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Today, we headed out fairly early for a ride to Monteverdi. I know the roads out there so I was tying to hold myself back from charging, but I’d slept really well (that deep deep sleep you only get after being up for most of 40 hours straight) and I wanted to ride my bike. I mean, come on — we’re in Tuscany!

We’d been divided up into groups according to ability level. Some of the women weren’t cyclists at all and weren’t sure how they’d do with 60 kilometers of riding. Some rode at home or did spin classes but weren’t sure how fit they would be when it came to riding the hilly Tuscan terrain. And then there was our group, women who’d brought their own bikes or who rode regularly at home and knew they could ride the full distance, if not a little longer each day.

My group was lead by Howard, Colleen’s husband. Howard is fifty years old and looks not a day older than thirty-five. He’s fit the way guys who run marathons on their shorter days and swim a few miles to islands offshore for fun are fit. He looks like a guy who can drop me on a climb any day of the week while eating a banana and talking on the phone.

We took off toward Bolgheri, the same direction we’d ridden the day before. I was at the front and just as we were passing through the Sassicaia vineyards, a men’s team of Italian neo-pros went by. I looked at Cheri, the woman just behind me in the line, and said: I’m going.

She shrugged. Ok. Me, too.

I jumped on the group of guys and they let me sit on almost toward the back of their group. They were flying. We crested the Avenue of the Poets, sped by one of the slower groups that had left well before us, and kept on going. By the time I looked back, it was just Cheri and me with a couple of the Italian guys. We’d dropped the rest of their team, even. And rolling up into the town of Bibbona, I realized I was going at a speed faster than I could maintain. So I wasn’t upset at all when the guy pulling us pulled off and said he was going the other direction. Cheri and I turned down into Bibbona alone and then started the climb up toward Cassale Marritimo.

Cheri and I were still in that mode of being floored by the views. We were still checked into our own lives (mine in New York and hers in Boise, Idaho) and we hadn’t yet accepted the reality of the rolling farmland that looks like someone shaking out a blanket over the whole land mass. I kept pointing out the views and we both kept laughing at how beautiful it was. A perfect sunny day. The sky meeting the horizon in crisp perfect lines like a brush stroke with almost no radius. We stopped somewhere along the road and took some photos. And then we kept on.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Cheri asked me, about 20 kilometers after we last saw any sign of our riding group.

“I think so.” I told her. “I mean, I know the roads. And today is the day we’re going to Monteverdi, right?”

She shrugged. Neither of us was sure. But I’d glanced at the itinerary that morning. I was pretty sure Monteverdi was our destination.

“I’ll go ask that guy up there if we’re going in the right direction.”

We pulled up to a stopped car and I asked a guy in garbled Italian if we were on the right road to Monteverdi. He pointed us on and we kept going.

It’s allergy season in Italy. The air is filled with pollen and flying bits of fluff off the trees. Luckily I’m not badly affected by allergies, but Cheri, on the other had, is. Within another 25 kilometers, she was complaining about wanting to scratch her eyes out because she was getting so itchy.

“Alright, King Lear,” I told her. “Just chill out and we’ll get you something for your allergies as soon as we can.”

We rode along for a good hour or so. Stopped once at a little roadside café to get a drink and something to eat. And then kept on. I talked to Cheri about her life in Boise. She’d lived in the Bay Area for a number of years and then moved with her husband and three kids to Idaho. She told me she’d just taken her three kids for a semester to Spain and enrolled them in a Spanish school, told them to figure it out and learn the language and get some decent grades.

“I mean, physics is hard enough in English, but imagine trying to learn it in Spanish.”

She said the kids finally got it, though. By the time they left, they’d all made friends. They’d brought their grades up. They were fine with their tiny apartment in Madrid. They took weekends in Morocco and Ireland. They traveled. They learned things they were never going to learn from sitting in a classroom. Like how to survive in a foreign place. How to figure out the base human interaction necessary to make yourself part of a community in a place that isn’t home to you. These kids will always have that confidence instilled in them. They’ll always know that they can get by in these circumstances. It’s valuable. I told Cheri: I think you’re giving your kids an education that they otherwise would never be able to get.

She tried to be humble and claim she was sure she was messing them up in some way or another, but I wasn’t buying it.

We hit our final climb into Monteverdi and rolled into town just as the bells were tolling: everything is now closed in Italy time. It was a Sunday. And in Italy, at 1pm on a Sunday, you’re hard pressed to find anything open aside from a little café to buy a cappuccino.

“Do you know where Rolando lives?” Cheri asked.

Rolando is a sculptor. He lives in the town. We were set to have lunch at Rolando’s and take a tour of his studios. But Julia had just told us that morning that even though he’s world-renowned, no one in that town knows who he is.

“Nope. Maybe we’ll just find it. I mean, the town is only so big.”

The night before, we’d been looking at the pictures from the Athleta fall photo shoot and I remembered Amy, one of Athleta’s designers, telling us that the pictures we were looking at came from Rolando’s house. So I knew there was a big marble deck and a view. It had to be one of the places hanging off the hillside, just outside town.

Cheri and I rolled along the road and started to exit the town. We were just about to turn around because we were at the edge of town and she said:

“Look! Sculptures!”

It was a much-needed cosmic convergence of sorts. In that strange magic land of Tuscany, all you have to do is look for something and it will appear. OK, maybe not anything you’re looking for. But if you’re looking for sculptures! Inside a fenced-in garden to our right were sculptures all over the lawn and along the driveway.

“Let’s go!” We started up the drive on our bikes, having no idea where we really were.

We were the first to arrive (as I found out when Cheri burst out a verbal outpouring of better Italian than I ever hope to speak to a man who turned out to be Rolando’s son) so we had a little time to kill. Cheri needed antihistamines in a serious way. She was starting to break out in hives. We rolled back to town and everything was closed, so we asked a German couple staying at the inn on Rolando’s property if they had anything for her. They gave us a little cortisone cream they had and when we returned from their hotel, the others had begun to arrive.

Rolando’s staff made an amazing lunch and we drank a little wine (which is the perfect way to help the world go fuzzy after you’re already dehydrated and tired from travel and riding). It was great, a brilliant lunch with gnocchi and cinghiale ragout, shaved artichoke salad, pasta, green salad, cheeses, and cured meats. And after lunch we all sat by the pool to talk to Rolando about his artwork and his general philosophies on life.

The mind of an artist is a wondrous thing. By taking on a lifestyle that suited his creative drive, this sculptor has given himself the ability to live as he believes is right for him. There’s no corporate culture to appease. There’re no societal pressures. He lives outside the norm and can thus formulate his own construct in which to live. And it’s fascinating.

His fundamental, base philosophy is:

“Every morning, I wake up and tell myself: I want to be well.”

Like it’s that easy. Like it’s just a decision. But, looking at him, framed by the buildings on his estate and his garden full of sculptures lined up like little armies, it’s easy to believe that it is a choice. That all you have to do is decide.

And then the conversation descended into the truly esoteric. Rolando was talking about how the mind has its habitual ways of thinking (things like: I need a better car or I have to work a good job and make money) and how it’s important to make sure that whatever your habitual thoughts are, they are the ones that work for you. Because those are the thoughts your mind will gravitate toward when you aren’t consciously controlling it. And in order to know what’s good for you, you have to unplug your mind for a minute here, two minutes there, and detach. Let it come to the place where it gives you what you need.

Jed, from Athleta, happened to ask a question about how you can get outside the mind. When it is telling you that “this” or “that” is the reality, how do you get outside it and condition it to work for you.

Rolando said you must observe the functioning of your mind. You must notice when it’s playing its little games. And you have to focus on the good parts of your thoughts, rather than the bad ones. Train yourself to focus on the good and eventually the good will become the habitual.

Rolando spoke about aspiring to your own reality, doing what is authentic to you and only you. If you want what others want, then you’re not seeking your own truth. The only way to learn by other’s examples is to pick the right ones and copy them, but ultimately the only example is your own.

He said there will always be more than one voice in your head, telling you what to do and what to think. There is the louder voice, the one you generally follow by default. And there is the softer one, the one that is probably more closely aligned with how you really feel. And the louder one is probably handed down to you through generations. It’s hard to ignore. But if you observe consciously, you can choose between them.

My take on the whole talk: piddly negative thoughts are basically just a colossal waste of time. Give yourself good juju and enjoy your life.

As we were closing up our talk, Rolando mentioned that our mechanic, Riccardo, had been a musician all his life. He’d been playing gigs in local bars and clubs, playing with friends and learning new music every day for years. Music was his passion. Not long ago, his family had gotten on him about it. They said he was putting too much of his time and energy into his music and not into his family life. So he’d quit. Just stopped playing. Hung up all the instruments. He gave it up to make more time for his family life.

But instead of making his life better, it only got worse. Riccardo lost his passion for all of life. He would come to Rolando sometimes when he was having a particularly hard time and the two would sit under a tree and talk all afternoon. Rolando told him: you have to do the thing you love. The thing that matters to you most, even if it seems selfish, is the thing that gives everything else in your life meaning. When you do that thing, everything flourishes equally. When you stop doing that thing, everything suffers equally.

So Rolando was thrilled the day Riccardo came by and told him:

“I started again!”

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For more information about the Women’s Quest Athleta Tuscany Tour, visit WomensQuest.com »