Splitting Lanes - A Study in Fear - Part 1
Updated: Jun 10
"What the actual hell am I doing right now?"
Or perhaps it was a more expletive-laden version, built almost entirely from a certain four-letter word starting with F, repeated multiple times and somehow forming a complete sentence. Just a few hours earlier, I had climbed onto this Honda CRF300 for the first time. A few hours before that, I had woken up in Costa Rica next to a guy I had met on Bumble six weeks prior. On a whim, I booked this trip after having only ridden with him once back home -about 25 minutes down a straight stretch of pavement, each of us on our own bikes- and after only a handful of conversations.
While this may seem like a reckless decision, that isn't why I was cursing the gods and puckering my sphincter. I am an experienced traveler and an experienced navigator, but at that point I was still relatively new to motorcycles. I had completed a few training courses and committed to riding consistently, but there was still so much I had yet to experience, including leading a ride and lane splitting on a highway between semi-trucks.
Cue the expletives.
I watched the locals do it, and my riding partner 'Hei-Hei' (my nickname for him) kept motioning for me to follow suit. Just ride up between them and go. I knew there was no way I was getting through this trip without making it happen, let alone chickening out within the first hour of a five-day adventure.
This would be the perfect place to tell you, in vivid detail, about everything that happened: the types of trucks on either side of me, the smell of the exhaust, how long it took, the sounds, the sensations. But, I don't remember any of it. What I do remember is sitting on that bike, feeling fear and anxiety creeping in, trying not to death-grip the throttle, and simply focusing on getting to the other side.
When I got through, we had to do it again, and again, and again.
For roughly an hour, we continuously lane split at about 65 mph on dirt bikes along the Costa Rican Highway until we finally escaped the main city and pulled into a town so Hei-Hei could visit a bank. I plopped down on the pavement and leaned against my bike, realizing I was horribly dehydrated, while he went inside to exchange his US dollars.
There would be a few more tests of my response to fear and risk during the trip, but overall it was exactly what we had hoped for: challenging, rewarding and deeply enjoyable. It is also why I chose Costa Rica when Hei-Hei challenged me to take an international motorcycle trip with him. Perhaps he thought he could call my bluff and trigger a fear response, knowing I was still uncertain about my riding abilities. What he didn't know is that I have a highly refined relationship with fear/risk-one that makes me what you might call 'risk-neutral' in the face of fear and danger.
I am generally not susceptible to peer pressure, but there are few things on which I refuse to be challenged.
A sense of adventure is one of them.
Do I still feel fear?
Absolutely.
I would love to sit here and say that my approach to fear and risk came from my military training and my time serving in combat zones. Or that my time working with local search and rescue, or even my current job as a risk-based analyst. Those experiences have significantly influenced how I view fear and risk today, but only after I had already built a foundation that was flawed from the start.
A Flawed Foundation
My foundation begins in childhood, likes it does for most of us. So take a step back with me, back into my memories.
There sits Nic: a small, stubborn, solitary child.
A few things to know about me back then: I couldn't be bothered to sit in a chair-it drove me nuts. I preferred to sit on the floor, or better yet, outside and barefoot. I also loved to read. While other kids were learning to read Goosebumps and other age-appropriate novels, I was diving into-and falling in love with- the stories of Ernest Shackleton, Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, Jim Whittaker (whom I later met), Henry Morton Stanley, Peter Matthiessen, and others. By the time I was ten or twelve, I had moved on to Joseph Conrad, Edward Abbey, Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell and was getting into wartime reporting.
My family was well aware of this and supported it. My mother even went to bat for me once against a teacher who accused me of cheating on a book report because, apparently, there was no way a child my age should be writing about such an 'advanced' novel. I don't remember which book it was, but I remember my mother saying something to the teacher along the lines of, "I can't help it that she can read at a higher level than you can".
At the time, the comment struck me in a somewhat shameful way. I didn't think of my reading as different. I was already acutely aware of how different I felt from everyone else, and now I was apparently reading 'different' too.
Shortly after that, I was placed in what they called the 'gifted program'. These days, we probably would have tested me for being on the spectrum. I didn't feel different. I don't know that I learned anything different, and I don't know if I was ever formally tested. I just went about my days and kept reading, intoxicated by adventure and the idea of exploration.
What I found in those travelogues, journals, and war reports were stories of people standing in the face of fear and moving forward anyway. Of course, my brain had not fully formed yet, so I lacked the wisdom to fully comprehend everything written in those pages. I completely missed the contextual clues that pointed toward a deeper truth:
Bravery is not the absence of fear; it is the willingness to act while afraid.
So little Nic wanted to be fearless, and armed with the blindness of youth, I set out to become exactly that.
I had a fair amount of freedom growing up and throughout my formative teenage years, so I largely did what I wanted. Some reckless things. Some half-reckless things. Some things intended to repair the damage caused by other people's recklessness. I had also started skiing at a very young age and eventually began teaching others while I was still in high school. During those years, there was a skier I followed who seemed larger than life. She was hucking herself off serious cliffs and charging incredible lines. Absolutely fearless. In fact, she was often described as one of the most fearless people on Earth.
Kristen Ulmer
I idolized her. I kept clippings of her photos in my journals as reminders of what a badass fearless woman could look like. Remember her name. It's important
The Military Exhausted my Fear by using Boredom
In March of 2001, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy with a delayed entry date, scheduled to ship out to boot camp in October. I figured I would graduate in June and spend the summer partying and rock climbing—my other great passion at the time.
Life obviously took a turn after that summer.
The peacetime vision of military service that I thought I had signed up for was thrown out the window in September. Over the next few years, I would spend a great deal of time dealing with fear. Fear of a completely different kind. My specialty in the service landed me smack dab in the Middle East for my time in the service.
I want to save that discussion for another essay, as it is lengthy, complex, and deserving of a multipart series. Needless to say, one of the most important lessons I took away from my time in the service was that fear creates a sense of urgency that compresses time. It does so in a way that isn't real. There are many moments of utter chaos and high speed velocity, and then there are days on end where you are reading every scrap of paper you can get your hands on while you sit and wait for something to happen. Be it candy wrappers, or the ads in newspapers used in care packages from loved ones, or your teammates love letters for the fifth time.
Much of military life moves at a glacial pace and consists of utter boredom. Ask any veteran, and they'll laugh while telling stories about "hurry up and wait." That boredom and those delays, in a strange way, exhaust fear. If you can learn to tap into that process preemptively and calm your nervous system, you can decompress time and focus on the task at hand. It gives you the opportunity to step back and think about fear as risk, rather than as the pure, adrenaline-fueled nightmare hellscape it can sometimes feel like.
Dopamine Junkie That Was Already Crashing Out
After the Navy, I decided to pursue a college degree. My husband at the time was from Boulder, Colorado, and as a dopamine junkie who was still more than a little reckless, the prospect of living in Boulder sounded fantastic. (Will get into the differences of Dopamine vs Adrenaline Junkies in a different post)
So we moved there after our time in the service. While I finished school, I also returned to my ski-bum and climbing dirtbag ways. Perhaps not quite to the same extent as before, but close enough.
This time, however, I was carrying a considerable amount of extra mental weight. The recklessness was now laced with existential dread.
I found myself running into strange mental headwalls that I simply couldn't explain. I would start boot-packing up a face that I knew I was fully capable of skiing, only to find myself sitting helplessly at the bottom, wondering why I couldn't even get my skis strapped to my pack. Or I would approach a drop that I had successfully done several times before, send it in arguably better conditions than ever, and somehow crash so badly that I dislocated my shoulder and lost grip strength in my right hand for several days.
What the hell was happening?
I didn't have time for this mentally. Physically, I was in pretty good shape. Emotionally, however, I was tearing myself to shreds.
If you've ever been to Boulder, Colorado, you might understand. If you're not operating at Ironman-level fitness, looking like Chris Sharma or Lynn Hill, and performing at a high level in at least three sports, then it can feel like you're nothing.
My pursuit of fearlessness over the previous two decades, combined with what I would later learn were the effects of poorly managed PTSD and a mild traumatic brain injury, was colliding with everything else in my life. I was trying to finish school while navigating a crumbling marriage, a loss of identity, and an unhealthy relationship with alcohol.
I was not coping well.
Get Intimate With Fear
Ironically, I picked up a new sport: snowkiting. Essentially, it is kiteboarding on snow. Because of that—and because there were relatively few people doing it, especially women—I suddenly found myself thrust into the Outdoor Retailer industry. I became part of the scene. I was rubbing shoulders with people on the industry side of the house, talking with athletes and personalities I had idolized for years, people I had only previously seen in films or recognized from photographs.
Cue Kristen Ulmer.
We met at Powder Mountain, and it turned out we had a mutual friend. I say "friend" loosely, because he is more of a family friend to me, but he's a name that many people know for his dry wit, humor, and ski films. Arguably, he was the person who pioneered and helped build the ski movie industry: Warren Miller. By the way, go watch Warren Miller's Extreme Winter. Kristen hucks a cliff in that film. I was seven years old when it came out, and I absolutely devoured it.
I didn't get much one-on-one time with her. She was there to lead a seminar and coaching program about her evolving relationship with fear—ideas that would eventually become her book, The Art of Fear: Why Conquering Fear Won't Work and What to Do Instead, published in 2017. In 2003, Kristen had rather abruptly retired from professional skiing. She walked away from filming, sponsors, competitions, and the media side of the sport altogether. She stopped writing her column for Skiing Magazine and effectively disappeared from the public eye.
The talk she gave that day changed my life.
It changed my life so profoundly that years later, when the book was finally released, I bought it immediately despite already embracing its core ideas. I wanted to immerse myself in them all over again.
Put simply, Kristen underwent a radical shift in her philosophical approach to fear.
I'm not sure I can do the idea full justice here or properly capture its essence, but I'll try. There is a misconception—partly fueled by a sort of Rogan-esque masculinity ethos—that fear is a bad thing that must be conquered. Even the language we use reflects this belief. We talk about defeating fear, eliminating it, mastering it, vanquishing it, banishing it.
All of those words imply that fear is the problem.
But it isn't.
Fear is not a flaw or an enemy. It is simply a feeling that reminds us we are alive. The discomfort and suffering come not from fear itself, but from our resistance to it. What if, instead of fighting fear, we turned toward it? What if we became intimate with it and listened to what it was trying to tell us?
Perhaps we would learn something valuable.
One analogy that resonated deeply with me was this: Imagine I am a leader sitting at a table with all of my advisors, trying to solve a problem. I would invite each advisor to speak. I would give them equal time and consideration before making a decision. In my body, my emotions are those advisors. They are constantly providing feedback. If I continually turn my back on fear, dismiss it as bad, and refuse to listen to anything it has to say, is it really surprising when it becomes louder and more insistent? Is it surprising when it starts banging on the table, demanding to be heard?
So why not sit down and listen?
Why not strive for balance?
Why not give fear the same respect and consideration that we so readily give to joy?
Stand With Fear
So where does that leave me today?
It leaves me sitting on a motorcycle in Costa Rica, staring at a gap between two semi-trucks and feeling every bit of fear that my younger self would have considered failure. The difference is that I no longer see fear as evidence that I shouldn't proceed. Fear was there because I was inexperienced. Fear was there because there was real risk involved. Fear was there because my brain and body were doing exactly what they were designed to do: gather information and keep me alive.
The mistake I made for years was believing that courage meant silencing fear. That somehow the adventurers, explorers, climbers, skiers, soldiers, and travelers I admired had figured out how to eliminate it.
They hadn't.
They simply learned how to sit at the table with it.
Now, when fear shows up, I try to listen. Sometimes it tells me to slow down. Sometimes it tells me I need more training, more information, or more preparation. Sometimes it points out a risk I hadn't considered. And sometimes it has nothing new to offer and is simply reminding me that I am stepping into the unknown. When that happens, I thank it for its input and move forward anyway.
I don't want to be fearless anymore.
Fearless people miss things.
Fearless people convince themselves they are invincible.
Fearless people stop listening.
What I want instead is awareness. I want presence. I want the ability to acknowledge fear without becoming controlled by it. I want to hear it, understand it, and then make my own decision. So yes, I lane split between semi-trucks on a dirt bike in Costa Rica. Not because I was fearless. Because I wasn't. And that turns out to be a much better reason.
~ Nic
BOOK: Art of Fear: Why Conquering Fear Won't Work and What to do Instead by Kristen Ulmer
SONG: Run to the Hills - Iron Maiden
This was a hype up song on the way to the slopes, I listen to it now and I can't remember why. It pulls at me again and I feel nostalgic. I can see some flashes of the memories, but everything feels a little hazy at the same time.
Also, here is a video of Kristen and her mates ripping it up. I had this on VHS among many others.
Thank you for reading my post. This post/essay, like many of the ones I write, is a blend of my personal experiences, travel, memories, stories, and shared conversations. These solely represent myself and my opinions and thoughts. When it involves personal friends I have given them nicknames unless they have given explicit permission to use their given name. There are times that I am able to pull from what I wrote down in my journals at the time an event happened, others I am trying to recall memories that have been altered by brain injuries and a lifetime of simply living. I may not always get it right, so please forgive me for some unintentional variations.
I always welcome feedback and thoughts on my posts. Please feel free to send me an email or comment below.
Love from the road,
Nic & Rally
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