Biking
Bikes are quickly taking over my life, and I'm 100% okay with it.
Weekly Three
HEAR: “Home at Last” by HOMESHAKE is a buttery smooth, surfy track that never fails to put me in a mellow mood.
READ: This newsletter by the musician Ted Gioia offers ten interesting observations on the lullaby, such as his favorite theory that the lullaby’s “efficacy focuses on the first song every baby hears, namely the mother’s heartbeat.”
VIEW: Here’s a picture of the gravel bike I purchased this week. She goes by the name of La Tolva (in English “The Hopper”). Also, checkout the HBO doc 100 Foot Wave, which follows big wave surfer Garrett McNamara in his search for that mythical wave.
No. 44: Biking
Last night I was eating dinner and enjoying a post-ride beer with the East Bay Gravel Bikers, a group of bicyclists that frequent the hilly fire trails of Moraga. It was their weekly “Thirst Thursday” ride and I was the new kid on the block — new bike, first gravel ride, carrying a bulky water bottle in my pocket because I forgot the ones that attach to my bike.
One of the riders was a serious athlete. Skinny, tan, and young with a scruffy beard and wide-eyes, Stephen caught up with us halfway though the ride after arriving late and sprinting through the rutted, steep trail find us. What had taken thirty minutes for us to complete only took fifteen for him. A few months back, he won a four-day race spanning hundreds of miles through the Washington forest. (He would stop riding at one in the morning and start riding again at four-thirty, just before the break of day. To sleep, he would find a soft patch of dirt, wrap himself in an emergency blanket, and shut his eyes.) One intensive week, he biked 650 miles and climbed over 60,000 feet.
“It gets me in the perfect mind set,” he told me, speaking about long-distance riding. “I’m not thinking about anything else. I’m perfectly focused on what I’m doing. Nothing else matters. Everything else goes away.”
With this, I think, he captured the beauty of sports. What is it about biking, surfing, running, swimming that make these activities so enjoyable and addicting? It’s that when you’re doing the thing — speeding down a rocky hill, gliding down a moving wave, sprinting to the finish line, holding your breath and pushing yourself through the water — you are totally, completely, one-hundred percent focused. You are immersed in the world, in the here and now, and it’s a spectacular place to be.
Time slows. One second feels like a minute because it only takes a second for everything to go horribly wrong. There is fear, but you come to know it like an old friend. You see every rock and pebble on the trail even as you approach them at twenty-five miles an hour, the same way the surfer sees every hump and groove in the slanting face of a wave even as she avoids being toppled by the crumbling mountain of water behind her. When it ends — when you make it out of that intense, ultra-focused, slowed-down moment in time . . . when you survive to tell the tale — you feel like a new person. The world seems more colorful. You feel replenishing air filling your lungs after each exhale. Your face is hot. Your vision seems sharper. There’s a smile on your face. You’ve just made contact with God.
As I’ve written in past newsletters, my life sometimes feels divided between overthinking and not thinking at all. I think this is good, though hard to sustain. In writing and reading and basically any intellectual activity, your job is to think think think — essentially, to be as far from the present moment as possible as you explore the far reaches of thought. In being active, your job is to stop thinking — to be right there right then or pay the price. None are better or worse. The healthy thing is not to be preferential but to make time for both.
This last week has been one-hundred percent presentness for me, hence the subject of this newsletter. After starting to ride with the Sunday morning group rides hosted by my local bike shop, Cyclesports, I’ve met a bunch of great people and rekindled my passion for biking. Before, I almost always rode alone. It got a little boring. Group rides have changed that. Rather than just competing against myself and keeping up my own fitness, the group rides offer the happy trifecta of being social, maintaining fitness, and indulging in person-to-person competition. On top of it all, the bay area is the ultimate playground. We've got remote paved roads through the hills, winding and shady trails through the forest, city streets dividing the concrete jungle, and incredible views. Think Oakland, Marin, Sausalito, Moraga, San Francisco, Alameda, Sonoma County, and so much more.
When dinner was done, beers downed, and goodbyes said, everyone packed their bikes into their cars — everyone except Stephen. He was going to ride home, at nine o’clock at night, from Moraga to Oakland, by climbing the closed Pinehurst Road, which would have been entirely devoid of human life and pitch black at that time.
“Gonna be dark,” I said.
“I love it,” he said, laughing. “I’m used to it.”
“At least no emergency blanket tonight,” I said.
“Nope,” he laughed. “I actually get to go home to a bed tonight!” he said, as if a bed were some kind of rare luxury.
I’m scheduled to ride with Stephen more often in the future. I saw in him (and I wonder if he saw in me) a similar obsessive nature. Driving home, I thought if I wasn’t careful, I might end up like him: riding through the green lush forests of Washington, sleeping under the shining stars, winning long-distance bike races.
I’ll do my best to avoid that worst-case scenario. ♦
Mailbox
Have a question or response? Hit reply. Write-ups and questions from readers will be published here each week.