Hours spent on the bike. Hours honing skills and training. Days in lousy weather, too cold, too hot, too wet. Long ages of hard and tedious maintenance. We wake up stooped early to get on the bike, on a trainer, or out in the pre-dawn chill.
Why?
Well, it could be said that there is some amount of enjoyment and pleasure in all that. It would be true, too. One has to relish the effort. It has to be a seemless part of a life, and there must be some reward, or we would find other pursuits.
For the love of mike! A lot of that stuff hurts! It’s been said elsewhere and often, cycling… real cycling …is about pain. It’s about overcoming pain. It’s an involved and complicated form of masochism. Really?
Hill repeats. Who in their right mind would, willingly, do this kind of thing? Intervals, until the vision tunnels, and the heartbeat roars in the ears, the arms tingle, the lungs burn. For what?
Skill drills. Tedious and often frustrating. Balance, and cadence, and form. Why? Plateaus are reached, and become a taunt. More effort is expended to break through. Fight the aging process. Work the muscles. Stretch… Weight training. Diet planning.
And then there is the road itself. Dodging traffic. Insults hurled. Maniac drivers, who seem to be homicidally bent. Horn blasts that are completely undeserved. Sneers. And the funny looks form loved ones and acquaintances. Why put up with something that isolates you, and causes everyone you know to label you as, “that weird guy who rides a bike a lot”?
One reason for all of that are those rare times when we manage to find the zone. When the thing ceases to be, and just is. There are those moments, those times when one is za zen. Suddenly the universe shifts into focus, and harmony is achieved. For a timeless time we are in tune with the eternal now. The ride is perfect and elegant. We fit into the world with precision and grace.
And then, after dismounting, someone asks, “Why do you do that? Why do you ride that thing?” How do we answer?
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