We ride bikes for fun. Right? Wait. Is that right? No. We ride our bikes for transportation. Yeah. OK. Can transportation also be fun though? I suppose, if done right. It’s hard to say exactly when fun will rear its pretty head. Also, I guess some people ride to get or stay in shape, and that’s not fun. Unless sometimes it is.
It’s probably true that most of throw a leg over hoping to have some fun, but we don’t always achieve that for a variety of reasons. Traffic. Lack of fitness. Poorly located hills. And sometimes our heads just aren’t in the right place. The modern world can be a confounding place to ride around. The bicycle is a miracle machine for sure, but it can’t always cut through the stresses of the day.
And what even is fun?
There’s Type 1 Fun, the traditional kind, where you enjoy the thing you’re doing in the moment you’re doing it. And then there’s Type 2 Fun, which is the kind you somehow enjoy retroactively. It’s fun to have done this kind of thing, even if, in the moment, it wasn’t very fun at all. Is there Type 3 fun? The fun of anticipating doing something fun? I may be trying too hard there.
What I’ve come to believe is that it’s always fun we’re after. Maybe we’re at a time in our lives when hurting a little (Type 2) is more appealing, or that we have such a mania for riding that we make it our primary transportation. Not all of the moments will be actual fun, but our aim is always to feel those happy, joyful feelings, even to cram a bit of fun in on our way to work.
When I was younger, I had a much stronger appetite for Type 2 Fun. It could be that the pursuit of suffering yielded better results than it does now. It’s not that I don’t enjoy not enjoying it. It’s more that I lack the patience for it. I want the stupid grins NOW. I want to go home happier than when I left.
As I was saying to Padraig on the Paceline just yesterday, “you get what you measure.” I’m more focused on fun now than I ever was before.
This week’s TCI Friday wonders what percentage of your rides are purely for fun, and what percentage are only fun adjacent, i.e. training, transportation, or escape from a crime scene.
I’m gonna guess that 50% of my rides are for transportation – groceries, getting to work, errands.
Maybe another 40% have no specific purpose other than to ride – off road adventure rides, road bike routes, MTB trails.
Then there’s a magical 10% or so where I’m riding somewhere to do something fun that’s not riding like watching a sports game, going fishing or going to lunch. I guess that’s transportation too.
The point is that riding is always fun for me. The last one probably counts as double fun.
There’s no training rides for me. I don’t measure anything (my little Sigma computer tells me distance if I bother to look). I have no fitness goals. If I’m feeling peppy, I stand on it a little harder for a little longer and maybe I get a little fitter. If I’m feeling flat, I go slower. If I’m feeling decidedly no good, I ride the e-bike.
I’ve never fled a crime scene, let alone by bike. Maybe I’d get away – no plates to trace, could squeeze through tight spaces. If only Hitchcock was still around.
Now that I am mostly retired (my former employer asked me to come back a few hours a week for “institutional memory” reasons, aka, “Ask The Geezer”), most of my rides are purely for fun. Even the commute in to City Hall for boring meetings is fun, because the little roads on my side of town and Santa Fe Plaza are best seen on foot or on bicycle rather than being stuck in a “cage”.
For me they are all for fun, but the fun comes with a side dish of fitness and another of suffering. The fun is generally more fun if I’m fit. So, to some degree, they are all training for the next ride, but they are fun as well.
Exception – rides with slower friends or family: these are just for fun.
Being currently injured and off the bike makes the above especially clear.
I look back on my days of training to race as not fun but I know that it was. Nowadays I just look for excuses to ride. Car needs to be dropped off at the dealership?- ride my bike. Need a half dozen bagels?1 ride my bike. Sun shining on a work day?` ride to work. Haven’t been in the woods lately?` ride my MTB. All fun and fitness comes with it!
These days I ride strictly for fun. If I improve my fitness, so be it. I am all in for fun…
I’ve never considered myself to be much of a competitor despite being involved in assorted sporting endeavors since I was a kid. I played football from 5th grade community league through high school. The practices mostly were not fun, but there was the intensity of it that kept me coming back. Simultaneously, I had preference for individual sports that lasts through today. No teams, just you. Any “training” I did was just me working on aspects of the effort but I was still having fun with the sport (Surfing, skateboarding, cycling, running and now snowboarding). I’ve entered many races/competitions and generally landed in the middle with an occasional podium (some DH, enduro/SuperD nonsense). Races are fun and the rides before and after are as well. It is all fun IMHO. Some more so than other things, but it always beats golf and pickleball. I keep that in mind when pedaling to work.
Now all riding is for fitness and fun. That includes racing cyclocross and XC MTB. I used to do about 25% commuting in that mix too. Allergies here in the Sacramento, CA area have got to me to the extent that I’m just not comfortable if I don’t shower after a ride. I’m nearing the completion of the six-month build phase of allergy immunotherapy treatment. Hopefully getting my immune system to calm down when in contact with the grasses, shrubs and trees (and all their pollen) gives me opportunity to start bike commuting before the winter. So much easier to ride to/from work when the days are short since I get to at least start the ride in daylight.