Endurance cyclist Juliana Buhring left a notorious cult, wrote a bestseller, and then rode her bike around the world. She’s just getting started.

“You grow up in a cult,” says Juliana Buhring, “and everybody thinks there’s something wrong with you.” Buhring is not damaged—not emotionally, she wants me to know—from her childhood in the Family International, the controversial religious group that she described in her bestselling 2007 memoir, Not Without My Sister. Physically, however, she is a mess. Her knees are scabs over scabs, and her forearms carry the scars of not-so-old asphalt burns. The bike wreck that caused them occurred two weeks ago, while she was descending wet pavement around a hairpin corner on Mount Vesuvius. The Pompeii-burying volcano stands just across the Gulf of Naples from Sorrento, Italy, where Buhring has been running a small bed-and-breakfast for the past three years to pay for her cycling habit.

Buhring, 33, is tall, tan, and lean, with a big black fish eagle tattooed across her midriff; she says she has been hit by cars twice and merely “knocked over” half a dozen more times in the past four years, the first after she’d been cycling for only a month. “I could write a manual about how to fall off a bike,” she told me over dinner at the gastropub that adjoins B&B Juliana. Her second memoir, This Road I Ride, which will be released in the UK by Little, Brown next summer, details more than a few of these collisions.