JOY RIDES

Cycling is the best of eight types of fun, reckons Rob Ainsley – but be mindful...

My road chums talk about Type 1 and Type 2 fun. Type 1 is all fun; Type 2 wasn’t at the time but feels good in retrospect. Said friends are audax cyclists, who ride 300km through the night and sleep in bus shelters, so they have a particular idea of what constitutes as ‘fun’.

Being a maths geek, I reckon this isn’t systematic enough. I see eight types of fun. Experiences are enjoyable, or not, in three stages: before, during and after. For each, score 1 for fun, 0 for none. Convert this binary number into decimal to give you a type of fun from nought to seven.

For example, some things are unpleasant to contemplate, experience, and think back on. Having a bike stolen, say, so that scores 0-0-0. Type 0 fun. Not fun at all.

If you’re a nervous flyer, plane journeys are 0-0-1: the sleepless nights before, terror during, but satisfaction/relief afterwards. Type 1. Unless luggage handlers trash your bike, obviously.

Buying a bike from an internet auction site can be heady anticipation dashed on delivery, then remorse: 1-0-0, Type 4. Enjoyable but regrettable activities – overdoing things at the club Christmas party perhaps, or an illicit romantic liaison during it – might be 1-1-0: Type 6 fun. While other experiences, such as getting married to a non-cyclist, could be anywhere on the scale. Good luck with that.

What about bike rides? Well, I always enjoy planning them. And I always take satisfaction in having done them. Some trips themselves, it’s true, are less enjoyable than others: awful weather, bad driving or mechanicals might threaten to turn Type 7 fun, the best (1-1-1), into not so good Type 5 fun (1-0-1).

The more I cycle, the more I enjoy that bit in the middle, the journey itself,

I was in the moment, enjoying that astounding phenomenon of existence

whatever happens. Many of my life’s most intense sensations – ones experienced when vertical, anyway – have come on two wheels. The sound of the dawn chorus in Sri Lanka. The sight of the next mountain range at the top of a French col over my bar-bag slice of gateau. The smell of East Yorkshire pig farms. That instant on a stormy Scottish moor when my socks turn from dry to waterlogged, knowing I’ll squelch the rest of the day. Somehow I enjoy them all. I feel connected with the universe. Alive. A state I’m keen to continue, all you drivers overtaking me too closely.

When I think of some of my longer tours, I wonder what was I thinking about all fortnight from Land’s End to John o’Groats, or every day of 9-to-5 cycling through Taiwan or Cuba. The answer is, well, not much. Because I was in the moment, simply enjoying that astounding phenomenon of existence, of being my own little portable cosmos. It’s all rather spiritual. Deep stuff for a simple ride up Shap in a headwind.

Once, touring New Zealand, I visited an art gallery with some hyper-realistic landscapes, so minutely detailed that every blade of grass, every splinter of wood was clear. As I cycled away it had the remarkable effect of sharpening all my senses. I saw insects as if they were vast Meccano-like structures – though in the case of the sand flies biting me, they actually were… It was like I could hear the wool growing on sheep, and smell Jimmy’s Pies even though the shop was 60 miles away. Even feel my leather saddle gradually breaking in, though I later realised this was merely wishful thinking. The relaxed mind enabled by cycling hasn’t gone unnoticed in the current boom for ‘mindfulness’ meditation techniques and philosophies. Mindfulness is what cycling’s all about, at least two recent books maintain, the latest of which is out in paperback this month – Ben Irvine’s excellent, delightful Einstein and the Art of Mindful Cycling.

So, if you’ve ever wondered what mindfulness is – when a friend tried to persuade you to spend four hundred quid on a weekend retreat to experience it – I’d say just go for a bike ride. By cycling you’re doing all that mindfulness stuff, free, automatically. And it’s all pleasure. Type 7 fun, in fact.