Category Archives: perceptions of cycling

Riding with heart: Mike Woods at La Vuelta a España

North American Mike Woods won his first grand tour stage in the 2018 Vuelta a España. Riding up steep grades past throngs of cheering fans, through the mist on a forested mountain top, Woods persevered. Rocking his bike back and forth, standing up out of the saddle, accelerating again and again, Woods pushed himself harder than anyone else could. When he crossed the finish Woods was caught by his soignuer, who held him so he wouldn’t fall down. Woods left everything out on the road. His ride was an amazing display of how sport gives an outlet, a place to put our energies, crystallizing our will into a determined moment, overcoming life’s arduous circumstances. Sport gives us the opportunity to show what the human spirit can do.

There were so many people on the side of the road today just screaming my name and my director was on the radio. In the last 500 meters he just said do this for your family. And, I did. I did. —Michael Woods on winning Stage 17, Vuelta a España 2018

Cycling it seems to me is so appropriate for the 21st century. It elevates human living in so many ways, including Woods’ showcase of the triumph of the human spirit. And it makes practical sense as a fitting, appropriate technology for daily living. It’s self-powered mobility that’s clean, renewable, accessible, affordable, and quite fun for everyone. From kids to families, all generations, young and old, including the many generations to come, cycling works wonders, and gives us a window into the beauty of the human soul and the everyday world we live in.

Resources and further reading:

Stage 17 highlights (3 minutes, including Woods interview). Watch video on youtube

Stage 17 last kilometer (4 minutes) Watch video on youtube

Professional cyclists used the Vuelta to draw attention to the necessity of increasing road safety for all, including bicyclists, pedestrians, and occupants and operators of vehicles.
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/freire-leads-demonstration-for-tougher-spanish-road-safety-laws/

Mike Woods is on Strava, the social network for athletes. You can view his day to day activities there. From Toronto, Canada, he trains in Tucson in the offseason. https://www.strava.com/pros/425147

All of us

Leave a reply

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
—Henry David Thoreau

People bicycling are like family. Cycling has an amazingly broad and diverse impact throughout our communities. But I still get surprised when I meet new cyclists and experience how the world of cycling is expanding. Cycling keeps branching out and bridging gaps. When I picked up the September/October 2018 issue of Bicycling magazine, I was captivated by the story on NASCAR driver Jimmie Johnson and his love for bicycling, and how that love is shared by so many in motorsports.

Joe Gibbs Racing mechanic Sean Kerlin is a cycling enthusiast. photo from bicycling.com

I don’t care who you are…it [cycling] is just a great break in the craziness of life. –Jimmie Johnson

Johnson is one of the great drivers of all time, and he’s also cultivated a passion for cycling. He uses it for many of the reasons we all do. Cycling has helped him listen to his body and learn about its needs (which helps him in the race car when he is driving). Cycling helps him enjoy his travels more. Johnson gets to explore the places he goes in depth and detail by pedaling, and meets lots of interesting people. And then there’s the intangibles. Cycling just makes for a better day. I bet cycling helps him practice hand, feet and eye coordination too, honing skills.

I’m following Jimmie Johnson on Strava now, and enjoy seeing his almost daily rides. He has 7423 followers on Strava as of this writing, and posts some awesome pictures of the places he rides and people he rides with, including his wife. Cycling makes life more beautiful.

To innovate…you need a trained imagination. —Martha Nussbaum, NEH 2017 Spring conversation

I’m a driving enthusiast, but didn’t grow up a NASCAR fan. So for me, Johnson’s cycling is a way into NASCAR traditions and culture. I found out they are not so different than what I am used to. They have a competitive drive that fosters innovation, and they care about the broader world, the environment and all people. The NASCAR Green program works to minimize NASCAR’ environmental impact and preserve the natural environment and foster sustainability.

No wonder so many of the drivers, mechanics, and staff in NASCAR have joined with cycling culture! It delivers a balanced approach and real sense of mechanical efficiency, ergonomics and light impact. Maybe when we ride a bike we are not as alone as we may think.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”

The bike brings people together. When we see people cycling we have an automatic connection. We have a technology that helps us calm our minds, deepen our engagement with our bodies and the planet, and expands our sense of the other, making the world more familiar.

I like this poem by William Safford, called “Maybe Alone on My Bike”. There’s an analysis in the Literature chapter of this Routledge Handbook that makes me think about the potential of the bicycle. So much stored energy! It’s almost like cycling tames ourselves and opens us up to a conversation with the landscape. We sense a greater connection to the world around us.

I’ve blogged about the manifold applications of cycling over the years. Here are a few examples of the positive impacts cycling imparts on individual lives, our families, our imaginations of what is possible. Out of many, cycling makes us one again. Riding a bike more and sharing the experience with others is a goal that creates the kind of world we want to live in.

The World Bank sees cycling as an investment in health:
https://bikeyogiblog.wordpress.com/2015/10/22/high-level-champions-for-bicycling/

The US Military sponsors endurance sports to support our service personnel:
https://bikeyogiblog.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/telling-it-like-it-is/

Kids benefit from cycling in many ways:
https://bikeyogiblog.wordpress.com/2017/07/29/cycling-in-the-news/

Dutch cycling

Leave a reply

Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. —World Health Organization

Cycling culture is universal in the Netherlands. It is part of the national consciousness. They embrace all things bicycle. In a country with less than half the population of California, they have many of the worlds top cyclists including Chantal Blaak, winner of the Amstel Gold Race and World Road Race Championship, and Tom Doumalin, winner of the Giro d’Italia and World Time Trial Championship. Just as Norway’s love for winter sports was on display in the Winter Olympics, the spirit of the people of the Netherlands expresses through cycling, in sport and everyday life. Cycling is a principle value the Dutch have built their communities around. [I usually use my pictures for this blog, but the photos in this post are from the public domain, mostly of the Amstel Gold women’s race which takes place every April in the Netherlands]

The bicycle was the traditional vehicle for transportation in the Netherlands in the early part of the 20th century, accounting for about 80% of trips in Amsterdam. Car technology changed that in the 1960’s, just like it did here in the U.S. The Dutch decided in the 1970’s to comprehensively plan for providing service to people cycling, and that has made a big difference. Cities are built for people on bicycles. 75% of secondary school children bicycle to school. The Dutch educate their children to travel by bike with a traffic certificate program, which most kids complete by age 12. This is part of the planning process, to instill confidence. There is a public expectation that kids will be cycling. The urban planners work with the traffic department and local communities to ensure that the roads, paths, and trails are safe for bikes. This is very similar to the travel culture that I experienced in Japan–bikes and walking are thought through and planned as completely as other modes such as trains, buses, and cars.

The results are pretty incredible. By no means perfect, but they go a long way towards a happy, healthier and more sustainable society. We have all the seeds in America we need for this. Our Safe Routes to Schools programming started as a safe streets movement in a country nearby the Netherlands, Denmark. We have many assets we can leverage including wide streets, space and our hallmark of ingenuity guided by science and a high regard for all people. Our Constitution seeks to form “a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. Bicycling aids with all of these things, the American way.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we celebrate cycling, I like to remember how it brings together the highest aspirations for our healthiest possible future. It is about justice, equity, inclusion, freedom, equality, and building strong and responsible communities. We can tell our young cyclists when they push those pedals the possibilities are unlimited. You very well could end up on top of the world.

BERG EN TERBLIJT, NETHERLANDS – APRIL 15: Arrival / Chantal Blaak of The Netherlands and Team Boels Dolmans Cyclingteam / Celebration / Lucinda Brand of The Netherlands and Team Sunweb Women / during the 5th Amstel Gold Race 2018 a 116,9km women’s race from Maastricht to Berg En Terblijt on April 15, 2018 in Berg En Terblijt, Netherlands. (Photo by Dan Istitene/Getty Images)

Photo Credits, and References:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/races/amstel-gold-race-women-2018/results/
http://www.tdwsport.com
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2016/may/18/cris-toala-olivares-netherlands-tulip-fields
http://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/racing/world-champion-chantal-blaak-wins-2018-amstel-gold-race-376513

Santana Adventures

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands

Cycling and walking to get our bearings

3 Replies

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health–and create profitable diseases and dependences–by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. –Wendell Berry, “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture”, 1977, Sierra Club Books

If I can bicycle there, then I can live there. This was the mantra I came up with after my visit to Japan last year. It was my sixth time in Japan, but the first time I bicycled. What a difference it makes! I felt at home on my bicycle. Cycling has been an essential way for me to get my bearings in places since I took it up in earnest over twenty years ago. But feeling at home in Japan was different since it had felt so foreign. Cycling is an activity that creates connections.

Wes Jackson of the Land Institute said Wendell Berry’s book on culture and agriculture “launched the modern movement for sustainable agriculture”. The cycling and walking movements today are doing the same thing for sustainable transportation. There is tremendous enthusiasm in the cycling and walking communities. We need to support that by setting up our cities and villages, and the roads connecting them together, to encourage walking and cycling. This is what I call structural encouragement.

Structural encouragement means that we design for those travel modes. It would naturally occur to people that we are not only welcome to bicycle and walk, but it is part of the shared experience of living in the places we make our homes. The infrastructure we design connects people to our own capacity and powers for creating movement. It makes a woven world.

Human movement is the most fundamental form of human action. That is why we call “movements”–such as civil rights, women’s marches, conservation efforts–movements. When we march together, it symbolized the power of collective community action. We let our legs do the talking. It is the language that preceded language. An invisible thread connecting us.

Cycling and walking are not only a ways of moving forward, they are ways of living in place. They allow us to tune in more to what is going on with our bodies, and the places we live in. It is a way of paying attention. Designing transportation systems that facilitate human powered transportation (clean, renewable, healthy, sustainable, fun human movement!) is a direct solution that creates benefits now, and future dividends. It’s a transformative economic idea, one worth investing in. Check out the nonprofit I founded to learn more how we can accomplish this change together and how you can help. https://bikeinitiative.org

Man is made of the same atoms the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Worship” from the “Conduct of Life”.

Blog posts on my Japan trip 2017:

https://bikeyogiblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/cycling-japan-lights-my-fire/
https://bikeyogiblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/travels-in-japan/

Doing what we love matters

Leave a reply

When you have a better sense of the way the environment flows through your own body, you’re liable to work harder at taking care of the environment. –Richard Nelson, “The Way of the Hunter”

Cycling is a creative act. Everyday when we practice what we love, we weave together a sense of our own health and the environment we draw our life from. In this way culture emerges.

The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water. —Akira Kurosawa, “Dreams”

My cycling journey took off 21 years ago in Reno, Nevada when I sold my car and bought a bicycle. I rode out of necessity to work and to live–errands, chores, and exercise. Reno offered clean air (for the most part), fresh mountain water, and enough places to ride to help me get started. The sense of renewal, authenticity and simplicity cycling brings to my life is special.

The best predictor of whether we are happy or not is our social relationships. –Meik Wiking, “The Little Book of Hygge”

I was (and still am) amazed at the intimacy cycling creates, both with people and place. Somehow cycling expands our in-group, we just feel more humane. I think it has something to do with being in touch with our vulnerability, which is at the core of our human state. Accepting this helps us build intimacy with all of our neighbors and changes our expectations regarding the terms we put on nature. We recognize and respect limits, experiencing ecstasy from ordinary things, like being outside for sunrise and sunset, easily swayed by each season’s grace.

And so it goes, and cyclists know! No matter how you get started cycling, the physical habit immediately delivers positive spiritual experiences–freedom, adventure, the power of will and action. Bicycling is emancipation in action. Feel unbounded freedom every day, real freedom within life’s constraints. Everyone who has experienced it can’t help but wish all could experience the freedom of cycling personally. Our wisest policies would encourage as much cycling as possible to help people flourish. Cycling increases confidence and self knowledge, improves daily social relations and decreases disparities, nurtures health, and fosters the invention of culture that both expresses and educates us, affirming care, love and co-creation.

The bicycle is America’s vehicle

Leave a reply

“…we need to weave physical activity back into our culture.” –Daniel Bornstein, in USA Today, Physically fit recruits for Army are hard to find.

The bicycle has been around for a while, but we are only beginning to express our spirit through its forms. By adopting a national strategy promoting cycling, we can address challenges we are facing while fulfilling more of our nation’s promise. The bicycle pulls so many issues together–public road safety, healthy kids, a fit nation, building sustainable cities, safeguarding beautiful landscapes–and by practicing cycling, we make progress on all issues. Like Andrew York displays through this piece on classical guitar called “Moontan”, there is still much music to be made in America on classic forms we inherited, like the guitar and bicycle.

Cycling is a way for people to participate in building a healthy nation. Cycling literally builds a stronger, healthier America. The US Military has an endurance sports program to support amateur athletes, endurance sports education and activities for current, retired, and veteran members of the United States Uniformed Services, including a cycling program. But anybody can contribute to the nation’s health and strength by cycling and exercising in your own way.

Exercise is medicine. It is affordable, proactive care! I’m not just saying that, the American Medical Association and American College of Sports Medicine created The Exercise is Medicine Initiative in 2007. Research is revealing more and more about the powerful ways exercise prevents most major diseases in our society. Cycling lots helps us provide more of our own healthcare, and plus we get the benefits of interacting with our communities in healthy ways.

When I see people cycling in Albuquerque, It occurs to me they are bringing positive change. Just like we generate our own wind by cycling, we shed a new light on our community. We see more of the process of restoration happening at home. We become part of that process by applying our own energies and giving our attention. Cycling attracts community involvement.

I think the imagery of cycling as unifying is powerful. Partly because it creates wholeness in practice. Here you have the freedom and beauty of human movement mated with a world-changing technology, the wheel, that allows us to apply our own energy to make beautiful things happen. Even more beautiful because cycling is practical! It expresses who we are.

References–

Check out Wikipedia’s definition of a bicycle — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle

Here’s the USA Today link to the article the leading quote is from. The article frames physical fitness as a national security issue. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/01/10/physically-fit-recruits-army-hard-find-especially-these-states/1016030001/

Check out US Military’s Endurance Sports program for current, retired, and veteran members of the United States Uniformed Services. Awesome! http://usmes.org

Photos in this post are from my bike rides in Albuquerque, except for the flower arrangement. Thank you Sansai Studios for that photo! https://sansai.photoshelter.com/index

More on the Exercise is Medicine Initiative here. http://exerciseismedicine.org

The beautiful necessity of cycling

Leave a reply

…human inventions are magical in that they give life to what heretofore had no existence. Our good working ideas have the capacity to direct our lives in a manner indistinguishable from any other reality. —Cormac McCarthy, “Cormac McCarthy Returns to the Kekulé Problem” in Nautilus

The invention of cycling is a remarkable achievement. Along with walking, cycling epitomizes sustainable transportation. Human beings are designed to move under our own power. Walking is the most basic transportation. A bicycle is the most basic vehicle. By designing our cities and streets around the concept of serving walking and cycling well, we improve all types of human mobility. It is the long-term solution to our current transportation challenges.

This song by Rush, Subdivisions, reminds me of the world I grew up in. It sometimes felt alien, partitioned, and anonymous spending so much time in automobiles. A new degree of culture is emerging that commands our respect for the inalienable freedoms of human movement. The culture that embraces an array of transportation opportunities dramatically improves our travel safety, and revs up our lives and economy. Multimodal transportation–serving all travel modes–is the new helm. This framework brings health, sustainability, and builds community. It’s a saner world, one where we are not incessantly rushing, but spending time doing things that truly bring us joy, and listening more to what our bodies have to tell us.

An article in The Guardian today mentions “vehicles are now America’s biggest CO2 source”. It discusses reducing emissions and improving efficiency, but not increasing walking and cycling. It’s not an either/or proposition, it is about viewing walking and cycling as priorities, absolute necessities, basic public goods. Without serving those choices, we are left with a conundrum. We’ve learned structuring cities and streets around cars reduces choices. Walking and cycling make healthier, happier people, and better places. They’re good choices. Everyone yearns for health, happiness and freedom. Elevating the idea that streets are for people makes many transportation problems disappear, and creates a system that matches our human potential.

We need to get more people experiencing cycling to open minds. It is a key technology for sustainable development. Cycling aligns with the beautiful necessity of our human nature. We are an animal designed to move with our legs. The bicycle unites that reality with an ingenious tool. Cycling is magical, like having wings or discovering new superpowers. It changes the way we experience and perceive the world. Cycling joins the power of wheeled locomotion with the sensitivities and keen pleasures of being human. By designing our streets to serve walking and cycling first, we’ll give rise to a new form of built-environment that connects us through our activities and makes our spirits soar higher. Once we obey the concept of designing cities for wellness, our culture can expand in new directions, giving our dreams real leg power.

Akemashite omedetō gozaimasu

明けましておめでとうございます

Happy New Year!

Finding peace on the bike

Leave a reply

Everyday when I get on my bike I learn something new about the transformative powers of cycling. Creative thoughts flow. If I’m angry or hurting, somehow cycling helps me work through those feelings, and turn that energy to the positive. Cycling is constructive. Cycling and sport in general helps us focus our energies, overcome fear and use our life for the good.

When I watched a story on New Mexico’s opioid crisis, it made me think of how cycling can change our course. Then my friend sent a link to a video of Juanjo Mendez’s story. Juanjo was injured in a motorbike crash, and felt depressed afterwards. But cycling brought him back.

Dr. Leslie Hayes in Rio Arriba County suggests the real solution to drugs is to get meaningful things in peoples’ lives. We are not going to arrest or medically treat our way out of the opioid crisis. We need love. Stories like Juanjo Mendez’s are proof cycling adds meaning and hope.

Cycling helps us cope with pain and trauma. If addiction is an effort to avoid pain, as Dr. Gina Perez-Baron suggests, cycling and sport in general may be a constructive outlet to deal with our hurts in a healthier way, even focusing our energy to propel us towards our goals in sport and life. To get super proactive building healthier lives, we can promote cycling and healthy sport.

Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than government in breaking down racial barriers. —Nelson Mandela

References:
“New Mexico deploys best practices to avoid the worst outcomes in the opioid crisis”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/new-mexico-deploys-best-practices-avoid-worst-outcomes-opioid-crisis
Photos are from Saturday’s ride https://www.strava.com/activities/1251054152

Bike culture

Leave a reply

The thing you learn from being a cyclist is you don’t give up, you keep fighting and it’s funny how that transitions over into other things in life. John Tomac, rancher and mountain biker

From the simple form of the bicycle springs a variety of culture. Cycling, like music, fosters vital expression of the human spirit. It allows us to move abreast with our days, creates meaning and helps us make sense of our lives. The experience of cycling brings us together with place through the application of our skills with an elegant, purposeful, and artful technology. We can trace all the variety in cycling back to this original experience, the exquisite freedom and sensations of cycling reverberating contagiously deep in the inner oceans of our unconscious.

A bike ride always feels worthwhile. Somehow it unlocks our perceptions and gives wings to the art of becoming. It’s a creative act, bringing us into a powerful state of joyful relations.

The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”

Cycling puts our ambitions in check with our practical abilities. There is no shame in living cycling. It’s a way of reading the land, celebrating with nature. In a world of pop culture and groupthink, cycling is a way of living directly. An unmediated way of caring for yourself.

All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain…I see the same law working in nature for conservation and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure of right Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance”

Cycling is really something wonderful to celebrate! It’s a discipline that is dictated by our nature and follows truth. The truth is our body’s health is integral to our mind and wellbeing, and we must take care of it. By developing cycling skills, we are enacting an understanding of the value of our health, and practicing responsibility to all life. Cycling is a beautiful gift, a part of our heritage. Cycling extends our powers and lives in a joyful way. The variety cycling is generating is amazing. John Tomac’s example in the video below shows how cycling is part of the fabric of a larger American culture, something that is fixing itself in the soil for good. We are seeing the love of cycling connecting vital elements of sustainable culture around the globe. Cycling runs deep, through our legs, hearts, and lungs, through our hard work, through generations across time. It’s simple really, oxygenated blood pumping through our bodies is good for us. And rolling on wheels with our family, friends and whole communities is unabashed fun!

American mountain biking is fun-based and grassroots, and it’s always been that way. —J. Tomac

Coryn Rivera, the new American bike racer

Leave a reply

I feel free and comfortable when I’m on my bike. –Coryn Rivera, from Team Sunweb

A 24 year old from Tustin, California, Coryn Rivera became the first American to win the Tour of Flanders this year. Her first ride was at age 8 on the back of her parent’s tandem bike. She started cycling on her own at age 9, but didn’t get much experience riding on the road until she got her driver’s learning permit at age 15. Turning Pro at age 16, she’s won 71 US National Championships. That’s not a typo! And now she is performing at the world’s highest level. Coryn also won the RideLondon Classic this year with her phenomenal sprinting skills. Check out her Road Bike Training Tips on Liv Cycling. What an amazing journey. What a cool sport.