A fine mist has started to fill the air only a mile or two from the car. It’s the type of atmospheric condition that usually makes it an easy decision to turn around, call it a day, and return to the still-warm coffee and freshbaked banana bread that I left in the van. But I’m not turning around today, because as I mash against the pedals of my bike and climb slowly up the backcountry gravel road, the voices inside my head are starting to make noise.

Like the devil and angel that torment cartoon characters, this pair has begun their own unique and decidedly partisan dialogue. The good voice is trying to remind me that I am, for the most part, a moderately successful individual; that I have a family; that really I have nothing to prove in this life. The bad voice is on counter-point.

The good voice requests that I take a good look at the ridge—my goal for this ride. Draped in cloud, it’s easy to imagine that hail and/or snow are mixed with the obviously high wind raking the treeless terrain a few thousand feet above. As my pedal strokes slow, the good voice triggers my imagination. I picture myself exhausted and cold, fallen from my bike, injured and unable to escape what is surely to be a slow, pathetic, and completely avoidable hypothermic death. For good measure my mind punctuates the scene with newspaper headlines like, “Somewhat Experienced Mountain Guy Makes Fatal Error,” or the ubiquitous query, “Um, What’s the Point?”

The pitchfork voice laughs at such thoughts. “Questions?” he prods. “Is that all you’ve got? This guy’s life is filled with questions. What he needs is answers and they don’t happen if he turns around.” The bad voice goes on to remind me that I am a bit of a legend among my partners for my ability to spot the smallest cloud and use it to justify a hasty retreat from any ridge, and that when I’m not around they have a special name for me.

Suddenly all the great images from outdoor literature flood my mind—references to men stomping to the summit with the wind in their teeth, Joe Simpson escaping the void—classic melodramatic hyperbole. Then to cap it off, the bad voice offers a purely hypothetical point. “Seriously,” he starts, “how many people come to mountains with less experience than you and survive?”

Lightning rips the air above me as I leave the gravel, shift to my granny gear, and start the mile-long grind to the ridge. By now the voice of reason has been reduced to a whisper. “You can still turn around and tell people that you made it to the top.” But all I’m hearing now is the bad voice who has started calling me “dude”—a juvenile tribute to the badass I’ve become since leaving the minivan. “Dude,” he says, “this is going to be epic.”

Twenty-five or thirty years ago the idea of a mid-life crisis speeding across a mountainous ridge would’ve been mocked, or cause for an intervention. It would have, perhaps rightly so, been seen as a useless, selfish activity of zero benefit. And at the time psychiatrists would have agreed that riding such sketchy terrain is an adolescently rebellious thing to do, an example of an unevolved consciousness or suicide wish.

Thankfully for those of us who need to justify our love of dangerous things, some risk-takers actually grew up to become psychiatrists, geneticists, and scientific researchers. They pulled back the layers of hubris to explore risk from a different angle, seeking the biological and psychological explanations for the voices in our heads.

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