Tour de Ken
A 2,745-mile experiment in resilience, design, and identity.
I’m training to ride the Tour Divide before I turn fifty. After years of chronic pain and a surgically reconstructed ankle, I’m rebuilding from the foundation up—body, systems, identity, and meaning. This isn’t just a ride; it’s a long-arc design experiment lived in real time.
Why the Tour Divide?
The Tour Divide is a self-supported bikepacking race from Banff to the Mexican border: 2,745 miles of mountains, weather, solitude, and uncertainty. Riders face everything from hypothermia to wildfires to mechanical failures far from help. It’s demanding in every sense: physical, mental, strategic, and existential.
For me, it’s also the culmination of something larger. After years with a fused ankle, chronic pain, and a long period where I could barely walk without a cane, this ride is a way of asking a hard question:
What becomes possible when you design your life as a long-term system, not a collection of goals?
This project sits at the intersection of endurance, complexity, embodiment, and meaning—the same intersections that animate my intellectual work.
The Long-Arc Experiment
Body as System
Training through injury, constraints, aging, adaptation, and nonlinear progress.
Mind as Pattern
How identity, motivation, and long-term meaning systems evolve under stress.
Life as Design
Applying systems theory, behavioral architecture, and lived-experience design to an endurance challenge
What I’m Tracking
The journey isn’t just about mileage. I’m tracking systems-level indicators across training, recovery, sleep, pain patterns, weight, nutrition, and emotional bandwidth. Not to optimize, but to understand how change really happens over long arcs.
Training load and progression
Weight loss and metabolic adaptation
Pain and functional mobility
Sleep and recovery
Mental resilience patterns
Environmental constraints and real-world variability
Systems that support or undermine momentum
The Journal
Updates, reflections, and systems notes from the journey.
Get in Touch
If you’re a journalist, podcaster, researcher, designer, or endurance athlete working on systems, embodiment, or ultra-distance strategy, I’d love to connect.