Bike Snob - Anonymous [53]
It’s exhausting to wade through crap, and sometimes, the only way to cut through the crap is with physical activity. This will never change. You’ll always need to use your body productively, and to use it expressively. As you trudge through the cultural detritus it’s increasingly easy to lose touch with this truth. And if interpretive dance or stripping isn’t for you, then cycling is a great way to meet this need.
Pain
Nature’s Cruel Instructor
Life involves pain—there’s really no way around it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Without pain, how would we appreciate pleasure? How would we know when to take our feet out of the oven (I like to read with my feet in the oven on cold days) or to stop watching Two and a Half Men? While some of us live in fear of pain, the fact is that it’s just a part of the spectrum of physical sensation, and you simply can’t spend your entire life in the Jacuzzi part of that spectrum. Sometimes you need a cold shower to wake yourself up.
Like life, cycling involves a wide range of sensations, from sublime pleasure to searing agony. While ideally you’ll only venture into the pain section occasionally, you have to accept the fact that it’s going to happen. But there’s pain you can control and pain you can’t, and cyclists sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between the two. Here are the various types of pain you’re likely to come across, what you can do about them, and when it’s appropriate to just say uncle:
Pain from Exertion
You’ve probably heard some variation of the expression “Nothing worth doing is easy.” Obviously, this is completely ridiculous. There are plenty of worthwhile things that are exceedingly easy, like eating and sex. Even the most conservative person has to admit that sex is worth doing since all of humankind depends on it. Sure, some people do manage to complicate sex, but then again people can complicate anything. In fact, a more accurate saying would be “There’s nothing easy that can’t be made difficult.”
Cycling’s also pretty easy, though like sex and everything else in life you can make it as simple or as complicated as you choose. However, cycling does require physical effort—and yes, extreme effort can be painful. But a lot of this is optional. You can ride as easy or as hard as you choose, and you don’t have to ride fast if you don’t want to. When you’re driving you need to go as fast as everyone else or else you’ll bring traffic to a halt, but cycling’s more like walking in that respect. When you walk you can do that dorky power-walking thing, or you can just slow your roll and strut. If you want to ride around at 3 mph on a cruiser bike with ape-hangers while wearing a leather vest and no shirt and listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive, by all means do so—though it might take you a long time to get to work, unless you’re a seventies Quaalude salesman, in which case your office is probably your banana seat.
Conversely, you might even find you like the pain of exertion, in which case cycling offers a wide variety of pain-inducing disciplines to which you can subject yourself. Certainly, you can seek pain and exertion on your own, but for the true masochist nothing beats road racing. Road racers actually ritualize the pursuit of pain by donning strange formfitting clothing, strapping electronics onto their bikes and themselves in order to measure the pain, and then flogging themselves and each other on rides during which things like smiling are discouraged. Essentially, the only thing separating a sexual sadomasochist and a road racer is slightly different fetish gear.
If you prefer to smile while you torture yourself you can also engage in other painful pursuits, such as cyclocross. In cyclocross, smiling and having fun are actually acceptable, though the suffering is no less