On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 10/1/2005
The Long and Winding Road
Last month, I used Lance Armstrong's retirement as a departure point for discussing what comes next in the pro peloton. But that wasn't the essay I had intended to write when Lance's leaving was first on my mind. My initial interest was not about racing at all, but about retirement from racing, or more generally, about any and all cyclists who step away from riding...who scale back their cycling lives in one way or another. Not just racers who hang up their team jerseys, but recreational riders who hang up their bikes...and never take them down again.
If you ride with a club, you will have seen examples of this on many occasions. Someone who has been for years a regular on your weekend rides goes missing. They show up infrequently or not at all, and perhaps someone will say, "Hey, whatever happened to Eddie?" And someone else will say that they ran into him at a party or at the deli; that he's not riding much and has put on 20 pounds; that he had major knee surgery or a mild heart attack; etc. Sometimes the person has relocated and is still riding as much as ever, but in a new club, with new friends. And sometimes, for whatever reason, the person has simply walked away from cycling: it has lost its appeal and they've moved on.
This last scenario is the one that most interests me. Cycling has always been in my life, and it's hard to imagine a time and situation where it might not be there, at least a little. It's hard to comprehend being deeply involved in the sport--in the whole life of bikes--and then just turning one's back on it, as if it were some marginal, inessential frill to be discarded without a backward glance. And yet it happens, and I wonder why.
Burn-out is one reason why. At least it looks that way to me when I view the cycling careers of a few people I know. One guy whith whom I used to ride took up cycling when he won a bike as a door prize at a softball league party. He had no prior involvement with cycling beyond the usual kid stuff, and yet he jumped in head first. Started riding big miles right off the bat, traded up for better bikes once or twice, and was soon doing over 12,000 miles a year. Two years into it, he was doing the Furnace Creek 508 and PacTour, with RAAM as part of his immediate agenda. He never got there. After three or four years of total immersion in the sport, he flamed out. His wife left him with the parting shot: "I didn't marry you to be a sag driver!" And then he pretty much just gave it up. Too many miles; too little else. He forgot the old adage about moderation in all things.
I know others who have done the same thing, only maybe not to such an extreme degree. Or they have become so obsessive about their cycling that they've caused themselves some debilitating injury that scuttles their bike careers. In those cases, it's not a matter of psychological burn-out that prompts them to walk away from the activity, but a physical burn-out or breakdown. By beating themselves up so badly in an overzealous pursuit of the activity, they have damaged themselves, and the results are the same: no more cycling, or at the very least, a long lay-off from cycling.
No question, cycling can be addictive. It's fun; it makes you feel good; and if done properly, it will improve your overall health...shed pounds, tone muscles, jump start the heart. And it's an accessible activity. One can enjoy it without the tedious work of mastering a difficult skill set. (It's true that the best riders are very skillful, but one can get into the sport and have fun with it without all those more refined skills.) But sometimes it can be too much of a good thing. Sometimes, for some people, the lure of the open road becomes too compelling. They become slaves to their log books, and the bikes call to them, day and night. These folks probably would not admit to being addicted. They would say, as a speed freak I once knew said: "I'm not addicted. I just don't want to stop!"
This sort of obsessive-compulsive monomania can only lead to trouble. When any one activity crowds out any other diversity in one's life, the results are not likely to be good. In the worst cases, it can even lead to killing the goose that's laying that golden egg for you: you can love your own cycling to death. Do it so much, to the exclusion of all else, that in the end the love sours into loathing, and you have to give it up. You wake up one morning, look at your bike, and suddenly want nothing to do with it. None of us, enjoying another great year on the bike, would wish this to happen to us, nor to our biking buddies. So it makes sense to occasionally step back and look at our lives to see if everything feels balanced and wholesome...to note whether our cycling is a spontaneous, joyful dharma or whether it's just a tedious, habituated grind.
We occasionally run an item in our club newsletter called Faces in the Peloton. It features little interviews with club members, asking them not only about their biking lives but about other interests they may have that aren't bike related, including jobs, hobbies, what they've been reading, etc. The list of other recreational pastimes mentioned by club members is long and various. Everything from folk dancing to stamp collecting; from cross stitch to stained glass; from wine making to woodworking; from sailing to gardening. There are a few people who will only grudgingly admit to any interests outside of cycling, but they are rare. Most have several irons in the fire. This is as it should be. Cycling may be a big part of our lives, but it shouldn't be the only part.
One other question we ask in these member interviews is about future cycling goals. Most folks respond with something like, "Doing my first century," or, "Riding across the country." But one fellow answered, "Keeping on riding like I am now for as long as I can." His was not the specific Agenda with a capital "A." His was the larger view of life: finding the sweet spot where all is in balance and harmony...and staying there, more or less to the end of the road, wherever that may be.
Now then...some of you out there may be balking at all this smarmy happy talk. Some of you may be saying something to the effect of, "No pain...no gain!" Or that one needs to be driven, even obsessive, if one is ever to accomplish anything of worth. This presumably includes great goals in cycling, from winning races to completing epic journeys. And this implies a certain dedication and discipline in the training needed to reach those goals, not to mention the red haze of pain and suffering attendant on some very hard rides and races.
You won't get any argument from me about that. Even as lazy and laid-back a rider as I can appreciate the value of dedication and discipline in becoming an accomplished cyclist. And I've been known to suffer on grimly through some very challenging rides, when saner heads might have hung it up for the day. And I'm just an old recreational plugger. The lately retired Lance is the poster boy for hard work and intensive training, both in his cycling career and in his battle with cancer. There may never be a satisfactory answer to the questions about his alleged use of performance enhancing substances, but one aspect of his success story is certain: no one ever worked harder at the discipline of bike racing; no one has ever been so obsessive-compulsive in the preparations for his chosen battles.
But now, after 20 years of tunnel vision on the bike, he has retired. That doesn't mean he'll never throw a leg over the top tube again. He says he'll horse around with some cross races or maybe a triathlon or something, plus I suppose he'll be out on recreational rides in the Austin area or wherever his travels take him. In short, he'll become like one of us, or as much as a seven-time Tour de France winner and world-class celebrity can become like one of us, a normal citizen of the world.
Anyway, he's turned the page, and each of us, in our own time, in our own way, must turn that page too. There is no single template that fits all our lives...no carved-in-stone bench marks that tell us when to dial back the intensity; when to sit up and look around and let the tunnel vision go. If you pay attention to the rhythms of your own life, you'll know when to unwind. When to relax. When to rediscover the value of moderation.
Don't think of that moment as a failure of will or as a surrender to the creeping tide of time. Think of it as a progression from one way of being to another...to another that is perhaps more sustainable for the longer haul. Remember too that moderation is not synonymous with mediocrity. Just because we're too old or too feeble, or have too many other interests in life to be a major race winner doesn't mean we can't have buckets of fun flailing about on our bikes...duking it out for city limit signs or doing that whirling dervish dance on the downhills. Cycling is inherently so darn much fun that it doesn't take a lot of dedication or discipline to maintain a decent baseline fitness that will allow for feisty play in one's chosen peer group.
May I make the assumption that, if you've read this far into this column, you're a cyclist? May I further assume that you're a cyclist because you enjoy biking? That being the case, won't you want to continue biking for as long as it seems practical? I know I will. I've been cycling actively for 40 years already. Cycling has so enriched my life that I hope to keep doing it for as many more years as this body is willing to give me.
That may prove difficult at times, as infirmities and other challenges clutter up the road ahead. But I hope to stick with it, and that hope is rooted in a world where riding is only one thread in the larger loom of life. I never want the cycling to slip away, to become a tedious chore and a time-consuming bore. I want it to stay fresh. To that end, I will keep riding...but I will also keep not riding. I will pursue other interests away from the bike, and that will return me to the bike refreshed and ready for more cycling adventures along the long and winding road.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net