I headed out during a break from work yesterday to cover an easy training ride of about 30 miles on mostly flat terrain. The weather was just about perfect, warm but not hot, with a mild wind that wasn’t much of a bother. The idea was just to go out and spin the pedals for a couple hours, keep my legs loose after my run yesterday, and burn some fat.
Work has had me stressed lately, and it seems I’ve been doing an increasingly bad job of hiding it. I’ve had more than a few people there pointedly ask me how things were going, a clear sign that the heart on my sleeve is betraying my mental state yet again. Thankfully, a decent pedal is just what the doctor ordered to recenter myself.
For the first 8-10 miles, that’s what I concentrated on. I shifted when it felt like I was working too hard, I let the hills slow me down instead of attacking, and I just tried to keep things easy. Then I turned Southwest and picked up the bike path, and just let my mind go. It was smooth and clean, and all I had to do was pedal, and think of nothing.
If you ask most cyclists, they’ll tell you that, in some way, they ride to escape. The stress of their jobs, their family life, educational demands, all of them seem to melt away when you’re out for a pedal. Some of the area bike paths offer a unique opportunity in that regard.
When you’re riding a mountain bike, you forget about your troubles because you’re preoccupied with the job at hand. You’re picking lines, negotiating obstacles, shifting your weight, climbing, descending. Even if the pace is relaxed, you’re busy enough that you don’t really have time to think about anything else.
On a road bike on public roads, you’re similarly busy. There are fewer things going on at once, but they’re happening at roughly twice the speed, so you still have to pay attention. You’re scanning for potholes, monitoring traffic ahead and behind, navigating, checking your cadence, making sure you’re spinning and not smashing, remembering to drink water or take in nutrition, when the ride is long enough.
But on the bike path, particularly some of the paths around here, you can just turn off your brain and pedal. There are no obstacles, no potholes, no traffic. For miles at a time, there isn’t even scenery. It’s just you and a strip of asphalt, completely enclosed in trees. You may or may not even see another person, depending on how far you are from the nearest town, and the time of day. It may sound boring, but when you’re there, spinning your legs, feeling the rush of wind past you, the tires whispering on the damp pavement, it’s truly peaceful. A lot of people I see in these stretches are listening to music, trying to drown out their apparent boredom, but I savor the peace of it.
In our modern lives, there are far too few opportunities to relax and tune out, and detach yourself from the worry and concern and stress and busyness of it. But on my bike, I can do just that.