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.