Threshold
A year ago I was using a cane in airports.
Not metaphorically. A cane. I have a congenital deformity in both feet, a surgical fusion in the left, and years of chronic pain that had, by then, rearranged my relationship with standing, walking, and being upright for any sustained period. Cycling, the sport that once organized whole chapters of my life, was something I watched other people do.
I am forty-eight years old. I had gained over a hundred pounds. I work full-time as a healthcare executive after the company that my co-founder and I started was acquired. I teach at Georgetown. I am writing a book. I have a family (one partner, two daughters, and four dogs), and a body that has been trying to tell me things I was not ready to hear.
In the summer of 2027, before I turn fifty, I intend to ride the Tour Divide. Banff, Alberta to Antelope Wells, New Mexico. 2,745 miles. Mountains, weather, gravel, isolation. A route so indifferent to the people who attempt it that finishing is the only metric that matters.
This is not a reasonable plan.
The constraints are real: a damaged body, significant (though decreasing) excess weight, limited training time, a life that does not pause for transformation. Most of the people who attempt the Tour Divide are younger, lighter, and have spent years building the aerobic base I currently do not have following years of losing the one I once did.
I am not chasing what I used to be. That version of me is gone, and I am not sentimental about it. What I am doing is designing forward: taking the body I have, the life I have, the limitations I have, and building something that did not previously exist.
This is a design problem. Not a fitness challenge, not a bucket list, not a midlife redemption arc. A design problem. The kind I have spent my career thinking about: how do you build a system that performs under real conditions, with real constraints, when the distance between where you are and where you need to be is large enough that the person who arrives will not be the person who started?
I do not know if I will finish the Tour Divide. I do not even know if I will make it to the start line. What I know is that the process of trying will require me to redesign how I eat, how I train, how I recover, how I manage pain, how I allocate time, how I think about my own body as a system rather than a thing I happen to live inside.
That redesign is the project. The ride is the constraint that makes the project legible.
This is the record of that work. Not a training diary. Not an inspirational narrative. A design log, written in real time, from the middle of the process, before I know how it ends.
It starts here.
Ken Wake is the author of Thinking Design (forthcoming) and a Professor and Entrepreneur in Residence at Georgetown University. His work explores systems, technology, design, and meaning. Tour de Ken is his weekly log.
