bike. life.

you make a decision and a choice. every time you clip in. it is the enactment of your will. drop through the gears. arse on saddle. flex in the thighs. the body leads, the mind follows. in a world where demands are made and must be met, be they taxes, departures, working hours or any other obligation that tethers us to the bind, strips us of our sight and leaves us blind, when you ride you enter the environs on the outskirts of liberation. you are on the approach to freeness. you’re fighting against the curse of our times – doing nothing. a movement against inertia. you are making a statement. heard through action. every pedal stroke a word, every kilometer a sentence, every hundred a chapter. writing a book with your being. letting the world know that this tribe will not pass by into the dust. that you will not desist. no matter what else it is you do, you are doing this, conscious or not. the mind leads, the body follows. it works both ways, it becomes one and you know you are of the earth just as you leave it, however fleeting, like a seed on the wind, to grow, to build, to become a fulfillment, forcing into the bend, easing out of the curve. impossible in the limitless of what you can achieve, for a singular moment. maybe two, if you are very lucky. but you made this. it is not luck. it is the enactment of control, of self, and, lest it be forgotten, left to gather cobwebs like so much else we once believed in, it is the exhumation of a dream. relinquish and release, relax, through the tension and concentration of stress. the sweat. the tightness. the ache you love. when you get closest to realizing the magnitude the words fall away, thoughts vacate. [now] becomes real. and it comes again and again and again, every time you leave that door.

a life on two wheels.

life, indeed.

Author: Lee Rodgers

Cycling coach, race organiser, former professional cyclist and the original CrankPunk.

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