David Hummels: Sabbatical Biking Across America Q&A

Distinguished professor of Economics and former dean of the Daniels School of Business, David Hummels is taking a sabbatical—a year long break from work to reorganize his career.

In the time off, he's decided to pursue a biking trip across America, something he’s wanted to do all his life.

“I wanted to do something that was a really, really big challenge, physically, mentally, and emotionally, to cap off almost a year to make the transition back to being a faculty member feel complete,” Hummels said.

As of this interview, Hummels was in Pennsylvania, and is scheduled to reach Boston, his destination, on June 21. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you prepare for this?

I grew up in Colorado, and I started biking probably around age 8. I started biking more seriously in junior year of high school. Then maybe, 20 years ago, some other faculty and I started biking a lot, and doing longer rides.

I’d been kind of steadily building up to harder and harder multi-day rides. I found myself as dean, and it really cut quite sharply into my ability to do this thing that I deeply love. So I kind of restarted once I stepped out of the dean's office a year ago. My training got pretty intense in December. I was working with a coach who was a professional cyclist for a while, and a Little 500 champion. He put me through some pretty excruciating training from December to April.

Could you talk more about the path you’re taking? Is it the fastest path?

It’s definitely not the fastest. You can get across the country about 600 miles less than we're doing. If you just go straight East to West, it's much faster. We're going from kind of the Southwest to the Northeast.

The route is put together by the company organizing the crossroads cycling. They have a route that they've mapped out over the years, and some of it is different from what a lot of tour companies do. A lot of tour companies will take you to really spectacular parts of the world, and every ride will be just gorgeous scenery, something you'll never see again in your life.

This is different. The point of this is to get from one side of the country to the other. Today, we're riding along Lake Erie, and it's really beautiful. But there are other times when it was tough, ugly riding. We had to ride across the Mojave Desert, and into Arizona. It's just different. You're trying to make it across the country and some parts of the country are just not very hospitable to being on a bike.

Are you traveling with a group? And how do you pack?

There’s 25 riders who are doing this, and most people who are doing it are retired since most people don't have seven weeks to spend for work like this. We get two duffel bags to put all our gear in, and the organisers arrange for a hotel at each stop. You go downstairs each morning, you hand them your duffel bags, you get on your bike, and you ride, on average, 85 miles up the road to the next stopping place.

They've kind of scattered out the routes for us and if you get into some mechanical problem you can't fix on your own, they can help you out. So, it's pretty different from some people doing this bike packing thing. You're camping, and I'm way too bougie to camp my way across the country and not take a shower for two months.

Has the trip gotten progressively harder, or has it gotten easier, and were there any moments where it was excruciatingly hard?

No matter how much you train and how many intervals you do, there's just no substitute for being on a bike for 40 hours a week. The first couple of weeks were very hard for almost everybody including people who are much more fit than I was.

We were coming through the California hills and the mountains in Arizona, so you've got heat and traffic and some pretty steep climbs to get over those mountains. And you know, you're spending time in the desert, which is not great.

Part of the desert was along a terrible stretch of road where wind was blowing and we were going 30 miles an hour, basically knocking you off your bike. I thought, man, this is going to be too much for me, but I made it through that day. The next day, my legs were so sore I didn't want to get on the bike.

After that first week and a half, we had another tough stretch in Missouri. You have these rolling hills--these non stop up and down and up and down. I actually loved that, because I was starting to feel really strong.

Every part of is a different challenge. Sometimes it's wind, sometimes it's climbing, sometimes it's heat, sometimes it's boredom, but generally speaking, the longer we've gone, the easier it's gotten.

With your background as an economics professor, are there any insights related to your studies as you’ve gone across America?

We spent a lot of time in the southwest, along the very famous old route 66, and as you ride through it you realize these are places that the road still visits, but traffic doesn't. You can see the economic wreckage of low population density. There are many abandoned businesses and restaurants with no hope of ever being anything again, because there's just not enough people there.

Another thing is the extraordinary variety of things on offer. You can stream any TV show or any movie ever made. Every single restaurant is available to you at the touch of a button. All of that abundance and variety is incredibly distracting.

A trip like this strips everything out of your life. It becomes this very pure experience. It makes me think that our lives are not made better by this extraordinary abundance of information. Maybe sometimes we'd be better off intensely focusing, like monks, on one activity that is deeply important to you.