I was just reading a post from a normally indefatigable friend of mine who’s struggling with motivation to keep racing. My guess is that, rather than a surrender, this is a small crisis of conscience that will burn off whatever doubts she has about taking it to the next level, because she’s a bad-ass and everything she’s written about it thus far has been excitement and fire and joy.

But it did get me thinking about my relationship to cycling, and the things I’ve accomplished this year, and where I want it to go from here. I’ve logged about 4000 miles this year, most of them commuting miles, but at least a thousand of them were training for and riding my first century back in August.

As I began training for that ride, I’d thought I might be taking my first step towards getting into serious road riding. I put in pre-dawn miles and went after hills and thought about how heavy my bike was and how thick my tires were. I ate little blocks of gummi caffeine and sugar, occasionally found someone else going fast to trade drafting duties with, and wondered if I should get serious and trade the pedal clips for real cycling shoes and clipless pedals. I thought about joining a club and riding a featherweight bike in a paceline on Saturday mornings, and derided myself for having a triple crank.

Some things have become clear to me since then, most notably that performance road riding’s not my cup of tea. Occasionally I take on something that seems big and challenging out of curiosity or to prove something to myself, or in the case of the Livestrong Challenge because I wanted to do something good and difficult. But the truth is that I just don’t have much of a passion for pushing the envelope, my competitive fire doesn’t burn all that hot, and that anything that starts feeling like Serious Business loses my attention. I’m bliss-driven.

For example, I’ve gone weeks without making it out to a disc golf course, but I’ll still get up at 5:00 a.m. a few times a week to head out to a field with a stack of Rocs or Teebirds for an hour or so before work. There’s a peripheral motivation to become a better disc golfer and a stronger competitor, but that’s not really why I do it. I do it because I love throwing discs, I love shaping lines in the sky and watching the disc follow them. If there were no courses nearby, I’d still get out to a field because I love the snap of the throw and the shape of the flight, and I experience a lot of perfect moments doing it.

The perfect moments I have on bikes are blissful and joyous, very few of them have involved much suffering. The best rides I’ve had this year have been on partly cloudy days in the mid-60’s, flying down brick alleys on 60mm balloon tires with my hands wrapped around a pair of Albatross bars. I love riding my Xtracycle with my daughter to her school. I love wrenching on our bikes and building wheels and tuning drivetrains until they’re quiet and smooth. I love bunny-hopping and off-street bike trails and saying Good Morning to crossing guards on my way to work and cranking and rolling and flowing with traffic and breathing the air and having nothing but the sky above me the whole time. My brass bell is one of the prettiest tones I can think of. Sometimes, I like to go slow.

There’s a hundred things that make me smile about being on a bike, but there’s not a single one of them that a heart-rate monitor would make any better for me. Sometimes I wish that weren’t the case. Sometimes, I think it would be awesome to be driven to achieve peak performance, to measure my effort by my perseverance and endurance, to conquer and win. And I enjoy watching folks with those qualities struggle and grind and endure, I’m amazed by their superhumanity (as well as their humanity) and take delight in their performances. But the only measures of my cycling experience that really motivate me are grins and laughs.

I realized that I wasn’t dissatisfied because my Long Haul Trucker was the wrong bike for how I wanted to ride, but rather that I wasn’t doing the kind of riding I truly love doing (for which the Trucker actually is perfect). I put the fenders back on, the clips came off the pedals (though I may pick up a pair of these or these for traction), and it’s getting mustache bars at the earliest opportunity.

I also picked up a beautiful Paramount Series 3 earlier this year, and had plans to outfit it for road riding. But I think I’m going to put riser bars, platform pedals, and 28’s on it instead. I may not have room for a serious road bike in my stable, but I can make room for a zippy street bike. Especially if it’s fun to ride.

Tags: bicycle commuting, bicycling, Cycling, Livestrong, random observations, xtracycle

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.