I rode the National 24-hour Time Trial Championships a couple of weeks back. A few days beforehand, I overheard someone else who has ridden the event talking about it to a mutual friend at another race. “But isn’t it just awful?” the mutual friend asked. “I mean, apart from anything else it must be just incredibly boring.”
“No, no,” said the rider. “It’s kind of wonderful. You go into a sort of trance. There’s something spiritual about it.”
There’s something spiritual about it.” This feeds into a fear I have, which is that at a really basic level I’m doing cycling wrong. While someone else is riding 500 miles non-stop in a blissed out state of transcendence, I’m plodding along trying to entertain myself by counting up all the bits of me that hurt, putting them in rank order of agony, and then working out which bits of me that don’t yet hurt are about to start. (Incidentally, you can only have so many painful body parts. If you have a sore back, sore neck, sore backside and sore feet and then you get a sore knee, your back will get better. This will not actually help in any systematic sense.)
To try to produce a bit of entertainment on a long ride, I usually set my computer up in kilometres, de-select the average speed function and then use the raw distance and time to calculate (and convert) my average speed in miles per hour, to a minimum of three significant figures. Sometimes I do it the other way round. Or I can convert it into different units altogether – I once got as far as furlongs-per-fortnight. It’s something to do.
I’ve had the trance-like experience while running. There’s something nice about realising you can’t remember the last couple of miles because you’ve been so relaxed. But the only time I managed something remotely similar on a bike was a few winters ago on a long ride when I suddenly didn’t know where I was. I knew who I was and what I was doing (long boring ride, obviously), but I’d no idea where exactly this featureless bit of back road was. I knew it was in the UK somewhere, but beyond that for a few moments I had no idea where. This experience was not blissful in the slightest. It felt more like a stroke.
I think the problem is that riding, especially on the road, has too many hazards. You have to concentrate and concentration is the enemy of Zen. “Bliss” and “Moron in a Volvo overtaking straight towards you with his hand on the horn” are states of being that pull hard in opposite directions.
I have asked around. I asked Christoph Strasser, who’s won both the Race Across America and the Transcontinental Race, what he thinks about when he’s riding 3,000km at one stretch. “I am very lucky,” he said. “I seem to be able to think about nothing for many days. It’s like I can turn my brain off.” He seemed puzzled that I couldn’t think about nothing as well.
Another ultra rider said she liked to think about the scale of what she was doing, how far she had ridden, how far she still had to ride, and how amazing it was going to feel when she did it. That sounds, if anything, even more glorious than a trance.
Meanwhile, I’d be thinking, “How does that bottom bracket make so much noise when there is so little torque going through it? Does it have some sort of amplifier?”
Honestly, there are days when I worry that the closest I’ll ever come to a spiritual experience in a very long ride will be the gin and tonic someone bought me after a 250km ride in Mallorca.
Although, to be fair, it was pretty good.
