James Hibbard - The Art of Cycling

James Hibbard

An exceptional read.Paul Kimmage, author of Rough Ride

The Art of Cycling

Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

To my son, Graeme, with love beyond measure.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

F rom the first time I rode my neighbors yellow Schwinn Varsity down the street, I was determined to become a cyclist. My hands deep in the curve of the handlebars, every pedal stroke transformed into speed as the road silently retreated beneath the narrow tires of the bicycle. Like most children, Id ridden bicycles before, but with their flat bars and knobby tires they had always seemed clunky and utilitarian. This bike was different so fast that it felt tantalizingly close to the freedom of flying and riding it was perhaps the most beautiful sensation Id ever experienced.

I started racing the summer after that fateful ride on the Schwinn, just before my thirteenth birthday. Progressing quickly through the junior ranks, I moved to the U.S. Olympic Training Center while still a teenager trading proms and homecoming for an insular world of Eastern Bloc coaches, travel, and physical pain. Turning professional with a top-ranked American team, I became just good enough to realize first-hand that my cycling heroes of the late 1990s were hiding the secret of their doping. By the time I stopped racing in my mid-twenties, Id decided that the sport Id once loved beyond reason was rotten to the core comprised of people who espoused the virtues of fair play and hard work all the while doing and putting into their body whatever was necessary to win.

Now far removed from the younger version of myself who had pined after the external validation of winning, I began to ride again after not touching a bicycle for nearly a decade discovering with each successive ride that the positive aspects of the sport had come to eclipse the toxicity of the doping era. Cycling has since regained a different sort of luster harder won and more complex. With the perspective afforded by the passage of time, Im able to see not just its shortcomings, but also the innumerable moments of beauty and insight which, regardless of winning or losing, came from my attempt to do something as well as I possibly could.

Every choice carries with it the sentimental shadow of everything else that might have been and I still remain uncertain about the ways in which the sport of cycling was invaluable to shaping who I am, how it deformed me, and who I might have become had I not pursued it as intensely as I did. My only response is that on some level, caring deeply about anything eventually leads to the great pain of loss be that the loss of your sport, or the loss of self which results from becoming so identified with something that other aspects of your personality which might have flourished, wither on the vine.

Slowly, Ive come to regard cycling as not simply pleasant, but even redemptive, and can reflect on how riding has always been able to return me to the realm of the embodied and physical if only temporarily, releasing me from the egoistic striving of what Buddhism aptly terms the small self.

As I write this, Ive just returned from a ride. Still fresh in my mind is the feeling of my bike swaying beneath me as I climbed the same winding mountain roads I trained on when I was a racer. My breathing is more labored than it used to be, and I consciously no longer concern myself with how far or fast Ive ridden. I simply try to notice the sensations; the feeling of the thick morning fog passing over my skin; the hum of my tires as they roll over the chipseal road, and the slight burning in my legs as I muscle my way over the last meters of a steep climb my sensitivity to the innumerable inputs from my bike and body having been honed by tens of thousands of hours of training. Like a beach at low tide, words and ideas recede, and suddenly everything seems possible again.

In the pages that follow, my purpose is to address all of the little things all the aspects of the sport which at first appear superficial and banal. In dealing with the surface of things however, my aim is not to obsess endlessly over them, but rather to understand them sufficiently so that they can become so natural, so engrained in the subconscious, that they fall away so that youre no longer merely pedaling a bicycle, but doing something far more interesting, significant, and meaningful: remembering, with every pedal stroke and heartbeat, that you truly exist.

Upon learning that I both studied philosophy and used to be a professional cyclist, people often asked me what I thought about during the many hours I spent training alone. Usually, Id say something about how time passed quickly, or how I occupied my mind by looking at the power meter on my handlebars. While none of these answers was untrue per se, the most compelling even beautiful aspect of cycling is that when riding Im able to think about very little. Through philosophy Id sought answers to lifes mysteries to ultimate questions of life, death, and meaning, but in Descartes and Nietzsche, Husserl and de Beauvoir, Id only encountered its limits. Ultimate things could be approached from every direction, but like trying to learn the floor plan of a house in total darkness, there seemed no way to think or speak rationally about those things I cared about the most.

Cycling forced me to reframe the problem itself. In many ways the demands and challenges of being a cyclist were the antitheses of those I found in philosophy. With the solitude afforded by the bike, the questions remained, but I was changed. My once all-consuming desire to understand and bring words to all things evaporated rationality itself seeming to grow silent as I pedaled. Cycling provided an escape hatch from my own head and the bicycle grew to be sacrosanct. Visceral and immediate, riding drew me back to the physical world: the play of the sunlight as it filtered through the leaves of a tree onto the surface of the dark asphalt or how the cork tape on my bicycles handlebars felt underneath my hands pedal, breath, pedal, breath, pedal, over and over again in an unremitting pattern of repetition which even among the cerebral and strong-willed, forces your higher-order faculties to capitulate.

Like so many others, in my attempts to outthink and somehow get ahead of lifes uncertainties, I have the habit of endlessly assessing this or that idea, plan, or concept. As if I were contesting a never-ending chess match, hypothetical scenarios feverishly unfurl until my own abstractions come to eclipse all thats proximate and near. The real threat is that just often enough, this sort of thinking works or at least it serves its ostensible purpose and increasingly life came to feel like little more than a series of events to be dissected by the scalpel of logic. Coupled with the distracting allure of the internet at our fingertips, its tempting to be induced to live much of your life in a trance-like state, seduced by the short-term dopamine victories provided by the consumption of easily digested bits of information. As a result of both rational thought and electronic distraction, the blooming and buzzing confusion of life is tamed and held in abeyance, but with this power (and its material benefits) comes a gnawing detachment a feeling that a basic element of what it is to be alive has been lost.