To Bodily Go...

[ornoth_cycling]

To the uninitiated, endurance cycling would seem exclusively about the legs. Looking at a rider, there isn’t anything else going on other than propelling the bike forward, mile after mile.

But the reality—and one of the things that draws me to it—is that long-distance cycling involves nearly every part of the body, and stresses many bodily systems to their maximum capacity.

Imagine bringing your heart rate up to 80 or 90 percent of your max and holding it there—not just for a few minutes, but for seven or eight hours. Imagine the load on your circulatory system of 50,000 extra heartbeats. Think about the demand that big muscles, hungry for oxygen, place on your lungs and respiratory system.

Working muscles also need fuel in the form of glycogen. A cyclist quickly depletes what’s stored in the muscle tissue, then burns through the larger reserves stockpiled in the liver. After that, it’s up to the digestive system to make the carbohydrates you ingest available to your muscles as quickly as possible. And do it without making much demand on the circulatory system, which is already overtaxed.

Meanwhile, your body is trying to cool itself through perspiration, losing precious fluid and electrolytes. Here again, you dehydrate quickly, then rely on the digestive system to rapidly replace what your body loses through sweat. While sweating, the skin is also protecting you from wind, dirt, insects, gravel, and solar radiation.

While your legs are pumping to propel you forward, the rest of your muscles are working, too. Arm muscles are used to maintain your grip on the handlebars, and to pull against the bars while climbing. Your back, neck, and core muscle groups constantly adjust to maintain your balance as well as an unnatural and somewhat uncomfortable aerodynamic position. When I finish a long ride, my traps are usually in far more pain than my legs.

All your weight rests on your hands, feet, and butt, and these contact points are sometimes worked raw. And your hands are constantly working: shifting gears, braking, manipulating the bike computer, delivering food and fluid, signaling your intentions, and more. Your eyes and ears are equally busy, watching for threats, maintaining balance, and helping you navigate.

All of this input data is fed up to the brain, where it’s all coordinated: maintaining your balance, making decisions, assessing your effort level, calculating angles on descents, figuring out how to react to the immediate conditions, and at a higher level how to navigate from Point A to Point B. And it’s doing that while impeded by a very limited amount of fuel, since it relies exclusively on glycogen to function, which your muscles burn through at a prodigious rate.

I’m always taken by surprise when non-cyclists ask what I think about all day on one of my long rides. What to think about? There’s precious little time or energy or attention to spare for contemplation. In fact, on a lengthy ride, too much thinking is probably a sign that something has already gone wrong!

Even when the ride is done, your body continues working hard, repairing itself, recovering, replenishing, and building stronger muscles in response to the training load.

… Looking back at what I’ve written, even enumerating the bodily systems that cycling calls on still fails to communicate the raw intensity of those demands.

I often simply collapse on the bed for an hour or two at the end of a real hard ride; there’s precious little left over that you would call human. And ironically, that very emptying out provides a transcendent experience for the rider. A challenging ride is the crucible wherein we surpass normal human limits, and breathe the same rarified air as the greatest athletes among us.

These days, the descriptor “epic” gets thrown around pretty casually, but “epic” is a very fitting word for the ride that demands everything a cyclist has got. Every cyclist’s palmares is speckled with rides that truly are that monumental: destined to become oft-recalled personal legends. Such epic rides transform the cyclist, no matter how mundane, into an heroic figure, for having the simple audacity to test not just the strength of his legs, but all the diverse limits of his bodily endurance.