The Selection

You’ll only become a better cyclist when you think you can’t become a better cyclist.

I’d just got divorced, and moved to a new city, and fallen in love again, and had a longer commute to work and a new dog in my life that needed walking in the mornings and evenings instead of just getting let out into the forest, and in that same year I changed up my job (working with Runner’s World and other brands, as well as still getting to hang in there with the supremely cool talented staff of Bicycling) and I had to be in the city a lot more, and... look, you know exactly what happened: instead of doing what I should have done and riding more when there was so much pressure, I did what we too often do and let the riding slip.

I’m telling you this plain and simple and without excuse: I gave up. I’d still been riding around a bit – I was evaluating stuff when the Test Team asked me to, I was never the worst rider or anything in any group I found myself part of. But it was gone, whatever it had been, that thing I’d had – that we get – that kind of ease on a bike, that feeling that we belong between those two wheels, the thing where you never think much about the thing (though it is a miracle to possess and be possessed by it!) because it just is who you are and what you do.

I accepted that it was gone.

And something let go. Some tension, some fuzz, I don’t what know it was, but it vanished. I mean, right at that instant: as I first raised then pushed down my left pedal and rose off the top tube where I’d been resting my thigh and clicked in my right foot and started out of the parking lot on a cold clear crisp morning not much different from any others that had been making me feel bad about myself on a bike, I gave up; and I felt better, and the bicycle did that thing where it settles into the road and kind of wraps itself around you so that you feel as if you’re sitting in it instead of on top of it.

The only thing I’d really got right in a year of cycling was not giving up on cycling, even after I’d given up on myself.

There are so many ways to get better in this strange and marvellous pursuit of ours. Some of them are as straightforward as: look through corners to the spot where you want to exit. Or: drink before you’re thirsty. Or: to remove pedals without accidentally tightening one of them beyond human comprehension, always think ‘back off’, and you’ll turn the wrench towards the back of the bike, which is clockwise on the non-driveside and anticlockwise on the driveside. Or: just as you begin to rise from the saddle on a climb, give a hard stroke and pull the bike forward underneath you to prevent the rear wheel from kicking back into the rider behind you.

Sometimes the ways we get better are more elusive, more mysterious, hard to even describe, let alone prescribe. Maybe even, I don’t know, there’s some magic mixed up in it, some kind of communion with whatever it is that matters in our lives and makes our lives matter. I’m sure of this, anyway: knowing how to do something like corner better, and caring enough to want to corner better, and after achieving some level of improvement, seeing there are other improvements you hadn’t even known were possible, and in this way realising and appreciating and eventually becoming a celebrant of the richness of the simple joy of riding a bicycle – you will go places. You will ride to places you cannot guess, and you will get there just when you need to.

Thelasttimei got better on a bike was when I decided I would never get any better at riding anymore, that my best days as a cyclist were behind me.