the big thing is the weather. where i live it’s the first month of spring and there’s a real summer feel. normally spring is cold and teases and seems to actively try and keep summer at bay. but this year it looks like skipping itself and going straight to a blissful summer. i’m happy about it. i was so over winter. it was unnaturally cold, at least in the mornings. and commuting mostly with a small bike bag means i am sans jacket. so all day i’m just a little bit cold. i could rectify this i guess, go back to a backpack (which i did for a few rides this season) but i think i’m sold on the bike-bag business now. part of growing old gracefully. anyway, it’s a relief that this weird spring-summer is here. and today’s spin was great. i snoozed with b and the dogs after getting back from town and then went out for a dusk ride that used to take an hour. it took an hour ten, but what of it. it was great. spinning down near dark hills. just breathing the warm fragances. what i did still crave though was a freewheel. having decided i wanted one, that imaginary taste of freedom is almost too much to bear. of course, i could ride the geared bike. but sometimes that’s too much freedom. i just want a little bit more. not the whole hog. so, it was almost perfect. good enough for the moment, and a super memory. still, next week has gotta be freewheel week. maybe i’ll get one put on tuesday. ready for the 31 degree day they’re forecasting on wednesday!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

i have this trend of getting burnt out. running, tae kwon do, tennis. i’m full of beans for a while, for years even, and then, well, it suddenly all just seems too much. i have this fear that i might be turning off cycling in this way. today, i was just sick of everything about going fast. the pressure to keep up, to spin faster and faster, to belt away from the lights, to get in front, to take the non-existent commuter prize. i have gone through this before, a lot actually, but this afternoon i had just absolutely had enough. i rode the best i could, while fantasising about a nice platform pedalled bike, a sprung brooks saddle and a front basket. and i would ride this bike slowly to work, stopping for coffee on the way. and on the way home, i’d be chill too. it’d be as fun as ‘riding a bike’, plain and simple, which i forget to do. more and more. the only thing that worries me about ‘letting go’ is getting fat. i have tendency to soften very quickly. i do all this pushing, straining, not really to win anything but to ward off the expansion. it’s a trap. i don’t know what to do. do i go slow and wide, or fast and thin? i wish it wasn’t a choice, because i will probably choose vanity over happiness anyday. damn. oh, i’m sorry if i’ve all this before. it’s probably a bind i am going over and over and over. i get like that sometimes. a lot actually. damn. i’ll probably buck up.

yeah, so this was a while ago. It was during the tour actually. while it was on tv and i was going to work and watching it at nights and falling asleep too soon because my eyes can’t/couldn’t take watching the movement of riders on the screen for more than about half an hour. so this was a while ago while i was riding home after work and a storm picked up and it got super strong and blew at me and caught my bike and flung me about and so i put my head down ’cause i thought i was gonna be blown off and just hung on when i hit a shopping trolley! it blew into me. i fell off, seemed to hover over my bike, and i don’t remember hitting the ground but i had bruises on both sides. i entered my experience on a bike chat site thingy and i think people made wizard of oz references which were pretty apt and witty too. anyways because it was tour time and cadel had fallen and lance too and got up and rode so did i. i rode in the rain and wind, no big deal, with some bruises, no big deal, but a couple of weeks later i noticed that the wobble was actually a bend in the frame, the fork too, and i had toe overlap like i didn’t before which is all a bummer cause it was a new bike. and well that’s that. okay. no moral. i mean watch out (and that was a moral i put in my bike chat site thingy comment/post), but no larger moral. hitting stuff is hitting stuff. that’s all. impact means nothing. there’s no wisdom to it. we fall off, we get up or don’t. we finish our ride or we go home. either way is either way. i mean unless you’re getting paid for it. but i guess what i am trying to say is that no one is watching. no one is judging. i have learnt that. i’m not sure how. i do know it’s not a moral.

I was saying a thing I’ve been saying all my life.  i was saying how I always think everything I loved, everything I love, would, will, disappear. i was saying it was a theme in my life.  (maybe in the saying of it all my life I had actually made it a theme!  maybe if i’d just shut up!)  still, it really has been – a theme, this is.  and i remember, quite strongly, moments when that feeling came into extra sharp focus.  when I was younger, many of these where while surfing; out deep, in the water, on stormy afternoons, as the dark came, I invariably grew maudlin for all the niceness in my life.  A home.  A girl.  A uni course.  A car.  Everything, completely tenuous.  It could have been the negative ions, or my dipping body temperature.  Even so, as I said, this feeling has never actually been asbent.  When things are good, or even just not-catastrophic, I get what i can only describe as ‘warmly scared’.  Everything will fall apart, and soon, and i feel sorry for myself because of it, in a soft, kind-hearted way.  as cosy as it is (or as it can be), it’s an attitude i’m tiring of now and, as a way of trying to buck it, I’m making an effort to be brave enough to appreciate in a more direct way.  Call it part of my Buddhism-as-self-help kick.  It’s hard.  So when i say that today, as I rode to work on the surly pacer, with absolutely everything feeling perfect – bike fit, happy medium pace, carradice – it was a weird mix of the truly tender and the awkardly frightening, i’m saying a thing that’s a kind of real and deep and, hopefully transforming, thing for me to say.  it’s a simple thing, a bike to ride, yet it is a blessing – the merging of body and tool, the bliss of rightness, of exact utility.  they’re gifts, which is a stupidly corny thing to say, i know.  except, i’m hoping that if i do say it it might become a new thing for me.  like, gratitude could be my thing, my theme.  so i will say it, and say it…at least until it all goes bust.

i rode up as the lights turned green.  it was an easy pass.  a bunch of old guys.  the middle old guy had a nice commuter style bike.  from a well known brand.  all very practical, a mineihaha (can’t spell that) saddle bag. brass bell on the neck.  sound stuff.  i was going to say ‘nice bike’ as i blew by, but he had jogging shoes on and it somehow seemed inappropriate. the bike was probably a fluke.  or his brother’s.  the gap was weird and i didn’t need to fall into it.  though, lately, the gaps have been all good. our dvd is broken and shows vid in a grey/purple scale.  weirdly, it’s cool. the absence of colours seems to bracket the action in a way that means i can just turn off.  it comes from a place outside culture and i can let the bad stuff go.  it’s back in the domain of ‘moving pictures’.  so i should have opened up to the guy.  he was just a ‘moving thing’.  but then, i was also wondering whether he would actually notice how nice my bike.  the jogging shoes indicated he wouldn’t.  which was probably what put me off.  i wanted to be acknowledged back.  it’s not a problem i have with dvds.

a heavy day.  rode with the large black crumpler backpack crammed full of lumpy things.  swung onto the path to town and the lycra men were going hell for leather.  cranked over a few times and gave up.  the bag wasn’t too heavy, just too heavy for me.  then and there.  i’m not used to the ‘crap on my back’ deal these days, and the load felt existential, a psychic burden.  i rode straight to work, no nice river loop for me, i was too bogged down for any kind of pleasure.  the day rubbed it in.  obligations and responsibilities outweighed rights.  i felt like i owed and owed and owed.  in the evening i watched a special inquiry into anxiety.  the doctors said ‘it’s not the event, its what goes on in your mind that screws you up’.  for me though, event and interior, psyche and world, always seem to match up.  i’m a cycling metaphor, weight itself. 

finally!  it’s been four years and my surly pacer feels great.  feels perfect in fact.  somewhere in the four years, about a year and a half ago, i actually traded it for a vintage pinarello, and a month later traded it back.  i missed it, sensed i had been rash, too flash.  it was great to get my working man’s bike back, but still it was slightly off.  yet today, no pain in the neck, the butt, the hands, the knees.  no niggles at all.  it was pure pleasure.  the endless run of long stems, short stems, up-turned stems, flipped stems, set-back seat posts, no set-back seat posts had settled around a long, flipped stem, a no set-back post.  nearly there.  then, last night, i dropped the saddle down about two millimeters and it all come together.  lovely.  can’t think of a better bike for me now.  i rode to work with the carradice barley bag and span a lower gear than usual, spinning like i was trying to race my anxious heartbeat.  the anxiety wasn’t beaten (it is so fast and rides a carbon pinarello), but the happiness of the old faithful bike was a neat consolation.   

Mykonos. 2007. photos: a h