Allison Madigan

I was born and raised in Santa Rosa, California a city located about an hour north of San Francisco. In 2008 I moved to Boulder, Colorado to study Economics and International Affairs at the University of Colorado. After college I was hired as an Analyst at a company that collects, stores, and visualizes real time electricity data for people trading in electricity markets. In August of 2017 I quit my job and began bike touring south from Whistler, Canada. For all intents and purposes it is my first ever bike tour and (possibly to my parents dismay) it’s still going.

I began because I felt stuck, nothing in my life was awful but nothing felt all that spectacular either. So I did the scariest thing I’ve ever done and quit it all. Your typical mid-20s crisis. Since then I’ve pushed my physical limits, been at my wits end, cried out of pure emotional exhaustion, seen glorious landscapes and met all the more glorious people. There are three key phenomena I have observed and would like to share. One, community is the best. Two, most conditions are temporary. And three, it’s shockingly easy to get tunnel vision.

The culmination of those observations is an affirmed certainty that the current economic and social structures are not fixed. I have noticed I am happiest when I am analyzing patterns, trying to understand human behavior, experiencing the world from different perspectives and learning all that I possibly can. So now that I feel relatively unstuck I am channeling my energy into making sense of the expansive possibilities that lie ahead.