Over the years that I’ve been riding and writing about bikes a simple truism has emerged, if I’m not riding, then I’m not writing. Almost all of my ideas (at least about bikes) occur to me while I’m on one. Oh, sure, I can take a week off and stay in the flow, but much more than that, and the words dry up.
You might have noticed, but probably not.
I haven’t been riding. I decided to take a month off, just at the end of November, after breaking a rib or two in a mountain bike crash, and I ended up needing much longer than that, between injury recovery and bad weather. So, I finally climbed back on my bike a little over a week ago, more than 90 days later. It’s the longest I’ve gone without pedaling in decades.
As you might imagine this led to a small identity crisis, some mental health challenges, and the cratering of my base fitness, though I have been busy with recovery and my body is probably more fluid, flexible and ready-to-go than it has been in a long time.
If you’ve ever had a hiatus like this one, you will know the low-level panic of returning to the bike to find your legs have not joined you. Not being able to ride as I know I can, or expect to be able, is discomfiting to say the least.
But I am older and wiser now (GUFFAW!!!), and something I’ve learned is that nearly any sad story can get better if it’s reframed. For example, Luke Skywalker had his hand chopped off at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Major sad trombone sound! But losing that hand was an opportunity for him to refocus on his Jedi training, understand just how powerful Darth Vader was, and essentially get his rebel shit together. He needed to lose that hand.
Incidentally, while I was nursing that busted rib and trying to un-fudge my lower back and a few other troublesome bodily problems, I daydreamed a lot about that rejuvenation chamber they stuck Luke in earlier in that same movie after he’d gotten his ass kicked by the giant snow beast on Hoth. What I’d pay for one of those things…
So, Saturday I’m riding, and I’m on a bike path (ewww), and I’m trying to come to terms with the state of myself, and then it occurs to me. I literally can do no wrong right now. Every turn of the pedals, no matter how easy, is bringing me back to fitness. I can avoid hills. I can avoid traffic. I can head home after an hour. I can ride the trainer in the basement for 20 minutes. It’s all good.
When you’ve been laid low, the only way is up (most of the time).
This is actually a reframing I brought over from my recent attempts to become a meditator. Every attempt I’d made previously to add meditation to my regular routine had failed, because I’d felt I was bad at it, that I was doing it wrong, that my mind was too over-clocked to slow it down. Then I decided to have no goals for meditation, other than to sit still for 15 minutes. Amazingly, everything went better. I sat there with my eyes closed, following all my dumb thoughts in the swirling circles they tend to travel in, and at the end I got up and thought, “Not bad. I’d do that again.” And I did.
Someone smart said to me once that happiness is normal life with all the expectations removed.
And I don’t know about that, but what I can tell you, as a lifelong bike rider with all the ego and baggage that creates, is that removing all the expectations from my riding has been a total Jedi move. I ride. I sweat a little. I come home. No panic. No regret. No self-flagellation.
Just tires. Rolling. And fitness and/or sunshine somewhere in the future.