The Return

When we take up cycling, be it as a kid, a teen or as an adult, the draw of the bike is going—seeing new places, encountering new terrain, feeling the changing land through the bike. For most of my life I’ve thought of the bike in terms of where it can take me, the away.

The finish to any ride was less about my return than the end of the fun—the correct response once my legs are all funned out. I return home at the end of each ride because that’s where my food, my shower, my bed proved I’d reached the end of my labor.

Bike tours were the only time when the finish brought me to a new destination, an occasion where the finish wasn’t a return to the start, status quo.

I never made going home the point of the ride. When a friend once told me that she spent most of each ride obsessing about all the chores she needed to do at home, all the things waiting for her, what I experienced was sadness that she couldn’t enjoy the moment, but also profound hope—here she was able to find a way to get out when the facts of her life argued against the bike.

When I was a kid I went home because I wasn’t allowed to go farther. To ride the same circuit over and over in the same day struck me as too boring to be interesting.

But once I was old enough that a ride could take me as far afield as I dared, arriving home became something different. If I was relieved, that was a signal that I’d ridden with all I had. If I was irritable, that was a signal the ride wasn’t long enough—while the irritant was almost certainly caused by something other than the bike, a ride that was sufficiently long brought me the calm to take on the irritant, rather than dread it. Paying bills is way more satisfying when you’re blissed out from that last descent.

When my race results were still in their ascendency, I aimed to arrive home utterly empty by every measure. If I discovered an unfinished bottle in a cage or unfinished food in a pocket upon my return home, I considered that a failure of effort on my part. Each ride served as a magic act if successful. I arrived home with nothing in my bottles, nothing in my pockets and nothing in my legs. 

The demands of my life today make such rides a luxury I can rarely afford. If I arrive home so depleted that I have to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich over the sink because it is so full of PB and J, I know that I won’t have the patience necessary to be a reasonable father, even after a beer-equipped shower. Years of data also demonstrate that if I’m so fatigued that I’m suffering fatigue-induced brownouts, I can’t be trusted to operate a microwave or do laundry. or even remember that they may be occupied.  

More recently, I’ve noticed that there are times when I arrive home, satisfied, content. My pockets may still hold unfinished food; mix may be sloshing in a bottle, possibly two. Those are the days where I don’t need to perform the post-ride lock-kneed lean against the wall. Those are the days that I notice that being engaged on the bike helps me better engage as a father, an employee, a partner. Getting a ride in tells me I’m taking care of myself and that gives me a confidence that I can show up for others.

So much of cycling teaches us that if you burn those calories now, you won’t have them to burn later, but more and more, when I return home, I’m ready to jump into the least-sexy parts of my life. I find that I don’t mind cleaning out the garage if I’m not wasted from five hours in the mountains. 

Arriving home with something left in the tank began as a strategy to make the rest of my life run better. A concession to adulthood. The surprise has been to find that these days I’m more likely to find my Zen, to find flow, if I’m not trying to wring every watt from my body.