Orny's Cycling Journal

In my previous post celebrating 100,000 miles on the bike, I promised an upcoming post about the motivations that underlie my passion for cycling. Here it is, with a shorter bonus postscript listing some things I actually dislike about cycling.

I started pedaling when I was around five years old, when my parents first plunked my ass down on a Marx Big Wheel plastic tricycle and turned me loose in our driveway. I’ve been pedaling ever since, with the only break happening during college (when I got my first car) through my first full-time job (and my first new car).

That tallies up to about 45 years where cycling has been a central part of my life.

It might seem a little late to think about this, but I’ve decided to take a look at why. What is it that motivates me to keep pedaling, after having already ridden for such a ridiculously long time?

The impetus for looking into that question came from a recent GCN video, wherein one of the presenters asked himself why he never got tired of cycling. It might be worth a watch if the question is meaningful to you. A few of the answers he shared resonated with me, and some of them absolutely did not, but the question remained…

What is it about riding a bike that still appeals to me?

But two items of business need to be mentioned before I can share my own answers.

First, after I’ve shared my motivations, I’ll share the much shorter list of things I hate about cycling, which might actually be more interesting to some.

And second: writing about my motivations is tricky. The list of factors is long and detailed, and it would be difficult to convey my depth of feeling without getting really verbose and boring my audience to death. So I’m going to keep my comments brief, and ask the reader to infer that depth of feeling. So keep that in mind while you read my summary descriptions.

That said, here’s my list. There’s a dozen of them, in single-sentence bullet-list form:

• Cycling – especially the sensation of speed – is exciting and fun, and that’s just as true at age 60 as it was at age 6.
• Cycling allows me to enjoy the outdoors, connecting with nature, breathing fresh air, and feeling the sunshine and wind.
• It gets me out into the world around me, seeing the countryside and the varying contours of the land, while learning all kinds of details about the places I ride through.
• I’ve always needed a physical outlet for expending excess energy, and cycling provides a healthy way to work myself to fatigue or exhaustion.
• The health benefits of cycling are greater than almost any other human activity, contributing directly to cardiac, respiratory, circulatory, muscular, and digestive health (without even mentioning mental and emotional health).
• Cycling can burn a tremendous amount of calories, which makes it great for dieting, or (as in my case) a good way to get away with eating lots and poorly.
• I get to exercise my analytical side by tracking and comparing all the quantitive data that’s produced, such as my mileage, power, and fitness numbers.
• With such clear ways to quantify performance, cycling makes it easy to set goals for myself, and a genuine sense of achievement upon reaching my goals.
• Group rides offer a social element that is lacking in many of my other daily activities, and I’ve made a number of good friends as a result of this pastime.
• Many rides wind up as treasured memories that I look back upon and will enjoy for a lifetime.
• As everyone knows, one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done is raising money to support cancer research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, through my 26-year devotion to the Pan-Mass Challenge charity ride.
• For all these reasons, cycling is clearly a great use of my time; among the many options I have for spending time, cycling beats nearly all other alternatives.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s an extremely compelling list of reasons to get out and ride, even – or perhaps especially – now that I’m into my sixties.

In contrast, there are certain aspects of cycling that I avoid like the plague. So, as promised, here is my much shorter list of the things that I hate about cycling.

Number one is that I only ride on the road. There are lots of other cycling disciplines, including mountain biking, gravel riding, cyclocross, track riding, bikepacking, downhill, stunt riding, and more. I don’t do those. I am a roadie, and exclusively a roadie.

I don’t race. In the U.S., most bike races are criteriums, taking place on small, technical courses with lots of turns. That kind of close-quarters racing is insanely dangerous, and I’m just not interested in courting crashes and injuries. And while I might enjoy other formats like hill climbs or time trials, I really have no desire to compete against other cyclists. I much prefer challenging myself with completing a long and/or difficult course like a century or a brevet.

I don’t do interval workouts or structured training programs. Although high intensity work is a vital part of any training regimen, I detest the self-induced extreme suffering of riding according to a spreadsheet and a stopwatch. What works best for me is the Swedish idea of “Fartlek” – or “speed-play” – where you emphasize varying your intensity based on the terrain around you, with some degree of both spontaneity and specificity.

I don’t ride a bike with motorized assist. While there might come a day when old age and feebleness force me to accept powered assistance from an e-bike, I will avoid that as long as I possibly can. Since exercise intensity is also an important part of healthy aging, I’m not going to surrender any of my fitness until I’m forced to.

And finally… I don’t mind big hills, darkness, or cold weather – I have appropriate gear for any of that stuff – but I do my best to avoid riding in wet weather. Even though it’s really only miserable at first (once you’re soaked thru, you can’t get any wetter), it wreaks havoc on the equipment and necessitates very thorough post-ride cleaning and maintenance: a messy, tedious chore I’d much rather avoid.

All this might leave you thinking that I‘m always ready and eager to ride, but that’s not always the case. In fact, there’s often times when cycling is the last thing I want to do. Usually that’s because I’m overtrained, when I’ve worked myself too hard for too long, without giving my body sufficient time to fully recover, leaving me tired and irritable. After all, it’s a fundamental cycling truth that you don’t get stronger while riding; that’s when you incur the damage that promotes muscle growth. That growth and strengthening can only happen while you’re resting, so it’s important for cyclists to rest just as diligently as they train.

That’s why I have time to contemplate and share why I’m still in love with cycling… Because I’m taking a much-needed rest day after riding for six days in a row! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe there’s a big ole burrito downstairs with my name on it…

Safe Cycling, Smart Cycling, Confident Cycling, Fundamental Cycling Skills: whatever you call it, educating riders on how to safely share the roads with other users is an important responsibility of advocacy organizations around the world.

I’ve never been through a formal bike safety course, but I’ve done plenty of reading, supplemented by plenty of self-education through tens of thousands of miles in the saddle.

In that time, I’ve gained one recurring insight which I haven’t seen anyone else specifically mention: the value of minimizing the number of interactions you have with motor vehicles.

We all know that out of every hundred drivers you encounter, a certain percentage of drivers are either distracted, impaired, or aggressive enough to constitute a meaningful danger to one’s safety. For sake of argument—and this is only a swag—let’s say that only 5 percent of drivers operate unsafely.

It’s a mathematical fact that our chances of being hit increase linearly with the number of drivers we encounter. At our 5 percent level, if we pass (or are passed by) 100 cars during a ride, we will have around 5 potentially unsafe encounters. But if we pass 400 cars, then we have to survive about 20 risky instances. On any ride, the more cars you pass, the more opportunities you have to be run over, QED.

But the converse is also true: if you only come across 20 cars, then maybe 1 of those drivers will be a danger to you. The fewer interactions you have with drivers, the fewer bad drivers you encounter.

That’s true no matter what the real rate of dangerous drivers is. Whether it’s much lower (1 in 500) or much higher (1 in 3), you’re *always* safer by reducing the number of interactions you have with cars. So that should be a goal for every cyclist.

“That’s nice, Ornoth, but how am I supposed to do that? I don’t control how many cars are on the roads…”

Riders aren’t idiots. Even complete newbies intuitively do a couple things that minimize problematic interactions with cars:

• Avoid major arterial roads and highways with high-volume traffic. Ride on side and back streets that have less traffic.
• Avoid narrow roads with no shoulders. This doesn’t really reduce the number of encounters you have, but it does produce less frustration and anxiety, and gives everyone a greater margin of error.

Beyond the obvious, here are some practical strategies I often use:

• It sometimes makes sense, when you are about to start a narrow segment of road, to pull aside to allow any vehicles following behind you to pass. That way drivers aren’t frustrated and following you closely, looking for (potentially unsafe) opportunities to pass. You’ve defused a potentially dangerous interaction, plus you get the ethical satisfaction (and perhaps we all gain some political benefit) from your having been unexpectedly nice to someone.
• Avoid going up long hills that will slow your pace. The slower you go, the more time you’ll take, and more vehicles will come up behind you wanting to pass (which make the previous points about narrow roads even more important on climbs). All else being equal, if you have a choice between a hilly and a flat route, you’ll have fewer interactions with motor vehicles on the latter.
• When practical, avoid having to make left turns. Turning left requires moving across at least one parallel lane of traffic (the one you’re in, plus any to its left), then possibly crossing one or more perpendicular lanes (the cross-street). This isn’t a problem for right turns, because you’re not crossing lanes of traffic. Another alternative that can be safer is to make a two-stage left.
• Don’t leapfrog traffic! It’s tempting to pass cars when they’re stopped at a traffic light, and buses at a bus stop. But most of the time those vehicles will want to pass you once they’ve started moving again. It’s a lot safer to insert yourself into the line of cars and wait for them to proceed, unless you’re damned sure you can sprint fast enough to stay ahead of the cars you pass!
• Do your best to ride at the same speed as traffic. While this isn’t possible on high-speed roads, it is the optimal way to ride in urban traffic. In my experience, drivers will be less irate at a cyclist who maintains a comparable speed than one poking along at a walking pace.

I want to triple-emphasize that last point, because for my money, it is one of the most beneficial safety rules you can observe as a rider. By riding at the same speed as ambient traffic, you dramatically reduce (perhaps even to zero!) the number of vehicles that attempt to get past you. And as I said above: the fewer interactions you have with drivers, the fewer bad drivers you encounter, and the safer you will be on the road.

You could summarize all that in two golden rules: be considerate of other road users, and try to reduce the number of interactions you have with them. If you ride according to these principles, you will be exposed to fewer bad drivers, endure fewer opportunities for crashes, and reduce the frustration level of the dangerous drivers that you do encounter.

Training just keeps going, but today was another major expedition: the Charles River Wheelmen's 60-mile Climb to the Clouds, including the ascent of the 2008-foot Wachusett Mountain, the tallest mountain in eastern Massachusetts. It was a real beast, but I did manage to set another personal land speed record at 43.2 mph. My legs are aching now, but the ride was excellent training for the PMC, which is now less than three weeks away. Speaking of which, I've been focused on fundraising, which is always the more difficult part for me, and am now hovering at $1155, about on par with previous years.

The weather only let me ride two days this week, but both days were biggies: rode 24 miles up and around the Middlesex Fells, and the next day rode 51 miles out the Minuteman trail to Bedford, then Carlisle, then Walden Pond, and the Decordova Museum before returning home. Set a new all-time speed record (36.1 mph) and the next-to-highest average speed ever (16.36 mph, second only to last year's PMC ride)! All spring long the winds in Boston have been consistently and abnormally strong, which has been quite a little pain.

I should also recognize that even though I have yet to ask anyone for donations, I received my first two contributions recently, from stalwart and fellow cyclist Sheeri, and from former Dargon Project writer Rogers!