Zen and the Art of Bike Riding

I just returned, sore lady parts and all, from a 2-day, 136-mile bike trip out and back to the coast. What I love about long-distance bike riding is not what you’d think. I don’t love it because of the physical challenge, the way it works all the big muscles, the great cardio. I don’t love it because it takes me outside, for hours and hours, into the glory that is Oregon. Well, of course I love it for all that. But that’s not the big reason.

The big reason is how obvious and no-nonsense life lessons are when you’re out there on a bike for hours and hours. The lessons are delivered, in your face. No mushy aphorisms-to-live-by, no bumpersticker-like words of inspiration. Just immediate, lived experience.

Here’s what I mean: One minute you’re tooling down this back road and there’s no traffic and the wind is at your back and the air is sweet with new mown hay. On either side of the road, the foxglove and larkspur are in full bloom. And your companion (who happens to be your wonderful, amazing middle son Zane) calls your attention to a red-winged blackbird. And the two of you say, almost in unison, “It doesn’t get better than this.”

Five minutes, maybe more like 3 minutes later, the wind picks up and shifts and is hammering your face and all of a sudden there’s nasty gravel all over the shoulder and you run over the decaying but still redolent carcass of a skunk. And you think: Shit. What just happened? This is how quickly life changes. And you realize: Just because it truly sucks right now doesn’t mean it will suck five minutes from now. And you think: Life turns on a dime. And isn’t that kind of grand.

You can be philosophical – okay, you have to be philosophical – when you are powering up a seemingly interminable 7 percent grade or when the late afternoon sun is scorching your back as you sweat through the final 15 to home. This is when Zane and I curse loudly, pick the bugs from our teeth and yell to each other, remind each other: “It’s all good miles.” The downhill-sweet-hay miles and the uphill-log-trucks-on-your ass miles, the skunk miles, the watching-a-great-blue-heron-dive-for-a-fish miles. It’s all good miles.

Get it?

I’m beginning to.