If you’d asked me where I wanted to go the day I bought my touring bike, I couldn’t have told you. There was no particular destination in mind, no tour route I wanted to follow, no endpoint calling to me with a silky siren’s voice. What I knew for certain, was that I wanted to go, to strike out, to move.
I soon developed a scheme to ride my bike to Atlanta, the city of my birth. A return. I’d ride from Memphis to Atlanta and arrive in triumph. Why that was the trip and what I was meant to triumph over was as vague as anything in the mind of a college kid.
My desires, my goals, appeared vague because I was trying to dress up a single urge as a plan. There was no purpose to riding to Atlanta. I simply hadn’t dreamt up anything more original. The thought to go to a place alien to me and immerse myself in the landscape and the people was an idea bigger than my limited attention could conjure.
That urge, the one thing I really knew at the time, was that I wanted to leave. What was it I wanted to leave? Well, for starters, Memphis. More broadly, the South, a place where I was as foreign as I was native. Closer to home, well, home. I wanted to free myself of the bonds of family, of being shackled to my past, of the risk that my roots might limit how wide I might spread my wings, how far I might fly.
With the sort of hindsight that comes when well into middle age, I can now see that what I was running from wasn’t what surrounded me. I was running from me. The problems for which I blamed my family, school, city, were really problems with me. I couldn’t accept what was around me because I hadn’t yet learned to accept myself. Had you put the question to me, I’d have pointed to the fact that I was a musician, that I played amazing music, that I loved riding my bike and whatever else I used as excuses to tell myself I was awesome. The thing I didn’t yet understand was that those window dressings couldn’t stand in for real acceptance, that bugaboo of pop-psych talk: self-esteem.
Each time I climbed on my bike, I was striking out for an adventure, some memorable experience that would serve to confirm just what an amazing life I was leading. Every ride contained the literal move of leaving home, but in them I felt the metaphoric truth of striking out to find my fortune.
And then a funny thing happened. I realized that I wanted to be stronger on my bike. I wanted to keep up with my UMASS teammates when we hit the bottom of a hill. I wanted to be there when they began sprinting for the town line. I realized I was going to have to get serious—ride more, eat better, protect my sleep, swear off alcohol and sweets.
Only then did I begin to find that I possessed within me the will to work hard, to impose discipline, to make a promise to myself … and keep it. That was the beginning of the real journey, the one that made the rest of my life possible. Had I never said to myself that I needed to go to bed before 11, eat more protein and ride no less than five days a week, my life would have taken a different course. I can’t say what that path would have been, but it wouldn’t have been the one that led to writing about cycling, moving to the West Coast, to being the father of my sons.
I’d like to say that when I studied music I learned the meaning of discipline, what it feels like to work hard and the sense of reward that comes with dedication. I didn’t uncover it there. Nor did I find it as a writer. I suspect that I needed a shorter feedback loop in order to see the relationship between work and result, and while gaining fitness as a cyclist took weeks upon weeks, cycling enabled me to close that circuit.
There is a hill in Western Massachusetts, maybe 10 miles north of the UMASS Amherst campus, where I evolved from being dropped by the group at the base of the hill, to holding on for a while before being shed, to keeping the group in sight over the top and fighting my way back to them, to sitting in the group and chatting—somewhat breathlessly—with friends on the way up and holding my spot.
The first time that happened, the satisfaction I felt carried a flavor that was new to me, one as savory as it was sweet, and no compliment from my teammates could have meant as much as the confirmation I felt within.
Somewhere in those years, the disappointment I felt at the end of each ride, of finding myself back at the place I so wanted to leave, evaporated. My return home carried relief, that out on my ride I’d given myself an adventure, a large serving of fun, but also another penny for a bank that held real buying power somewhere in my future. I came to believe.
Those were lesson I needed to learn, yet had anyone told me what I would discover, I’d have rejected them as unnecessary. Often, though, the truth is simple.
I stopped running from myself and began riding to myself.