“On a bike your consciousness is small. The harder you work the smaller it gets. Every thought that arises is immediately and utterly true, every unexpected thought is something you had known all along…..what goes round in a riders mind is a monolithic ball bearing, so smooth, so uniform that you cant even see it spin…”
‘The Rider’- Tim Krabbe
What follows may not transport you; the reader, from A to B. ‘Writing about writing about cycling’ ends up firstly being an acknowledgment that one is putting oneself through a process of self analysis; an acknowledgement that what follows will be a loose self portrait of you the cyclist as writer and secondly an exercise in frustration as it does not take long to fall back into the mode of ‘writing about cycling’. Or maybe it’s that one cannot ‘write about writing about cycling’ without ‘writing about cycling’. Bare with me….
Whilst riding I’ve noticed that my streams of thought work much like my feet on the pedals; as I ride a track bike to work during the week, and my feet are constantly moving, this link between mind and body becomes more and more apparent. So as my feet push down on the left pedal and pull up on the right my thoughts are in perpetual motion with them.
Pushing forward through traffic my mind skips and jumps from one thing to the next, as soon as I dismount these rhizomatic connections stop. As I set off the recognition of a tight physical sensation in my stretching thigh muscles gives way to the details of the day ahead, to the weekend, to someone I once knew, to a present once bought for me, to a birthday of a far away friend that looms closer, to a dinner I once ate with a colleague who is no longer nearby; a loose collection of details; quickly thumbed pages of re-collections that roll along quickly and blur with my own speed. It is as if I find myself sat in a darkened room watching the contents of my own mind spinning on a zoetrope in front of me. I can notice but I cannot grasp each thought as it appears.
Parallels can be drawn between this and the act of meditation; an endeavour that is often described as ‘ridding one’s mind of all thoughts’ when in actual fact most teachers of meditation will point out that meditation is really an observation of our minds and what occurs within it during those long hours of sitting (reasonably) still and concentrating on ones breathing. One is supposed to acknowledge the un-impeded mind at work and watch it, without ‘grasping’ as it bounces from one thing to the next, lost and confused without the convention of logical ‘coherence’.
For many years I attended a course of therapy with a clinical psychologist who practiced EMDR; a branch of therapy that for a large part also involves acknowledging what the relaxed mind does. Unhindered thoughts from the subconscious arise as ones eyes watch the therapists finger move from left to right, akin to the swinging arm of a metronome. This latter motion is a useful tool for helping people who have undergone severe trauma; something that often causes the brain to get confused. It is said to stimulate both hemispheres of the brain at once and ‘pull them in line’ with one another.
The wagging finger I spent hours watching works exactly the same as my feet on the pedals; back and forth and side to side does the same thing for the brain as up and down, push and pull.
After four years of cycling across town once a week I began to realise that the journey to my therapist was becoming almost as helpful to me as the course I was attending. While riding my mind felt free and unburdened, able to think without past negativities clouding its progress. My feet moved, my thoughts tumbled along, and things that had seemed problematic at the start of the journey were no longer problems by the end. Whereupon I would reach my destination, jump off and the speeding thoughts subsided into the background noise of the street. People walked with their coffees, and their prams with children, buses growled their way along the tarmac and I would scrabble desperately for the lost pearls of thought before they were washed down the nearest gutter with the summer rain.
Because of this rare phenomenon, much of this article was written in intermittent stops while out riding and consists of scribbled, quite often illegible notes in my notebook that I kept in my back pocket.
As I previously mentioned, writing about cycling as a day-to-day activity (as opposed to a sports commentary for the Tour de France or the Vuelta d’Espana for example) becomes a portrait of our daily lives. I reflect, fantasise, resolve, dream and ponder on my bike. And the nice thing is I’m quite sure that I’m not the only one. After the 7/7 bombings in London, the city saw a surge in cycling not witnessed since the 1930s. Add to this various cycle hire schemes, a huge push in advertising from the mayors office, the introduction of so called ‘cycle superhighways’, a growth in independent bike retailers and the added ‘hip’ factor of pretty bikes ridden by pretty people in pretty clothes, with not one single bead of sweat between any of them no sirreeee…and we now have have a city where a large percentage of its population thinks on two wheels instead of four.
A portion of a capital city whose thoughts are stimulated by a pace determined by ones own legs; a human pace with added wind and, judging by the past three summers, rain in ones hair for invigoration (!) plus the empowerment that comes from getting somewhere using ones own volition and determination. Ok, so we’re not catching up Copenhagen just yet which currently wears the maillot jaune for having 36% of the cities population get to work by bike but we are getting there…
Everyday I pass hundred of cyclists; old chaps with greying beards on tourer’s, men and women with seats on the back for the kids, young men in Lycra on smart Italian racing frames, rudeboy’s on outsize mountain bikes with suspension forks, young ladies on Pashley’s and Peugeot’s and couriers on beaten up steel horse’s with flyers for the last alleycat* they rode at the weekend pushed into their spokes…. and most of them are smiling. You may think this is an exaggeration but I promise you, its not. Get hold of a bike for the day and watch the others pedal with you and you will see this unconscious grin, so rare on the faces of commuters in this city, spread its way across the lips of many. This is the same smile I wore at aged ten, as I tried to impress my uncle by taking a tight corner on my new racing bike and instead ploughed through Mrs Boyd’s hedge stopping just short of ending up going through her living room window. This smile has not gone away. The self empowerment that comes from getting from A to B using ones own legs, heart and head should not be underestimated and lest I sound like some cyclismistic preacher of two wheeled wonderment (which I know I do…) yes, of course cycling in London is tough, tiring, wet, and dirty but it is, I believe, fully worth the effort.
Of course, not everyone is cycling to get from A to B. Long term cyclist and writer Graham Fife speaks in his book “The beautiful machine” how aged five he learnt that escaping from an abusive home life on two wheels was a lot quicker than walking, for him cycling was not about arriving, it was about leaving:
“ I knew what the bicycle promised, it promised Freedom”
The 1939 film “The wizard of Oz” introduces us to Dorothy Gale who dreams of finding another place:
“Its not a place you get to by boat or train
Behind the moon, beyond the rain”
One can only wonder how Dorothy’s story would have differed if she had, instead of waiting for a tornado to come along and sweep her away, stolen Miss Gulch’s (the Wicked Witch of the West no less) bicycle with Toto in her basket and got out of little town Kansas the hard way.
I’ve cycled since I was a small boy, and as I’ve grown my two-wheeled fixation has grown with me. Two years ago I began going out at night, not to get to work, the pub, or a friends house but just to ride. I came to realise I agreed with the words of the great naturalist John Muir when speaking about the power of the outdoors on the workings of ones mind:
…” going outside was really going inside.”
This was the point where I realised that my addiction had hit a point that I couldn’t rationalise to others. Friends, colleagues and strangers at parties looked at me as if I were crazy, thankfully a handful understood. As I pedalled through the night observing the different lights, people and time signatures of the city my mind would again begin to loosen. This is why I cycle I thought to myself and this is why this article floats along from point to point in some desperate attempt to convey what happens in the saddle. A task that feels nigh on impossible. There are no words that exist in the place my mind goes when I ride…so I can only talk about motion from a stationary position.
After a summer of bruised skies and daily deluges, autumn is shaping up beautifully. Most morning’s last week were fresh and crisp, with blue skies and a cold wind that bit around my ankles and reminded me that in the coming months winter riding would be upon us. This cold Autumnal wind that beats down the road towards me is the challenge of this time of year; as positive as cycling is, its ALWAYS a challenge.
Quite often this challenge is a mental one, and then distance, weather and hills play their part and seek to put one’s two wheels into reverse. Climbing the last hill before I get home these days I find myself naming the London hills I can think of: Champion, Fox, Knights, Highgate, Biggin, Norbury and so on: a verbal meditation and a distraction from the pain in my thighs. Last week as I pulled myself up this final climb a cyclist zipping down the hill towards me smiled and lifted a hand from the bars in recognition of a familiar struggle.
In his book “What is Sport?”, the French cultural theorist Roland Barthes while writing about the Tour de France speaks of this battle and the camaraderie that exists:
“ This combat is a competition, not a conflict. Which means that man must conquer, not man but the resistance of things”
On a bicycle I feel in control in a world that makes us feel we should be, but quite often are not. On a bicycle I can conquer the ‘resistance of things’ that the world puts in my path and it makes me look forward to being old and grey, possibly deaf, possibly bald…but still pedalling.
*A type of race started by bike messengers that consists of hitting various checkpoints around the city in order for a nominal prize
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David Cochrane is an artist based in London and co-founder of brokenbiscuitsbikerides.wordpress
Thanks to Andy Marsh, co- founder of brokenbiscuits for encouragement and much bike related discussion when progressing up said hills.
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