Why We Ride…
We all read articles about how we evolve as bicycle riders, what we enjoy about riding and what we experience when we’re out on the road. This is a recent Substack post from Jim Stein, MD who usually writes about cardiology related subjects. This time he chose to write about how he has, in his words, optimized the ride experience, albeit after a fair amount of keen observations and adjustments. I thought you might find in interesting and insightful.
What I Finally Optimized on My Bike Ride
James Stein, MD
Like most people, I learned to ride a bike when I was a child, but my relationship to it always was practical: finding friends to play with and getting from one place to another. As will be a surprise to no one that knows me and my natural (lack of) balance, I never jumped curbs, popped wheelies, or did other tricks, so I never developed the instinctive handling skills or confidence that seemed to come naturally to other kids. That part never really changed. Even now, 23 years after becoming an avid road cyclist, I can’t ride no-hands, and part of me feels like I am putting on a seatbelt when I clip in.
My first ten-speed was a blue Sebring Viscount, advertised as being made from “aerospace” material. What I remember most is how light it was.
I started biking again in 2001. A friend and I started riding on Sunday mornings just to talk. He showed up on a black steel bike that I thought was made out of iron and looked like it might survive a collision with a tank. I showed up with a Trek hybrid that reflected my usual instincts, with a bell, a giant bright headlight, handlebar extenders with rearview mirrors that could turn into mountain bike handle extensions, and a hard-wired cycle computer that told me not just how fast I was going, but how light or dark it was, my altitude, and the road temperature. Over time the rides got longer. My seat went up. The handlebars rotated forward. The kickstand quietly disappeared. I started paying attention to distance and speed and the bike morphed from being something I used to get somewhere to something I was trying to improve.
Then one day I fell in love. I was riding alone just after sunrise on a Sunday morning, and I went down Old Sauk Pass for the first time ever, into a valley. There was no traffic, no conversation, no devices asking for anything. Just the wind, the gorgeous sun shining through moist leaves, and the soundtrack of red-winged blackbirds, cardinals, and robins, interspersed with blue jays, black-capped chickadees, and mourning doves taking off - as well as goldfinches, red-tailed hawks, and turkey vultures flying. I fell in love with that feeling in that moment, though I didn’t realize I was trying to recreate it for the next 20+ years.
I ultimately bought my first road bike in 2003 and I loved it immediately. It was a titanium Litespeed Firenze, a much better bike than its rider. I also was a little afraid of it. The tires looked impossibly thin and jumped forward with the slightest pedal stroke. Clipping in made no sense to me. I practiced on my neighborhood circle and fell often enough that neighborhood kids would stop, watch, and laugh, but I eventually learned. I bought multicolored cycling jerseys and a Livestrong yellow band and read Lance Armstrong’s book, “It’s Not About The Bike.” I looked the part and loved cycling.
But then I started doing what I tend to do: I added things and started optimizing. A wireless Bluetooth cycle computer to monitor not just speed and distance, but also cadence and my heart rate (using a chest strap). Then a newer and better version of it. A mirror on the handlebars, which later migrated to my glasses. Brighter lights. An extra chainring for climbing hills. I started paying attention to grams, the weight of components, the weight of my helmet, and where the bottle sat on the frame. All of it seemed to matter at the time and had a rationale, as well as the expectation that all of it should work, all of the time.
When it did, it was satisfying. When it did not, it was hard to ignore. I would stop mid-ride to reconnect sensors, adjust things, try to get everything to sync the way it was supposed to work. There were times I was more focused on whether my heart rate signal had dropped than on the road in front of me.
One Sunday morning, riding through the UW-Arboretum with a friend, I stopped to do exactly that. “I can’t get my heart rate or speed to work,” I said. After stopping the third time, he looked at me and said, “I guess you’re not bicycling then. Whatever will you do?” It was a throwaway line, but it landed. At some point, I had replaced the ride with the numbers.
At some point, I had replaced the ride with the numbers.
The next decade made the question of safety more real. My wife died suddenly, and with that came a fear of being out of contact or unavailable. A friend had a concussion, not on a bike, but it changed how we thought about risk. We chose different routes and joined an industry geared towards us with better helmets, more and brighter lights, and then another layer of connectivity, including smartwatches with notifications, helmets with crash detectors that notified your friends, and rear-facing cameras. What I gradually noticed was that the long conversations I relished when cycling with friends increasingly became interrupted by notifications, the same interruptions that exist everywhere else, now were appearing on rides that used to be one of the few places they did not.
The barrage of advertising and messaging charged on: “Return home safely.” “Increase awareness.” “Stay in control.” Well, safety is my love language, so they got my attention. I remember being told, “Jim, you need a rear-facing camera, it’s amazing for safety.” But I did not understand it. My primary concern is not getting hit by a car and if I did (G-d forbid) it’s surviving with my brain intact, not whether I have them on video. “But Jim, drivers behave differently because they are being recorded - it’s safer.” Me: “That assumes they know they are being recorded, which I don’t think they can tell at 55 mph, especially if you think they don’t notice you.”
Last summer came radar: “Jim, it’s amazing. You can see cars behind you from 150 meters away.” And I found myself asking, what exactly am I going to do differently because I know there is a car 492 feet behind me, even if it is accelerating? Radar didn’t seem to affect my limited options of (1) waving my hands to be more visible, (2) staying on the right side of the road where I cycled anyway, and (3) bailing off the road. I like my rearview mirror that is attached to my sunglasses, so much so that it is second nature to use. But radar highlighted something larger for me: the cumulative effect of gadgets on attention, and not just on the road ahead. Like fancy cycling computers that included text messaging and GPS routing, they increasingly pulled riders toward electronics and troubleshooting rather than the ride itself.
“I am not sure if my radar is working.”
“Can you ride behind me so I can see if it picks you up or just the cars?”
“Car back! Do you see it? Oh, it turned off.”
At the same time, I found myself moving the other way. Not as a statement, but in service of that amazing moment 23 years ago when I descended down Old Sauk Pass, listening to the wind and the birds, fully absorbed in the moment I was living in. I never got a smart bike computer or radar. I even took the cadence magnet off my crank and kept my phone safely away in my back pocket in silent mode. I kept the blinking lights in the front and back, especially since there is some (weak) evidence to support the use of biovisibility measures. I still wear a heart rate monitor, but only when I am heart rate training (like now, since I am recovering from stacked illnesses).
Last Sunday morning, I rode alone. It was early, and the birding soundtrack was back. I even saw a turkey, some does, and a killdeer on the side of the road, as well as two sandhill cranes that recently came back to Wisconsin for spring breeding and nesting. When I got home, I had nine missed messages, but the world went on. I also had ridden faster than the week before, though I only learned that later. I felt so relaxed and realized that I finally had optimized my cycling, not by adding more inputs, but by removing many of them. I was riding faster, my fitness was improving, and yet the experience itself had become simpler and calmer.
We live in an attention economy, a world increasingly built around connectivity, metrics, and optimization. Sometimes those things genuinely are useful. But often they slowly displace the experience they were meant to support. The key questions are “optimized for who” and “optimized for what.”
For me, cycling is about fitness, camaraderie, and being outside in the bright light, the crisp air, and the sounds around me. If I want metrics and connectivity, I can stay indoors on Zwift. But out on the road, I rediscovered something increasingly rare: the ability to pay attention.
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