Of the many facets in my life that give me reason to feel gratitude, cycling keeps coming up for me. Who I was as a young person—deeply neurodivergent, madly intelligent and epically undisciplined—did not then add up to success in life. Whether I’ve looked back on my past in the course of therapy (psychedelic or otherwise) or through writing about my experience of the world, I’ve come to appreciate that many of the qualities that we prize in adults—discipline, intention and their downstream skill, grit, to name a few—shared an absence in my life that shaped my personality for the worse.
But to look at just three dimensions—discipline, intention and grit—I recognize that cycling has served as a lens through which I passed, refracting my deficits in ways that didn’t so much illustrate them as illustrate present-tense needs that called upon a better skillset.
What I couldn’t see as a nine year old was that I had a gift for entering flow and how if I wasn’t in flow I couldn’t muster the concentration to boil pasta. That remained true well into my 20s. Lacking either discipline or intention I had no appreciation for what grit was.
Then came a day on a backroad in Hardeman County, Tennesse, some 50 miles from Memphis, and after a short pull at the front of a paceline, I pulled off just in time to hit a short hill. Lactic acid exploded through my body, detonating my legs so totally that I began to slip off the back of the group. Honestly, in the moment, I felt relief. That shortage of discipline and intention meant I possessed an underdeveloped work ethic as well. What happened next woke something in me.
One of the veterans in the group, seeing my pedal stroke ease, put his hand on the back of my saddle and as he shoved, shouted, “Get in there.”
Was it shame? Embarrassment? Camaraderie? To this day I can’t identify what that feeling was, but I can tell you this: I didn’t like it. I detested what he sparked in me and I gathered a variety of will to which I’d previously remained unacquainted. That push accelerated me just enough to close the distance to someone’s draft, but did nothing to overcome the load necessary to hold that pace to the top of the hill. In less time that it takes to draw a breath I developed a determination not to be called out that way again, no matter what sort of internal bloodshed was required to avoid it.
To my delighted shock, as the grade eased some hundred yards later, so did our pace. I’m certain from this wisened perspective I’d experienced great struggle followed by periods of recovery, but for whatever reason, they never registered as such. Perhaps it was my knowledge that we still had more than 50 miles to return home and I’d never considered that the ride wouldn’t continue to rise in infinite difficulty, but that easing of pace to allow everyone—all of us!—to recover arrived like a late Christmas present.
I recall looking down at my legs, amazed that they had delivered me to a place I can’t call a promised land. There was no promised land for me in those days. I simply didn’t believe it existed. Yet, that day my legs delivered something that I didn’t know hid within me, waiting to be woken like some dragon sleeping deep in a mountain in Middle Earth.
That dragon has a name: Grit. Of course, I would overplay my hand repeatedly, which taught me the equally valuable lesson that grit is a finite resource. Creativity may be an infinite game, but grit comes in batches rationed between recovery. A bad night of sleep might yield only a cup of the stuff, but a weekend getaway can produce gallons of it.
Years would pass before I truly learned how to summon grit for other purposes. Sure, grit makes the difference between staying with the group over the top of a hill and getting dropped, but it also defines the delta between a good piece of writing and a great one. It’s the resource I need to call upon when my patience flags, the little something extra that allows me to suck in a breath and smile when my teenager tells me that ibuprofen won’t work on his sore muscles. Grit is what keeps me from rolling my eyes.
When I think back on those hardest days I’ve had on the bike—the 10 sawtooth miles of singletrack I rode on my gravel bike at the Super Skaggs Grasshopper, the last 20 miles in utter darkness at Unbound, the final 5k in 35-degree rain at Fish Rock, and trying to get undressed in my car afterward—I’ve learned that I harbor wells of grit that I can call upon to accomplish more than what I thought I’d signed up for. In that regard, the bike has served a critical role for me. Not only has it taught me that I possess grit, but by putting myself in situations in which I think, “This is more than what I signed up for,” followed by the realization that, “No, buck-o, this is exactly what you signed up for,” grit has taught me I’m made of more than I thought.