really do is watch. Because remember, there's this rule that when you are competing in one of these bikepacking competitions you can't accept help unless it's available to every other person riding the course. Like for example, there was this one day where Lael ran into Rue at a trailhead ...

RUE KALADYTE: She'll be like, "I haven't had water in four hours. I'm so thirsty."

RACHAEL: Lael sees one of those water boxes, bends down and opens up this rusty gate.

LAEL WILCOX: [gasps] There was no water.

RACHAEL: Meanwhile, Rue and their friend Sean are standing right there.

LAEL WILCOX: And they'd be, like, drinking a gallon, but I couldn't take it.

RACHAEL: Lael wants that water. Like, she needs it. But she also doesn't want to take that water because the whole ethic of this sport is to be self-reliant. That is why she's out here.

RUE KALADYTE: And then it's like, acknowledge that, and then I just, like, put up my camera and take a photo.

LAEL WILCOX: You're like, you see the person you love most in the world and you're like, "Just keep going."

RACHAEL: So Lael keeps riding away from water, away from Rue, away from any sense of comfort. Eventually, in the distance she sees this outline.

LAEL WILCOX: And I'm like, "Oh, it's Rue!" When I get too, too tired I can't focus my eyes. I hallucinate. And the hallucinations are like—it's like a rock and I think it's a person, or it's a cactus and I think it's Rue. Like, real objects turn into people.

RACHAEL: And from that state of tripped-out solitude—no water, no help, Lael now has to go through one of Arizona's greatest landmarks, a fortress of tourists with selfie sticks, a mall in the desert.

LAEL WILCOX: The Grand Canyon.

LULU: Wait, like, into it? Like, down into it?

CAT: Yes, down into the canyon then back up the canyon.

LATIF: Oh my God!

CAT: But you can't actually—so it's a national park, and so tires are not allowed to touch the ground.

LATIF: Yeah.

CAT: So this might be worse. You hike into the canyon and out of the canyon, and your bike has to be on your back the whole time.

LAEL WILCOX: The bike probably weighed 40 pounds.

RACHAEL: Keep in mind this is one of the most popular trails in the US.

LAEL WILCOX: There are like so, so many people.

RUE KALADYTE: People were asking her all these questions. Like, "What are you doing? What are you doing?" You know?

LAEL WILCOX: Like, "Hey, is there some nice riding down there?" And I'm like, "Nope." [laughs] I just have to carry it across. Oh my God, just, like, every single person. And then I'd have to, like, pull over for the mule teams to pass.

RACHAEL: It's the worst, Lael says, she felt the entire ride.

LAEL WILCOX: And I was just like, this might be too hard.

RACHAEL: And after hours of hiking, Lael makes it to the bottom of the canyon, crosses the Colorado River, and then has to start going back up.

LAEL WILCOX: I start going up, and then I, like, get to the north rim, put my bike back together, start riding.

RACHAEL: But after a little bit her eyes start losing focus.

LAEL WILCOX: I start getting paranoid, like it'll never end, so I'm, like, riding as fast as I can. I'm like, "I just want to finish. I just want to finish so bad." I'm listening to pop music, I'm just raging. And then I crashed three miles from the finish. I was like, "All right. Get it together, headphones out."

RACHAEL: All that's left ...

LAEL WILCOX: The vermillion cliffs, beautiful pink, rolling mountains, no trees, wide open and that's it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lael Wilcox: Yeah, whoo!]

LULU: So how'd she do?

RACHAEL: It's an 827-mile route, and Lael does it in ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lael Wilcox: 9 days, 8 hours ...]

RACHAEL: ... 9 days, 8 hours and 23 minutes. Which means she breaks the record.

LAEL WILCOX: I beat the previous record by 2 hours, 20 minutes. The men's record.

RACHAEL: And she beats the previous women's ...

LAEL WILCOX: ...record by basically a day and a half.

LATIF: Wow!

LULU: Damn!

LATIF: Good for her. Wow!

CAT: I know. I know.

LAEL WILCOX: That trail is like the hardest thing I've ever done.

CAT: But it doesn't count.

LULU: Why? Why?

CAT: Well, we're gonna get to that after the break.

LULU: All right, Radiolab's back. We are talking about bikes and also what it means to be alone. Right? Latif?

LATIF: Hey. [laughs] Yeah, I'm still here. I was just messing with you.

LULU: [laughs] That's all right. Aloneness is the topic. But anyway, let's bring back reporter Cat Jaffee and Radiolab producer Rachael Cusick.

CAT: So before the break, we told you about this woman Lael Wilcox who did this incredible competitive bikepacking ride, 830 miles through Arizona—the deserts, the mountains, the forests, down the Grand Canyon, back up the other side. And she did it faster than anyone had before. But then Lael found out the record didn't count.

LATIF: Yeah, so what happened? Why? Why not?

CAT: A few hours after Lael finished, the guy who runs the Arizona Trail race, posted on Instagram and said the reason was that Lael's wife Rue and her media team were out on the course the whole ride. And they saw Lael, like, a lot.

LULU: But wasn't Rue's whole thing that she intentionally did not help her?

CAT: Yeah, but competitive bikepacking is all about completing these rides self-supported. And the race director said having people come out and visit you is a kind of support.

LATIF: Wait, so her record doesn't count just because some people watched her break it?

CAT: Yeah. And, like, in the sea of things that someone could consider as an advantage, this seemed like kind of a weird one. Like, Lael is gay, she's a woman, she's breaking a lot of records. Like, maybe they're just looking for something to pick her off, you know?

JOHN SCHILLING: Yeah, because that was a lot of the feedback. I have this fragile male ego and I can't stand powerful women. And that's why she got disqualified.

RACHAEL: So Cat and I, we called up the guy who made that call.

JOHN SCHILLING: John Schilling. I'm the Arizona Trail Race director.

RACHAEL: And he told us it was simpler than that. Like, a couple days into Lael's ride, he starts getting these texts.

JOHN SCHILLING: Bunch of my riding friends like, "Hey, have you seen Lael's Instagram account?" And I'm like "Well, no, because I've been out riding."

RACHAEL: He's also a bikepacker.

JOHN SCHILLING: So of course I go look and I'm like, "Oh, okay." Great. So there's clearly a media crew following her for this event, and that's not allowed. And it was also a violation of our visitation rule.

RACHAEL: And what's that rule?

JOHN SCHILLING: People can come out and see you, you just can't have the same people over and over and over again at, like, every trailhead crossing.

RACHAEL: That's in your list of rules on the website?

JOHN SCHILLING: Yes.

RACHAEL: Along with the rules that they can't have someone come bring you food or you can't draft off another person is this rule that says you can't have someone you love come out and keep you company along the way. In other words, you can't have any emotional support. And so when John found out that Rue and their friend Sean were out with Lael ...

JOHN SCHILLING: Seeing all that stuff and just like oh, good grief, you know?

RACHAEL: ... thinks to himself, "I'm gonna have to disqualify her."

JOHN SCHILLING: But I'm also not that much of an asshole to just instantly throw down a DQ hammer. You know, she's arguably probably the most popular and well-known bikepack racer on the planet. So I—I go home and I'm like, "You know what? I'm gonna reach out. I'm gonna send Lael a message on Instagram letting them know that there is a rule. She can have a clean ride, but just stop posting the updates." So I—I sent that message. I get a reply from both of them, a real nice reply and everything. And they—they discussed it and they just said, "No, we're gonna keep doing our thing." Well, okay. Then you're disqualified. End of story.

LAEL WILCOX: That's insane to me.

CAT: Lael Wilcox again.

LAEL WILCOX: I—I think the rules are outrageous. I believe what I'm doing is self-supported, and I'm not gonna, like, back down just because some guys tell me that I'm getting an emotional boost.

CAT: Lael says that when she was first told that Rue can't follow her because it's going to be an emotional advantage ...

LAEL WILCOX: I really thought about it. Like, is there something unfair happening? Should I not be doing this? Should I be respecting this?

CAT: But pretty quickly she decided ...

LAEL WILCOX: Forget it.

CAT: It just didn't seem like a big deal.

LAEL WILCOX: Who cares?

CAT: Rue's just taking pictures. And for Lael, those pictures were the big deal.

LAEL WILCOX: The people who care about the sport, they all say they want more women to participate, and this is a struggle at this point. So having somebody there shooting photos, it changes it. You might inspire some little girl to go ride her bike.

CAT: And Lael says that whether or not Rue is there, she is doing the thing self-supported.

LAEL WILCOX: Self-supported means, like, actual physical help. Yeah, people shouldn't bring you something to eat. That would change it from self-supported to a supported ride.

RACHAEL: Like, the physical needs are much more important.

LAEL WILCOX: Absolutely. Yeah, the physical stuff is what you have to take care of, is—is how you're gonna get results. People are always like, "Oh yeah, that endurance stuff, it's all just mental." And I'm like, "You try to ride 200 miles in a day and tell me it's all mental."

RACHAEL: Like, she's not superwoman because of emotions.

LAEL WILCOX: [laughs] Oh, yeah. I just, you know, got a day and a half faster pretending she's not there with her camera on me.

RUE KALADYTE: I don't know. It makes you happy if you see me.

CAT: Lael's wife Rue jumped in.

RUE KALADYTE: Will that make you go two hours faster than the guy's record? Will it make you go 36 hours faster than the women's record? That's insane.

CAT: And if anything, having her out there ...

RUE KALADYTE: I think that's slowing her down.

CAT: ... might actually make things harder for Lael.

RUE KALADYTE: She'll see us, she'll talk to the camera. Like, I don't know how that's making her faster, like, stopping to chat, you know, talking about, like, what happened the last hundred miles. I don't think that's gonna make you faster.

CAT: And that made sense to me because if you think about Lael's ride, she's out there, she's in her flow, she's trying to accomplish this ride, she's taking all of her energy and focusing on herself. And then suddenly, here's the person that you love the most and you're wondering, like, are they okay? And you're worried about them worried about you.

LATIF: Hmm. So you thought Lael was winning despite her partner being hidden in the bushes?

CAT: Exactly.

LULU: Hmm.

CAT: One of the things that having cancer during the pandemic taught me was that interacting with people that you love sometimes can make things harder. Sometimes they were trying to make me feel better and they would almost say that, like, the cancer was my fault. Or people I trusted to even diagnose me from the beginning misdiagnosed me four times before we found my cancer. I mean, solitude is a shelter.

LULU: So—so do you feel that people are more of an emotional drain on average that a—than an emotional boost?

CAT: I just don't think that the concept of emotional support is the same for everybody.

RACHAEL: Yeah, this rule felt totally absurd to me when I first heard about it. But then ...

RACHAEL: Whoo!

RACHAEL: I took a ride with Cat and Lael on the AZT.

RACHAEL: They're off in the distance speeding down this hill.

RACHAEL: Now I am not a professional bikepacker ...

CAT: This is what I live for!

RACHAEL: ... but I've done a lot of long distance biking. And I was shocked at how freakin' hard this was.

RACHAEL: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!

RACHAEL: It was just up and down and up and down.

RACHAEL: Oh my God, fuck this hill!

RACHAEL: I'm, like, pumping the brakes. My hands get, like, super tight from just like …

RACHAEL: Whoa!

RACHAEL: ... holding on for dear life.

RACHAEL: I just fell off this fucking mountain.

RACHAEL: I ran out of water.

RACHAEL: I'm really dizzy.

RACHAEL: I'm covered in scratches.

RACHAEL: Ow! A cactus! Ow!

RACHAEL: And at one point we were taking a break and I heard this very weird sound, this sound like a sprinkler going off in a bush.

RACHAEL: What is that sound?

RACHAEL: And I was like, "Oh my God, what a fun sound! I'm gonna go collect it."

LAEL WILCOX: I think that's a—a rattlesnake.

RACHAEL: No!

LAEL WILCOX: Okay, Rachael, just keep moving.

RACHAEL: Oh! No no no no no! 

LAEL: That's terrible!

RACHAEL: Holy shit!

RACHAEL: It was just shy of a hundred degrees out there that day, and eventually there was this moment ...

RACHAEL: I keep thinking I'll turn a corner and see somebody and I don't.

RACHAEL: ... when I was all by myself.

RACHAEL: And it feels really lonely.

RACHAEL: Lael and Cat were off in the distance somewhere.

RACHAEL: I think this is the way. I have no clue. They're not here.

RACHAEL: And I just hit this wall.

RACHAEL: Like, I wanna quit. I wanna go home. Oh my God. Fuck me.

RACHAEL: I got off my bike and I just started walking. But then ...

RACHAEL: Oh my gosh!

RACHAEL: ... I saw Lael and Cat.

CAT: You're doing it! You're doing it! Hey! Look at you!

RACHAEL: It was almost like some switch was inside me that got flipped on the minute I saw them. And I got this jolt of energy almost like one of those, like, sugary gel packs that marathoners eat.

RACHAEL: Okay, back on my bike.

RACHAEL: And ...

RACHAEL: Back on my bike.

RACHAEL: ... I got back on my bike. And I kept riding.

RACHAEL: And that's like not nothing. I just don't—like, I don't think that what Rue and Lael are doing is cheating, but I do think that there is some physical boost that we get when we are supported by others. Wow, this is fun. This ride's fun. Oh my God! Oh my God!

ESZTER HORANYI: Seeing people you know out on course will give an emotional boost, for sure.

RACHAEL: That's bikepacker Eszther Horanyi.

ESZTER HORANYI: I set a record on every bikepacking race that I did.

RACHAEL: And she and the other competitive bikepackers that we spoke to, they said that is why this rule about emotional support exists.

SOFIANE SEHILI: When you dig so deep physically for such a long time ...

RACHAEL: Sofiane Sehili again.

SOFIANE SEHILI: ... you're not drafting physically, but it's like something like, you know, mental drafting.

RACHAEL: We also heard this from ...

REBECCA RUSCH: Rebecca Rusch. I'm a mountain bike gravel hall of famer and a bikepacker.

RACHAEL: And the way they put it is just like so much of this sport is planning and packing and riding as if you are totally alone, and you're the only person who can take care of yourself.

REBECCA RUSCH: Okay, this is it. You know, no one else is coming.

RACHAEL: But if someone who cares about you is there ...

REBECCA RUSCH: We make different choices.

SOFIANE SEHILI: Knowing that they're out there, it just—it changes everything.

CAT: But I want to know what exactly is changing, biologically, physiologically, what are our bodies doing when we're going through something hard and someone else is with us?

JIM COAN: Well, can I go into a little background about the basics of how the body works?

RACHAEL: [laughs] Hit us!

RACHAEL: So Cat and I called up a guy who studies this exact question from the inside out.

JIM COAN: You ever been in a brain scanner?

RACHAEL: His name is Jim Coan.

JIM COAN: I'm a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.

RACHAEL: And back in 2005 ...

JIM COAN: We brought married couples into the laboratory.

RACHAEL: He put participants through their own version of a stressful thing, which in this instance wasn't ultra long distance bike racing, but actually an old fave of psychology researchers everywhere …

JIM COAN: Bzzt! [laughs]

RACHAEL: ... an electric shock.

JIM COAN: But we're not necessarily interested in the shock itself, we're interested in how they perceive the threat.

RACHAEL: And how does having someone you love close by affect that? So Jim takes one of the volunteer participants—call her Sarah. Puts her in a brain scanner and wraps a little bracelet around her ankle. This is for the shocking.

JIM COAN: [laughs]

RACHAEL: Now inside the scanner, Sarah is laying on her back looking at a screen kind of like an iPad, and it's got a circle on it.

JIM COAN: A blue circle.

RACHAEL: Now at that moment, Sarah is breathing a sigh of relief because she's been told blue circle equals no shock.

JIM COAN: Nothing was gonna happen in the next four to 12 seconds. Phew!

RACHAEL: And at that point, Sarah's brain looks relieved, or as much as brains can look relieved. Point is the blood in Sarah's brain is ...

JIM COAN: Relatively evenly distributed.

RACHAEL: ... it's calm.

JIM COAN: Yeah.

RACHAEL: But then the blue circle disappears, and in its place—bzz!

JIM COAN: A red X.

RACHAEL: Pops onto the screen. This X means it's shock time.

JIM COAN: In the next four to 12 seconds, they had a 20 percent chance of getting an electric shock on their ankle.

RACHAEL: And this ...

JIM COAN: Surprise, surprise.

RACHAEL: ... stressed Sarah out, just like any scary thing would. This X, it stands in for a bunch of hard, stressful things. It could be a rattlesnake, it could be a visit to your doctor or a hard test that you gotta take, or this exact music you are listening to right now. And when your brain encounters a red X ...

JIM COAN: Alert!

RACHAEL: ... things get frantic.

JIM COAN: Blood is moving like crazy all around the brain.

RACHAEL: Going to your visual cortex.

JIM COAN: To, like, your superior colliculus.

RACHAEL: Hypothalamus, telling your body to release hormones.

JIM COAN: Cortisol.

RACHAEL: Which makes it dump a bunch of ...

JIM COAN: Glucose, fuel for your muscles.

RACHAEL: So you can, you know ...

JIM COAN: Scream and tear this stuff off your body and get the hell out of there.

RACHAEL: And if you want to get technical, hyper-specific, very scientific, you can call this ...

JIM COAN: An "Oh shit" response.

RACHAEL: So that's what happens when Sarah sees the red X—bzzt—in the scanner when she's all alone.

JIM COAN: An "Oh shit" response.

RACHAEL: But then Jim ran this experiment again.

LATIF: Wait, who is this poor Sarah person?

RACHAEL: She's imaginary. She had a very bad day. Anyway, but her day was about to get better.

LATIF: Okay?

RACHAEL: Because in the second round of this experiment, Jim brought Sarah's wife—let's call her Joyce ...

[JOYCE: Hello!]

RACHAEL: ... over to the brain scanner, sat her next to it and asked her to hold Sarah's hand. Then he fires up the machine, shows Sarah the red X—bzzt—and ...

JIM COAN: These regions of the brain that are responsible for enacting emotional responses and releasing stress hormones, all of those things went quiet.

RACHAEL: It was almost as if the red X wasn't even there when she's holding her wife's hand. Like, it threw up this force field that protected her from the threat of the red X, made it feel on some level like it wasn't even really a threat at all. That big hill ahead, that rattlesnake, the doctor's appointment, that hand you love in your hand blocks these things.

LATIF: Wow!

CAT: But when it comes to Lael and Rue, I don't think they were holding hands or touching each other. Can this just, like, happen if you just see somebody that you care about?

JIM COAN: Well, my colleague and friend Denny Proffitt did some studies like this where he had people standing ...

RACHAEL: Jim said yeah. Basically, this still happens. Similar studies have shown that if someone you care about is just with you, like standing right next to you, it just makes bad things seem less bad.

JIM COAN: And the friend is just standing there.

LULU: Huh. So did Jim dare to enter the debate? Like, did he come down on one side?

JIM COAN: I have to say the critics of Lael are a hundred percent correct.

RACHAEL: Like, according to the science, having someone you love with you during a hard thing, it helps.

JIM COAN: Yeah. However, when it comes to the decision to do the thing the way she's doing it, I'm a hundred percent on the side of Lael.

RACHAEL: Can you say more about that?

JIM COAN: Well, one of the things we see is that people who are walking through the world with the expectation that if something bad happens, other people are gonna take a problem away, those people use more of their metabolic resources for growing hair, repairing tissue, building their immune system, doing all of these things that are associated with longer, healthier and happier lives.

CAT: So what Jim is saying—and this is huge—is that when we believe there's another person there, you can use all this stuff you're storing up because there is a backup person there. Meanwhile, people who believe or do things on their own or feel that other people are not necessarily part of the solution but they add more work ...

JIM COAN: Those people—and you may be one of them, Cat. I don't know. We'd have to measure it. But those people on average tend to keep a higher concentration of glucose circulating in their bloodstream. Sometimes quite a lot more.

CAT: They store the energy in case something happens.

JIM COAN: But that's not necessarily a good thing because you can sort of flame out.

CAT: Jim, like, clumps through the, like, cables of the internet and is just like, "Cat Jaffee, like, this is Jim the scientist. You should change the way you've viewed people as a problem because, like, it may not be good for you."

LATIF: You're making it sound like A Christmas Carol or something.

CAT: [laughs] I know! It took this thing that I was so proud of, and it said this thing you thought you had landed and nailed as, like, how you're gonna get through hard things needs to be revised.

LATIF: So you—like, at the beginning you were on Team Other People Are More Trouble Than They're Worth.

CAT: [laughs]

LATIF: And now he comes in and he's like, "Yeah, your body thinks otherwise."

CAT: Exactly. And at first I was like, "No! We need more science! Like, this can't be everything," you know?

LULU: [laughs] F-you, Jim. You're just one scientist with one MRI machine.

CAT: [laughs]

LULU: What do you know?

CAT: Yeah. Yeah, basically. And then I was like, "Well, you know what? Like, why don't you just try on what it would be like if Jim's right? And so that was the fall until now. And my life has infinitely improved.

LULU: What did you do different? What did you actually change?

CAT: I took up social dancing. [laughs]

LULU: What kind of—are we tango? Are we ...

LATIF: Endurance dancing!

CAT: Salsa, bachata, cumbia. West coast swing. I do it all. So yeah, I've really fallen in love with dancing, but also, like, professionally, I have been collaborating with a lot more teams. I just was like, "I don't want to have to do every part of everything anymore."

LULU: Has your feeling about solitude changed? Like, does it feel toxic now in some scary way?

CAT: No. I still go bikepacking, and when I do I invite people. But most of the time I end up going alone and I love it.

ESZTER HORANYI: I mean, it's—I think there's beauty of the loneliness that can come with being out there all alone.

CAT: Esther Horanyi.

ESZTER HORANYI: Learning how to deal with tough situations by yourself, I think it makes life a little less scary and you become a little less worried that what if my support system leaves me for whatever reason, what am I gonna do?

REBECCA RUSCH: And when things do get hard and you get lost and you figure it out all on your own, there is an amount of confidence that—that cannot be built with other people around who are gonna pick you up if you fall down.

CAT: Rebecca Rusch.

REBECCA RUSCH: And it's not to say either is right or wrong. I've done amazing rides. I love riding with people. It's like such a bonding experience, but I also love riding alone because then I really get to know myself. Then I get to know the one person that I'm gonna live my whole life with, and that's me.

LATIF: Wait, wait, wait. But before we go, what about Lael? Like, do you think any of this will change the way she does her rides?

CAT: Actually, as we were finishing up reporting, we learned that Lael is going to race next season without Rue.

LATIF: Huh!

LULU: Hmm. That's exciting. Oh God, I want to know how she does.

CAT: I—yeah. A lot of us will be watching.

LULU: I am. I will be.

LATIF: Me too. But if Rue's not there, how are we even gonna watch it?

LULU: Rach? You wanna head back out there with a microphone?

RACHAEL: No fucking way. [laughs]

LULU: All right, that's a wrap. Time's up. End of race. See ya!

RACHAEL: And if anyone does actually want to watch Lael's next season racing, you can actually track her. There's this website called Trackleaders.com. You can watch her dot move along. Rattlesnakes are sold separately.

LATIF: This episode was reported by Cat Jaffee and Rachael Cusick and produced by Rachael Cusick with help from Pat Walters. Original music and sound design by Jeremy Bloom, with mixing help from Arianne Wack. And fact-checking by Emily Krieger. This episode was edited by Pat Walters, who kept throwing down drafts like they were $15,000 bicycles and he was at the Tour de France. Special thanks to The Radavist for letting us use the audio of Lael's ride across Arizona, and to Lake Street Dive for letting us use their song, "How Good It Feels," which you're listening to right now.

CAT: And special thanks to the folks over at Chumba Bikes who welded me one of my best friends of the bicycle variety. And every person who has let me ask them about how they go through hard things. And an extra huge special thanks to my mom, Melissa Jaffee, who was there every way she could be during my cancer treatment. As well as the many friends who pushed their way into my fortress of solitude. I am forever grateful.

[ELEANOR: Hi, my name is Eleanor.]

[DAVID: And I'm David. And we are in beautiful Utah, cycling all the way from Montana down to the Mexico border.]

[ELEANOR: With our four-year-old daughter Ady. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Our hosts are Latif Nasser and Lulu Miller. Dylan Keefe is the head of sound design.]

[LISTENER: Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Andrew Viñales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Kreiger and Natalie Middleton.]

 

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