The notion of seasons in cycling has always rung wrong to my ear. For those of us who spent time following professional cycling, the cycling season didn’t encompass summer summer, it was the whole of the year. Winter, spring, summer and fall, the cycling season contained the whole thing, no matter how much a rider’s wardrobe had to change. And that ignores the reality that when we first enter cycling we all—to a rider—think of summer as the season of cycling.
As cycling charms us with her siren song, we began riding earlier and earlier in the year, ever more eager to see the world move at the pace that moves the body but stills the mind. Buying our first jacket is a rite of passage, our first concession to the calendar’s seasons, to our understanding that cycling can be more than a way to enjoy a summer day. It’s no small epiphany to realize that dressed rite, cycling allows us to enjoy any day. That Norwegian saying, “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing”? Few sports impart that lesson as deeply as cycling does. Anyone who has ridden through a winter can claim to be part Norwegian.
It’s become popular to refer to seasons at a macroscopic level. Not a stretch of three or four months (or five like some winters—looking at you Western Massachusetts), but stretches of time that may measure three, four or even ten years. For many of us, there is that first season of what we think of as “serious cycling,” when we’re eager to find out what sort of a cyclist we might be, what cycling can mean, can contribute to our lives. Some of us catch the racing bug and there’s a season that may stretch upwards of ten years in which we chase not our ideal, but our ultimate fitness. Even if it robs us of abilities in other realms (like the upper body strength to bench press our own weight), making us less fit for overall, many of us choose to chase fitness as defined through the narrow lens of cycling, leaving us looking underfed and swinging T. Rex arms that result in potential romantic partners wondering why we are underfed.
If I’m honest, the point at which I could release the desire to be racer fit came as a relief, and yet, I reached that point gradually, without the sudden epiphany that something had shifted, as happened for me when I decided to stop drinking alcohol—or the decision to do so, that I could have a glass of wine (or two) and not become the Irish lush I feared my forebears encoded in my genes.
When that non-racer season arrived, cycling shifted into its most expansive expression for me. My combination of cycling knowledge and fitness made me more capable of truly exploring by bike than at any other time. When we dispense with the early morning hill repeats—where the only change in scenery are the numbers we analyze on a computer screen after the fact—our opportunity to expand our views multiplies.
Today, I may pick a ride up in the Cascades so that I can see larch trees that turned yellow in the fall air. It’s a far cry from driving to the San Joaquin Valley to chase 100 other cyclists around farm roads that smell like fertilizer. It’s easy to conclude the former beats the latter, but in this current season of cycling, I see how what I sought on those farm roads fed the me of that time, and both those mes were true to who I am.
The season of cycling I’m riding in today is perhaps the most well-rounded, the most complete, and arguably the most healthy, though certainly not the most fit, if you follow. Cycling sits alongside the other needs and responsibilities in my life—yes, responsibilities. I call it that because tending it the way I nurture my sons, clean my home, cultivate a manuscript, these are all things that I’ve committed to, and riding fosters it all. The question I find myself asking before I head out for the ride is perhaps the most counterintuitive I’ve faced. With “training” rides, the question I most often asked what what I needed to accomplish in the ride, what I needed to give to the ride, to reach my training goals. Today, the question isn’t what I’m giving to my cycling, but what I want my cycling to give to me.