ornoth_cycling | Open Your Heart with Bicycling

This time of year, five weeks before my annual PMC ride, my reading habits usually turn to cycling titles. Many deal with training, technique, and nutrition—more on that in a subsequent post—but a few address the indescribable essential nature of cycling. Paul Fournel’s “Need for the Bike” and Tim Krabbé’s “The Rider” are two outstanding, enduring classics of that genre. There aren’t many others.

So I was very excited to come across a book called “Open Your Heart with Bicycling” at the BPL the other day. The volume was subtitled “Mastering Life through Love of the Road”, and a pull quote offered the definition, “To become aware of the inspiration that a sport or hobby, such as bicycling, brings to your entire life”. The back cover talked about the author’s years as a Benedictine monk and further time spent at a Buddhist college.

With that kind of a lead-in, I suspected I’d found another example of that rare breed of book that manages to capture that essential experience of cycling, full of the elusive insights that are almost impossible to relate to anyone but another cyclist.

I was misled. “Open Your Heart” would be more appropriately named, “A Very Basic Beginners Overview of Cycling”. It’s really a book for the neophyte, save for the nonsequitorial chapter on how to open your own bike shop. Sadly, there’s more philosophy in a single chapter of Fournel or Krabbé than can be found in the entirety of “Open Your Heart”.

So why am I writing about it? Well, there are three points I want to make/save/share from the exercise.

The first is confirmation of my theory that the “runner’s high” is extreme glycogen depletion and the resulting impaired brain function. I first articulated this idea six years ago in this post on my regular blog. Here’s the relevant quote from OYHwB (bolds are mine):

I have to eat; there is no question that I must eat after a long ride. […] I am perfectly content eating alone, particularly when my blood sugar is low as a result of very strenuous exercise. I am a grouch when I have not eaten properly. I eat what is necessary to stabilize and improve my disposition and only then am I allowed to be with other people! I have made more verbal blunders in this condition than I have ever made while drinking.

I think that illustrates my point very nicely.

The second item of note is the one bit of philosophy that I was able to glean from the book. It derives from the following passage:

But that’s how my real spiritual journey begins: with a world-class bicycle, a dream, and the haunting realization that no matter what the hucksters on television say, not every dream comes true. You can’t have it all, but you *can* have what you truly desire. I needed to learn this lesson, and I discovered the simpler pursuits like cycling gave me exactly what I desired. Not achieving boyhood dreams has been the least of my worries, and the joy that I experience on a daily basis began when I understood that as a young adult.

While the author doesn’t say it, he’s dancing around an interesting truth: that real happiness doesn’t come from fleeting experiences, but from simple things that one can derive joy from every day of one’s life. That could be something simple that is available every day, such as enjoying the sun in a clear blue sky, or the wind in the trees, or one’s favorite companions, or it could be satisfaction derived from a memory one can always revisit, such as helping a friend or donating time or money to humanitarian causes. But the idea is to base one’s sense of joy on things that aren’t transient, that don’t need to be reinforced every few days, weeks, or months.

Finally, the book caused me to reflect on what happens during a long ride. If you asked me what my mind was up to during those six- or eight-hour jaunts, I’d have to admit that it’s not doing much! While some of it might be off pondering things, most of the time I’m fully occupied making the moment-by-moment observations and actions that are required to operate a bike on a public way.

In that sense, it’s very zen: there is no “me” there, there’s just the riding: when riding, just ride. It’s a time when the joys and demands of the road supersede the usual preoccupation with one’s personal storyline; for a while, you forget yourself. Which thought, in turn, got me thinking about a famous passage from Sōtō Zen founder Master Dōgen’s “Genjōkōan”:

To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever.

Such is the ride.