nibbaniccycletour

the day

Start riding immediately after breakfast, and plan for about 5-6 hours of saddle-time per day. This will be split into ~1 hour chunks, and each chunk will be punctuated a 15-20 minute break where you stop for some food and to fill your bottles. Drink more water and eat more food than you think you will need, and start eating and drinking *before* you are hungry or thirsty, lest you hit ‘the wall’.

View each block on the bike as a meditation session. Some of them will be laser-focused on your body; others will be panoramic focus on the scenery. Some will be joyous tingles and dopaminergic surges while and others will hellish headwinds and leaden legs. This is the whole point. This is vipassana and you are giving yourself insight about how things are always changing. Try to keep your exertion level as constant as possible through all of the phases; if you overexert when feeling the buzz then you will regret it next time you hit a dark night.

You can change your position as much as you like but keep the effort steady at zone 2: the level you can sustain with only nose breathing. Settle in at the start of a one-hour block and resolve to keep moving until you reach your next punctuation-pause. You don’t need to push - just go steady and strong and observe how even the most painful of periods passes if you just pedal and persevere.

You can use rhythmic music or silence. You can listen to audiobooks but make sure they are something which you want implanting deep in your psyche. Avoid anything about productivity, self-help, gossip, news, finances, violence, etc, which is going to leave you feeling inadequate, worthless, wanting or angry. Most of my time is spent with music so that I can offload my own thoughts, but when I am feeling receptive I like to use the audiobooks of the nikayas by Bhikku Bodhi.

You will probably go through all of the phases over the course of a day. You may start out feeling great (a&p) and then sink into ‘ugh I can’t do this’ (dissolution) before having 10 minutes of ‘I _really_ can’t do this’ (dark night) and then find yourself sailing along feeling invincible (equanimity). Oftentimes when you come to the next buzzing a&p phase (tingles, goosebumps, energy) you will feel yourself having an insight or some abrupt inspiration to export. In this situation I highly recommend stopping and texting yourself the insights for later review. This is also the case in dark night phases where you just can’t get something out of your head. Stop and export; clear your cmem / sankāra.

You can lower the intensity of your pedalling in a dark night phase, but the only case where you should stop altogether is if you have some words looping in your head ready to export. When you export, only export. Do not whine or complain; the aim is to get them out, not to engage with them. You may need to stop, write, pedal, stop again, write again, pedal again, and so on; it depends on how deep export runs.

I like to find a place to do a little sitting meditation during the day - just 15 minutes - and to sit again in the evening. I find the bike warms my system up nicely so like to ride for an hour or so before any morning sit, but this is all optional and up to you.

Around early afternoon start looking for a place to spend the night. If camping, earmark a park or campsite 1-2 hour-blocks away. If staying at hotels, find your hotel and make a reservation. Do not set an target at the start of the day or your focus will become the destination (clinging) instead of the journey (releasing). This is not about achievement; this is about export and defrag.

the week

The week pans out in a surprisingly reliable way which mirrors a weeklong sitting-meditation retreat. Remember that within each day you will have micro-cycles, but the week itself has a macro-cycle dictated by dopaminergic makeup. Variability will come into play but I’ve done tens of these now and day 3-4 is always where the liberation comes.

Day 1 will see your dopamine levels rising. You will probably start with a bit of excitement to be on the bike, but as you settle in you could become quite aware of aches and pains in your body. Your system will be trying to raise your dopamine levels through phasic spikes and you will likely fluctuate between fairly extreme a&p and dn phases. You might cry or have other emotional releases toward the afternoon. This is all because your dopaminergic environment is volatile and you are settling into the rhythm; your system has not yet caught up. It can feel quite chaotic and turbulent, but also joyous and liberating.

Day 2 tends to be the hardest. At the end of day 1 your system is still in normal-mode and tonic dopamine may be depleted when you wake up on day 2. This will sort itself out by day 4, but the first 3 days are an adjustment period where your system is going from mostly-dormant to everyday-active. Your legs will also be tired by now, and day 2 is where your demons are likely to rise and bodily aches will be most intense. It could be quite emotional or difficult riding. This is natural all you need to do it stick to the plan. Day 2 on meditation retreats is often like this too, and at least on the bike you get to see the scenery flying by.

Day 3 can go either way, but this is where your body realises ‘this guy ain’t gonna stop’ and decides to up the tonic dopamine properly, while up-regulating receptors too. Legs will be tired by now so you may find that the old z2 effort is unsustainable and settle into a slightly lower power bracket, which is good. This is either going to be an emotionally challenging day or it’s going to be your first taste of equanimity. It all depends on how much baggage you have in your cmem / sankhāra and how quickly your dopaminergic tone is adapting. Don’t give up now - liberation is just around the corner. Your legs being tired won’t bother you tomorrow.

Day 4 you will (hopefully) be into equanimity territory. Your legs might be tired but that’s ok; work with what you’ve got. The type-2 fast-twitch muscle fibres will be exhausted so we are going to be relying on our type-1 endurance fibres instead; they last forever but don’t have the same ooomph. It will all be steady-state from here. The same can be said for your dopaminergic tone: your body will have elevated tonic dopamine significantly by now, which will be modulating and decreasing the impact of phasic spikes. What this means is that your micro-dark-nights are not as turbulent and your micro-a&p are not as invigorating. Things are good, and things are easy, and the woes that plagued you on the first 3 days are largely gone and forgotten. You will still have cycles as the days go on and you should continue to export, but your mood will mostly be lighter and more positive from here on.

Days 5 and 6 are a continuation of day 4, but your legs will be getting more and more tired. You will need to eat more and have more of a physiological need for rest. Again - focus on the time in the saddle and not the distance covered. Eat when you need to eat; you are not here to lose weight. By now your glycogen stores are starting to adapt so you might gain weight on the scales, but this is just water used to hold the increased levels of glycogen in your muscles: it will all fall away within a few days of getting off the bike. Your body and mind are well and truly adapted to the situation now: both systems believe ‘this person is going to ride this bike until the end of time and I need to adapt’. You will have settled into a rhythm in every sense of the word. The exports will still be happening and that is good. If they are not happening, that is good too - it means you can enjoy the ride.

Day 7 starts to see a little down-regulation in your receptors and this can be where things can get challenging again. Most of my tours to date have been 7 day and I have yet to do anything longer than this in a concentrated manner. My longest was the shikoku ohenro with all climbs and all temples; 12 hours a day for 7 days, which was too much. Don’t do this. The over-ambitious goals will imprint more clinging and craving for success and completion, and the whole point of the tour is to remove those things.

Go alone. Go at your own pace. Break it into chunks. Ride through the good and bad alike. Export your thoughts. Eat and drink and sleep. Use sunscreen, but don’t put it on your forehead or eyebrows unless you want to stream tears all day. Wear a helmet. Follow the rules of the road. Come back a better person.

Enjoy.

/jb202509291503