Moments of clarity hit me at the strangest times. I had one recently while sitting in the back seat of a minivan, dressed as if I were headed to the Tour de France, “Truth Hurts” by Lizzo blaring on the radio. I’d barely broken a sweat, and my legs were freshly shorn like any self-respecting, recreational cyclist. It was the last day of the year, and I was only three miles away from my year-end goal of 6,500 miles logged on my bike.

Now I waited with my bicycle next to me, disassembled in order to fit into the confines of a Honda Odyssey. When he pulled up, my Lyft driver wore a particularly perplexed look. He probably hadn’t ever picked up a man on the side of the road wearing head-to-toe Lycra, helmet in hand, and hauling a dismantled bicycle. Thankfully, I had requested an XL.

That morning I had made it just a few miles before running over a shard of metal in the road. The small piece of debris tore through my front tire like a knife, so much so that each inner tube I attempted to replace and inflate punctured immediately as it squeezed through the slice in the tire. I went through just about every possible solution in my head, as cyclists are wont to do, but after finding nothing viable I gave up and phoned it in. While I was standing on the sidewalk holding my bicycle, a 10-year-old kid on a BMX bike rode up to me and asked if I needed any help. “Nah, I’m good,” I said, though I really wasn’t.

While I sat there in that back seat, I had a particularly powerful moment of clarity: think morning-after-a-sturdy-acid-trip-level lucidity. Everything came into view, and for a few brief moments, life’s rhythms all made sense. I thought about the chaotic year that was just wrapping up. I thought about my childhood, and about why I was out riding a bicycle at the very end of December. I also thought about why in the hell I had decided to open another brewery.

I’ve never been the type to set goals. My life always seemed to work best in the present-tense: I liked to stay fluid, ready to launch into whatever adventure might be lying in wait around the corner. In college, I would up and leave for a few days without telling anyone where I was going, or even that I was leaving at all.

As a kid, I played just about every sport. I was never good enough for recognition, but good enough to get by—an 80% athlete. If I always stopped short of “giving it my all,” it was in the interest of comfort, or boredom. I also liked the freedom: I thought if I committed too deeply to one sport, I couldn’t bounce around to another one. At the end of my junior year in high school I made the decision to quit playing team sports altogether—you know, for anti-establishment reasons—and spent the ensuing years getting deep into high-school football culture and Androstenedione recovery drinks after powerlifting workouts. It definitely boosted my performance, and enabled me to lift more weight and endure more pain, but I always found myself stopping just short of reaching the proverbial limit. I remained the 80% athlete.

“While I sat there in that back seat, I had a particularly powerful moment of clarity: think morning-after-a-sturdy-acid-trip-level lucidity.”

My love affair with bicycles didn’t begin until 2001, during my junior year of college. As a kid, I had always enjoyed riding my bike for the freedom it provided, but I only ever saw it as the best way to get as far away from my house in the least amount of time as possible. But as a student at a Christian university in Abilene, Texas—one which didn’t allow alcohol consumption and protected the aquatic center from “mixed bathing”—I found myself in need of an outlet. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to finish my degree or just bail on the whole thing and flee to the mountains.

At the time, I had a pretty sophisticated horticultural project blooming in a large, walk-in closet in my house. Only a couple friends knew about it, and it wasn’t intended to make money—just to save us some. With those extra funds, I bought my first proper, carbon-fiber bicycle during a memorable exchange at the local bike shop—my guess is they didn’t usually encounter customers carrying $2,000 in cash.

That bike became a ticket into a theme park that I hadn’t known existed. My first ride was around 30 miles, and all I wore was a pair of swimming trunks and a tank top. Hecklers yelled at me from large pickup trucks as they passed me on country roads. Two beer bottles narrowly missed my head, and no fewer than six dogs chased me. It was fucking awesome.

Going for rides became a form of clarity, and a way to anchor me. I stuck it out until graduation, then left Abilene as quickly as I could. Today, cycling still feels as freeing, as intoxicating, as it did on that first long ride. When I roll out of my house in the morning, the first few pedal strokes lift off the negative energy of the adult world.

In December 2018, I decided to unfasten myself from that notion of the 80% athlete, and put forth a challenge for myself: to ride my bicycle 6,500 miles in one year. It sounds like an arbitrary number, but I figured that 125 miles every week might be attainable. Besides, I knew that my time would be limited, given that I was knee-deep in construction on a new brewery that was already months behind schedule, and about $500,000 over budget.

2019 blossomed into a chaotic year. Hops & Grain Brewing—the brewery that I had opened in 2011 on a shoestring budget and a basket full of dreams—was starting to feel like it was going to implode. Two years previously, I had signed a lease on a large warehouse in a college town just south of Austin called San Marcos in order to build a second, production-focused facility. This new brewery would finally give us some extra capacity, and with it some much-needed growth. More important to me was that it would provide advancement opportunities for our team members, who had helped us get to where we were. I hadn’t been able to offer those opportunities prior. Upward mobility is a hard thing to achieve in a small craft brewery.

By the end of 2018, the second brewery was supposed to have been operational, and I knew I needed something to distract me. It only partially worked: I felt trapped for most of the first half of 2019, wanting to get back to my creative self but unable to take the step forward, too worried about the cascading construction delays and need to find more money to keep the project going. Our bank account was dwindling, and there were still so many unknowns. We had beefed up our staff in anticipation of a 2018 opening, and as the delays continued to pile up I could see some storm clouds on the horizon. As the sole founder of the brewery, and with no one else to share the emotional burden, I found myself having to make some excruciating decisions. May and June would go down as some of the darkest months in my professional life.

“Hecklers yelled at me from large pickup trucks as they passed me on country roads. Two beer bottles narrowly missed my head, and no fewer than six dogs chased me. It was fucking awesome.”

For years, we had been saying no to distributors and retailers who wanted to carry our beer, because we simply couldn’t produce enough at our original location in Austin. 2011 was a heady time in Texas craft beer. A very restrictive regulatory structure was in place that had created an environment with a fairly small number of breweries. But some of us took a cue from the pioneers that had come before us—like Live Oak Brewing Company, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, Shiner, and Real Ale Brewing Company—and we thought that we could add value to the beer scene in the state.

We grew double, sometimes triple, digits year over year until late 2015, when we maxed out our capacity and had no more room to expand. Sales were still growing, our staff was engaged and excited, and I was sleeping soundly for at least a few hours each night. In 2016 we raised over 1 million dollars in a little over three months as part of a funding round to build the new brewery. The plan that I had put together had us on track for opening in the spring of 2018, and I felt bullet-proof.

These days, the advice I give to anyone who reaches out to me about opening their own business is to plan for twice as long as you think you’ll need, and budget for twice as much as you think you’ll spend. It’s easy to give that advice, but much harder to accept it when you’re already drowning in its reality. I thought about that a lot in the back of that Honda Odyssey.

As the spring of 2019 was approaching, and I knew that we wouldn’t be opening for at least a few more months, I started spending a lot of early morning hours on my bike. Helplessness has a way of making you think about the world in queasy new ways. The one thing that I knew I had total control over was my bicycle, but this time it was different—I wasn’t riding my bike to escape; I was trying to suffer. Instead of thinking about new projects, new beers, and new ways to deepen the connection with our community, I thought about bankruptcy, disappointment, and how I was going to tell my staff and investors that we weren’t going to make it. I thought about the agonizing task of having to let go of employees who had dedicated years of their lives to the brewery. I thought about the deep responsibility that comes with providing a job, a paycheck, health insurance, and retirement benefits, and what it would do to them when it was all gone.

When I rode at a leisurely pace, I thought about everything going wrong at the brewery. But when I pushed my heart rate to its limit, the thoughts disappeared. I pushed so hard that my vision would get blurry and I’d taste blood. It became a meditative exercise, where the silence I was seeking was found only in the depths of physical pain. It was cleansing, but it was also destructive. Hard thoughts led to physical exhaustion, and that led to making decisions in a state of desperation.

In October, I noticed in the Strava app that I might actually have a chance of reaching that goal mileage I had set the previous December. It was going to take some effort, but it was within reach. Meanwhile, the brewery was, against all odds, open and in operation, and we had begun to fill up our distribution pipeline after months of out of stock issues. We’d somehow escaped the worst forecasts, and life was beginning to feel more normal. So I decided to go for it.

“When I rode at a leisurely pace I found myself thinking about everything going wrong at the brewery. But when I pushed my heart rate to its limit, the thoughts disappeared.”

I had some travel planned for New Year’s Eve so I knew I had to have it done by December 30th. The last long ride of my year was planned for the 29th and—if my mapping skills were on point—I would surpass the goal on that ride. But my mapping skills were not on point, and I finished the ride about three miles short of the goal. Not to worry, I thought, I’ll get a short spin in on the following morning before catching a 1 p.m. flight.

Then, the next morning, I made it only a few miles before the flat tire debacle stalled me within view of the finish line. Standing on the side of the road, I berated myself. Why didn't I just ride my bike a few times around the block the day before? Why did I put it off until the next day? My whole life, I’ve lived in the moment. My whole life, I was the person who maxed out at 80%. And there I was, a mere three miles from meeting the goal—as far as I knew, since my bike didn’t have a mileage meter—and I was stuck. Maybe that’s what I should have told that 10-year-old BMX kid when he asked if I needed anything.

There I sat. In the back seat of a minivan, nursing my emotional wounds while a stranger drove me and my bike home. I reached for my phone to distract myself, and saw that my workout, tracked through the GPS on my watch, had just synced to the Strava app. I stared at it for a minute. Five miles, it said.

2019 was a year that nearly broke me. Despite the odds, things had come around at the last moment. The new brewery, on the verge of failure, had opened. Things for the business finally looked optimistic. And I had ridden 6,502 miles.