As four-letter words go, “work” is one that can make people grimace without ever being considered rude. It’s a funny space to occupy—a word with largely negative connotations and very little to sell it. My own view of the word and what it meant evolved from something to avoid, something I couldn’t possibly appreciate, let alone enjoy.
Cycling changed that for me. It was on training rides with my UMASS teammates, when I would get dropped on the longer climbs, that I began to recognize a desire within me. I didn’t like watching my friends ride away from me. I liked even less having one of them look over their shoulder at me as they rode away.
I learned that the work of being a cyclist came in two forms. First, there was the lesson of simply learning how to dig in, to suffer. What I thought going hard was before my first race and what I knew it to be after my first race bore little in common.
My next lesson came in the form of a realization that I can’t continually will myself to go faster. There comes a point when no amount of teeth gritting will result in another tenth of a mile per hour of speed. That’s when I began to appreciate how the daily practice of getting on the bike and logging miles is the real work of being a cyclist.
And yet, because I loved riding my bike, riding more days of the week didn’t seem like work. More days of riding equated to more fun. What held me back from training more, initially, was that parental admonition that cycling wasn’t a serious pursuit, that daily riding was frivolous, unless, of course, I was commuting to work or school.
The days stacked up and a fatigue settled in my bones, one that calmed me, and taught me that work can be cumulative, that I only need do a day’s work in a day.
Those little epiphanies, several presidents old now, have given me a mantra that I used to say in training, but now characterize more efforts off the bike than on. In trying to offer an empathetic observation around a diagnosis of deep, pervasive childhood trauma, my counselor said what I was facing was “daunting.”
I shrugged my shoulders, then said, “I’m not afraid of hard work.”