92 Hours to Race Day: What Gravel Cycling Is Teaching Me About Faith and Fear

At the time of writing, I have 92.22 hours—that’s three days, 20 hours, and 13 minutes (and approximately 9 seconds…8 seconds…7…you get the picture) before I compete in my first ever gravel race. If you haven’t noticed, I’m a little jittery. My nerves are as taut as a guitar string pulled to its breaking point.

Trying new things is often scary. The fear comes from not knowing. What’s going to happen in Walhalla on Saturday? Will I be able to handle the elevation on the climbs? Will the hurricane off the coast dump rain on the course? If so, how will I have to adapt to that? Will I remember to bring everything I need? What if I have a flat? And the list goes on. This somehow reminded me of when Jesus told Peter to leave the boat and walk on water.

There’s something almost absurd about Peter’s moment of truth, not the walking on water part, though that’s miraculous enough, but the invitation itself. “Come,” Jesus says, as if stepping out of a perfectly good boat in the middle of a storm is the most reasonable thing in the world. As if the choppy waters of Galilee are as solid as Capernaum’s cobblestones.

91.89 hours remaining.

Peter must have felt his own countdown ticking. Not in hours and minutes, but in heartbeats. The space between Jesus’ invitation and his response. How long was it? A breath? A lifetime? Did he calculate the odds, run through contingency plans, worry about what the other disciples would think if he belly-flopped into the sea?

I suspect he did what I’m doing now: he made lists. What if the wind picks up? What if I sink? What if this is all some elaborate test I’m destined to fail?

But here’s what one might call the terrible beauty of the moment: fear itself becomes the point. Not an obstacle to overcome, but a doorway to walk through. The anxiety I feel about Saturday’s race, about unknown climbs and unpredictable weather and the dozen ways I might humiliate myself, isn’t a bug in the human system. It’s a feature. It’s the precise location where transformation becomes possible.

Because what Jesus offers Peter isn’t really an invitation to perform a miracle. It’s an invitation to discover who holds him when everything familiar falls away beneath his feet.

90.45 hours now.

I’ve been thinking about the gravel itself. Those loose stones that will crunch beneath my tires, each one a minor act of chaos, a tiny betrayal of the smooth certainty I prefer. Gravel doesn’t cooperate. It shifts. It slides. It demands a different kind of attention, a willingness to flow with instability rather than fight against it. You must hold on loose and let go. Trust the process.

There’s grace in this, I think. The way the path refuses to be tamed, refuses to let you coast. How the very thing that makes the race challenging, the unpredictable surface, the demanding is also what makes it worth doing. The gravel strips away pretense, forces honesty. You can’t fake your way across loose stones any more than Peter could fake his way across roiling water.

When Peter finally steps out, and the Gospels give us no dramatic pause, just “immediately Peter got down out of the boat,” something profound happens. Not walking on water, though that’s remarkable enough. Something more fundamental: he becomes the kind of person who trusts Jesus and steps out of the boat.

88.4 hours.

This is what faith really is. It’s not a feeling but a decision made in the face of insufficient data. Peter doesn’t step out because he’s certain he can walk on water. He steps out because Jesus has called him, and that call carries more weight than his uncertainty. The miracle isn’t that his feet don’t sink; the miracle is that he swings his leg over the side of the boat in the first place.

Saturday morning, when I clip into my pedals at the starting line, I’ll become the kind of person who signs up for gravel races. Not because I’m certain I can handle what’s coming, but because the invitation to try has somehow become louder than the list of reasons why I might fail.

The countdown will hit zero. The horn will sound. And I’ll push off into whatever Walhalla has waiting, carrying nothing but the strange certainty that stepping out of comfortable boats is what we’re made for, even when we can’t see the bottom through the waves.

Want to know how the race goes? Follow along for the aftermath, because sometimes the real story begins when the countdown hits zero.