On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 9/1/2009
Why do you ride your bike?
The elderly zen master was walking along the road when he met three of his young novices, riding toward him on bicycles. They stopped to pay their respects to their esteemed teacher.
"Bicycles!" exclaimed the master. "How splendid! Now tell me, young fellows: why do you ride your bicycles?"
The first young monk explained, "I ride my bike to get exercise; to stay fit and healthy!"
"Excellent!" replied the master.
The second monk declared, "I ride my bike to reduce pollution and congestion; to put one less car on the road!"
"Very commendable!" said the master.
"And you?" he asked, turning to the third young monk...
"I ride my bike to ride my bike."
"Ahhhh..." sighed the old teacher, and placing his palms together, he bowed down before the student and said: "I am humbled to be in the presence of a true master!"
• • •
So...why do you ride your bike?
If you are any kind of typical, modern cyclist, your answer might add up to an amalgam of the responses of all three of the young monks, plus perhaps some other reasons those novices never even considered.
Certainly exercise is a good reason to ride...to stay fit and healthy. The cardiovascular and aerobic benefits should be obvious to anyone, and the burning of calories is a big plus...a subtraction of flab that adds to our overall health. In contrast to the pandemic of obesity in our society, with all its unhealthy implications, riding a bike on a regular basis is--or ought to be--almost as basic as breathing or sleeping.
But personally, I'm not too diligent about getting my exercise. In spite of my best intentions and occasional New Year's resolutions, I never seem to be able to stick with programs involving some variation on high school calisthenics. They all seem too much like work, and I'm just too lazy or else too occupied elsewhere. Can't find the time. Getting up in the morning and doing a set of push-ups, pull-ups, and ab crunches?...please! Going to the gym and making the rounds of all those Rube Goldberg contraptions to tone up all those different muscle groups...muscles in places I didn't even know I had places...can't go there. Stairmasters and stationary bikes? I don't think so.
No, I have to kind of sneak up on my exercise, or let my exercise sneak up on me, while I'm doing something else that's fun. There are lots of athletic endeavors that will do this for us, but not all sports are a good fit for all people. I've done enough of the stick-and-ball sports over the years to finally accept that I'm not too good at most of them and as a result of that general incompetence, I don't much enjoy them. (The only excpetion might be racquetball, where, in my heyday, I was a pretty good club player. But swatting a little ball around inside a big wooden shoe box, while terrific exercise, doesn't do much for the inner man.)
There is a certain atavistic purity to running that appeals to me. But I got running-as-exercise out of my system on the cross-country team in high school. That grueling, painful experience sort of innoculated me against the entire 10-K and marathon craze that swept the yuppie ranks in the 80's. I gave the whole jogging lifestyle a pass.
Simple walking I like. Or its livelier country cousin: hiking. Or the even more ambitious endeavor of backpacking. I can and will do all of those, especially because I can do them with my wife, who is a demon hiker, but not much of a biker. There is the utilitarian walking: three blocks to the store for the groceries; around the orchard behind the mower or the garden cart. Then there's the intentional walking: "Let's go for a hike!" All of it is good. But even at its best, I still find the walking-hiking-backpacking thing has its limits. It can, literally and figuratively, only take me so far.
After trying so many of the other methods for sneaking up on my exercise, I always come back to cycling. I throw a leg over the top tube for the fun of the outing, to explore some new territory, to do that downhill dance with my buddies, to run some errands...and lo, the exercise is out there, just around the next bend, waiting to ambush me with its elevated heart rate and oxygenated lungs and fire-roasted calories. I take it as an article of faith that cycling will be good exercise, but that's not why I do it. It just happens while I'm doing something else. If exercise and good health were the only benefits of cycling, I doubt if I would do it.
Then there is that political, environmental argument: the one-less-car imperative. As the master says: very commendable! I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted to extoll the virtues of cycling as an alternative form of transport, as an antidote to rising gas prices and climate change and all the rest of the carbon footprint paradigm. We're not just cycling for our own health, but for the health of our Mother: this big blue marble we call Earth.
Cycling for recreation--as sport--doesn't really do much to reduce one's carbon footprint, unless we assume some less worthy, more eco-damaging sporting activity that we might be pursuing were we not on our bikes. Buzzing around on a quad runner or jet ski. Racing a car or truck or watching someone else do so. Driving to a stadium or other sports facility, driving to the mountains to ride up the hill on a chair lift...on and on. It's easy enough to work up a good ration of righteousness about our leaner and greener bike behavior, compared to most other recreational activities. Never mind that we sometimes throw the bike in the car to drive to a ride start. Even so, our sport is still more of a net-positive that most sports.
But for real environmental correctness, we have to look to those non-recreational, utilitarian bike miles. Commuting to work and running errands...the places where we really are leaving a car at home, or, in a few cases, not even owning a car. I only owned a bike--no car--for several years of my misspent youth. It definitely changes the way you live your life. Now I'm not quite so hardcore about it. I work at home, so no bike commuting (but no car commuting either). I use the town bike for errands when it seems plausible, but often, if it isn't easy, I'll take the car. Am I a hypocrite for urging folks to leave the car at home when I do sometimes use one myself? Probably. (Idle aside...something I'd like to see: a hippo crit.)
Okay, so I'm not as virtuous or as doctrinaire as perhaps I should be about using the bike to the total exclusion of the car. My own carbon footprint is probably still a size 13, double D. I guess I'm as lazy about doing the right thing for the environment as I am about getting my exercise. They say virtue is its own reward, and that may be true. But if being environmentally virtuous were the only reward I got out of cycling, I probably wouldn't be doing it.
There are other good reasons to ride a bike. Many of us find a social outlet in cycling. Whether it's showing up for a weekend club ride, signing up for a big century, or getting a license and banging elbows in a crit--a hippo crit!--we find ways to magnify and intensify our cycling jones through the many faceted lens of the group. We turn our bike rides into parties. That's certainly a good reason to ride the bike.
For me, one of the best things about riding my bike is sightseeing...seeing sights. I prefer to ride where there is less traffic, so I ride most of my miles out on the country roads, That means I spend most of my time gazing about at the country scenery: woods and meadows; mountains and rivers; red-tailed hawks and red-winged blackbirds; brown-eyed susans and blue-eyed grass. It's a movable feast, a sensory overload. I never, ever get enough of it.
But after getting the exercise and saving the planet; after doing the socializing and the sightseeing, there is still that third monk to consider: "I ride my bike to ride my bike."
There is something so fundametal, so profoundly simple about the premise of the bike: how the act of putting one foot in front of the other is translated into the rolling of a wheel across the ground. It's as simple and as basic as the act of walking and the invention of the wheel. The unicycle is just a monkey balancing on a rolling log, and the bicycle is just two unicycles with a few fiddly bits in between. No extra engines involved. No external sources of energy, save what we eat to fuel our own internal engine.
Once the essential premise is clear, the rest is just tinkering with the details: frame materials and geometry, crank arms and chains, hubs and rims and pneumatic tires...
And the result is kinetic poetry: that sublime sensation of moving through space, across the landscape, rolling along, enjoying the scenery, powered by nothing but the lazy looping of our legs on the pedals. Okay, okay...not always lazy. When the day is hot and the hill is high and the bike is heavy, no. Not always lazy and not always easy. But then neither is walking. Neither is running. If you want easy, stay home in bed, or take the car (and consider the cost).
But then we get those moments that make it all worthwhile, when we look around us at this marvelous world--and yes, for all that we've beaten the crap out of it, it still is a marvelous world, a world of marvels--when we look around, as we glide along, in woods and valleys and out on the hillsides...smell of bay laurel and salt tang of tide line...fog and sunshine, wind and wonder... When all the pieces come together, and we're carving a downhill corner, with just the thinnest whisper-kiss of tires on tar to remind us that we are not quite flying...then yes: this just might be as good as it gets. And that is when we can say: I ride my bike to ride my bike.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net