Many of you who have accompanied me on this bike journey from Zadar, Croatia to Wroclaw, Poland, in recent days have expressed your admiration for the physical aspect of this undertaking. For many non-athletes, cycling over 1100 km in 9 days, while climbing Mt. Everest and Mt. Blanc, may seem like a superhuman effort. Fortunately, this is not the case for me, as I have been doing endurance sports for many years. However, I have another challenge that I have been facing for years, and which was one of the main themes of this journey.

It is about unlearning the rushed life, at high speeds and with great intensity, which I have practically known for forever. Instead, I am learning to live more in harmony with nature, with the environment, with myself.

A few years ago, I withdrew from my professional life, which, in theory, created space in my life to develop these new habits. Being „here and now”, noticing what’s around you, being more open to others, better understanding yourself, your various emotions, your life path and the meaning of existence. Cycling through various unknown places, dragging not only a bike but also luggage and a drone on your back, somehow forces you to ride a slightly different style.

During this multi-day ride, I often watched as my old „I” bantered with the new one. The old one sometimes wanted to ride faster, further, longer. The new one asked him: but why do you want to hurry? Your wife told you that you can come back even next Sunday, and if necessary, even later. A wife like that is a treasure, isn’t she.

I stopped many times to admire something while many cyclists, especially on the Alpe Adria route, rode without noticing the beauty of the waterfalls, flowers, ripe grapes in Italian or Austrian vineyards, or the changing smell of our beautiful continent along the way. I used to rush like that without restraint. Before setting off on my journey, I wondered whether to take a drone with me. It’s an additional piece of junk to pack and carry, and each time it’s launched, it takes time, focus and preparation. Wanting to share my visual experiences with you, I tried to document this journey quite richly with photographs, both from a drone and from my phone. Anyone who has ever taken a photo while riding a bike, sometimes fast, knows that this requires extra effort. At the end of the day, it all had to be somehow edited into some digestible travel vlog. This additional work, although tedious, gave me a lot of satisfaction when it could move, inspire or lift the spirits of another person. As the wonderful priest Grzywocz once said, „value likes to be shared”. And what I experienced on many levels, spiritual, tourist, social, climatic, etc., was truly valuable.

I am writing this a bit in the past tense, so you can probably guess where my last story from this bike trip across Europe is headed. This morning, when I saw the downpour in Prague and the terrible forecast for the remaining 300 km of the road, my two “I’s” started to talk again. No, I have to go and finish this ride like a man, like a warrior… despite the terrible weather, despite my main assumption for this trip, which I wrote about above, and in fact despite myself. A new voice, you might say the voice of reason, said: but what pleasure will it be to spend another dozen or so hours on a bike in the pouring rain riding against a headwind of 30 km/h. What good will it do to the world? You don’t have to prove anything to yourself. And… I listened to this new voice, even though the old one wouldn’t let up. After leaving the hotel in Prague, I went to the train station in Prague to buy a ticket to Wrocław. It turned out that I could only buy a ticket at the ticket office to the Czech/Polish border in Trutnov. So I did. On the way, however, I returned to the idea that I could somehow crawl my bike from the border to Wrocław. After reaching Trutnov, it turned out that the downpour was so merciless that after a few minutes on the platform I was completely soaked. So I bought another ticket to the Sędzisław station, where I had two options: either stop for the night and continue the last 110 km by bike on Saturday or take another train, this time to Wrocław. I was about to book accommodation on in Sędzisław when I got the idea to check if there was anything to eat nearby. And nothing. I would have to starve for almost the entire day.

Of all the challenges that stood in my way, this last one turned out to be the hardest. How can I let go in this objectively difficult situation?! The goal is so close! For many people, especially those working in business, in professions that require high intensity, letting go is extremely difficult. One of the famous Polish Ironman competitors promoted himself with a slogan that once seemed quite inspiring to me, but today sounds idiotic to me, i.e. „There is no such thing as I can’t”.

When I was sitting there first in the restaurant car of the train to Wrocław and then chatting with fellow passengers about this and that, in the background there were voices of passengers saying that the terrible weather was because today was Friday the 13th. That it was all because of the Genoese Lowland, Boris. I smiled internally because I felt that it was not Boris or the weather that defeated me, but that I defeated the old „I”.