Bike Snob - Anonymous [51]
Think of it like dating. The best part of meeting somebody new is exploring each other physically and mentally and experiencing the thrill of discovery. You don’t immediately hire a sex therapist to sit next to the bed with a stopwatch and make you run through the Kama Sutra. The same goes for your bike. You’re building a relationship with it and with cycling. Take your time. Gaze into each other’s eyes. Spend lazy Sunday mornings together. But forget the lasers and heavy machinery—at least until you get to know each other.
Once you’re comfortable both on and with your bike, that’s when the real change begins. The first thing that happens is that you get fit. Think of all the people out there who are unhappy with their bodies, and wish they could change them. Well, I’m no “doctorologist,” but in order to get your body into shape you need to exercise. Perhaps you’ve noticed that the people you see doing stuff like running, cycling, and even skateboarding are in better physical shape than the people sitting in KFC with bucketfuls of chicken, or in casinos with bucketfuls of quarters—and especially the people eating bucketfuls of quarters while they attempt to shove chicken into slot machines. Those people tend towards the slovenly. Yes, you can pay a surgeon to flay the fat off you, just like you can pay someone to make your bike fit you, or teach you how to have sex, but none of those will have a lasting effect.
Once you fall in love with cycling, you will automatically get fit. You’ll no longer be one of those people for whom exercise is a chore. Better yet, you won’t need to pay for a gym membership, and you won’t need to drag yourself there and go through the motions, as if simply putting your body in a gym were tantamount to doing an actual workout. Sure, some people like going to the gym, but most people do it out of duty. Gyms are like fitness temples, and simply sitting in a temple does not make you a better person—living better does. You can’t cram all your repentance into a few hours over the weekend, and you can’t cram all your exercise into forty-five minutes after work. Why not make getting to and from work your exercise?
Once you start riding you’re no longer one of the sedentary masses. Also, you won’t need to eat less. Actually, you’ll need to eat more. Food will no longer be an indulgence. It will become what it was always actually supposed to be, which is fuel. Your meals will be sources of energy, not guilt.
At this point, you might begin to realize something. Your physical rhythms are now becoming more a part of your life. At the end of the day, you are tired—the good kind of tired, which is physically tired. This is the kind of tired that makes it easy to go to sleep, and that overwhelms the sorts of anxious thoughts that can sometimes keep you awake. You’re too tired to watch crappy TV. And like your hunger, your exhaustion is earned. There’s no more stressing about the appropriate way to satisfy it. Your body dictates the terms, and you obey them.
Don’t worry, you’re not turning into a brain-dead, zombie-like sleeping-and-eating machine. If anything, you were probably a brain-dead, zombie-like sleeping-and-eating machine before you became a cyclist. Really, what cycling is doing is burning the fat off of your life as well as your body. It’s eliminating the restless energy that you’d otherwise find different uses for, such as smoking, or eating