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By Root 238 0

yet the truth is there are plenty of people who ride bikes but aren’t cyclists. Take the food delivery person, for example. While this person may spend as much time on a bicycle as the most dedicated pro rider, many food delivery people aren’t cyclists. They’re simply people who must use a bicycle in the course of their workday. If the restaurant provided them with a motor scooter, or a car, or a shopping cart propelled by dachshunds, they’d just as happily use any one of those instead. Certainly this is not to say that there aren’t food delivery people who do like to ride bicycles, or that there aren’t cyclists among them, but often they’re as much cyclists as the average person who uses a computer at work is a tech geek, or the average physician is a stethoscope enthusiast. The bicycle is just a tool they use to do their job.

The cyclist, however, does not use the bicycle only as a tool. The cyclist opts for the bicycle even when other means of transportation are available. If you’re a cyclist, you’ll actually ride a bicycle even when you don’t have to go anywhere at all. You might just get on your bike, pedal around for a while, and come right back home having gone nowhere and accomplished nothing. So given the fact that riding a bike is a prerequisite to being a cyclist, it would follow then that we can define a cyclist as a person who chooses to ride a bike even when he or she doesn’t have to do so, right? Perfect, there we have it:

Cyclist (noun)—One who rides a bicycle, even when he or she doesn’t have to do so.

Well, I’d like to leave it at that, but the truth is I’m a cyclist. I don’t do things the easy way, I don’t accept answers I haven’t figured out for myself, and I seek out climbs instead of circumventing them. The problem with the above definition is that it doesn’t account for the many people who ride bicycles even when they don’t have to, but do so chiefly because they have an affinity (or even an obsession) with the bicycle itself. While many cyclists love bikes, loving bikes doesn’t necessarily make you a cyclist. If you’re around bikes a lot there’s a good chance you’ve run across these people. For them, it’s not about the riding; it’s about the bike, and the riding part is simply their way of fondling their possession. They keep their bicycles clean all the time, they fear scratches like they’re herpes, and they don’t ever ride in the rain (or as they call it, “water herpes”) so their bikes won’t get dirty or rusty. They’re like the people who collect toys but don’t remove them from the package so as not to diminish their value, or who swish wine around in their mouths without swallowing it, or who never get around to having actual sex because they’re too into sniffing high-heeled shoes while dressed as Darth Vader. These are not cyclists, they’re bicycle fetishists.

In light of this, I say that the definition of a cyclist needs a qualifier, and that it should be: (1) a person who rides a bicycle even when he or she doesn’t have to; (2) a person who values the act of riding a bicycle over the tools one needs in order to do it.

I’m comfortable with this. According to this definition, a cyclist can be anyone from a guy on a hybrid wearing jean shorts and sneakers, to a roadie on a Cervelo wearing a full team kit, to a person on a recumbent wearing a pink rabbit suit and singing along to a loudspeaker blaring Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business.” Moreover, it eliminates those for whom the bicycle is more important than the riding of the bicycle, as well as those who ride incidentally but would defect given the slightest opportunity (such as a job change, or winning a brand-new car on Wheel of Fortune, or perhaps most irresistibly, receiving a dachshund-drawn shopping cart). Most importantly, a cyclist is a person who has incorporated bicycles and cycling into his or her everyday life.

So, Why Ride?

As human beings we’re trapped. We’re trapped by our physical limitations, and our responsibilities, and our fears. Regardless of your lifestyle, the truth is you’re governed by