The View from my Bicycle [COLUMN]

The world slows down on a bicycle. Sometimes to a crawl. Sometimes to a virtual stop. But even on a bicycle, the view is a sweeping one. Sometimes it blurs at the edges. Sometimes it is a caterpillar of color, a cycoplede inching, stretching, sliding along roadways, flashing color and the spoke song to grasses and mountainsides it passes through. But if you're from the city, no matter how fast you're capable of riding, the world slows down.

It takes time to throw off all the detritus. And suffice it to say, the layer of grime we carry with us comes to us by way of NEWS. Sometimes it may seem as if we need the news from moment to moment. Watching the stock markets of late, the world seems to turn on a dime in the time it takes to visit the lavatory. Yet every time I have been away from phones and the internet and tv - and other mediums - I've arrived back to the same clamour. The same noisy ruckus that claims to be so important. Is it?

When the world slows down you notice, first and foremost, two things. You notice yourself, in the world. Where are you? How are you? And then another thought that sneaks up on you - should you be here, doing what you're doing? And could you be doing what you're doing a little differently. To summarise both those questions in a single word - you begin to ponder why.
It's a good occasional tester of reality. Because it offers us an opportunity to reshape ourselves, reshape our reality, and make both up as we go along. Reality, after all, is merely a certain point of view. There is a certain amount of suffering (or celebration) associated with a perception of reality that is out of whack (or true to form). A steep climb on a bicycle is a very good tester of our ability to match our perceptions of ourselves with the perceptions of the steep - and the steepness - of the challenges we face.

The cycle to Durban took me just under 21 hours of riding time (that's an average of just under 5 hours of pedalling each day - not much in a sense, a morning's work). We climbed over 5.6 vertical kilometres (see Griffin hill profile - brown line - above), and expended over 17 000 calories. We produced zero emissions (excluding a few farts), and consumed copious amounts of water, fruit and energy bars. Convert that brew into petrol and it might fill one or two water bottles. How far do you think your car would get you on two litres of petrol? [I admit it is a very unscientific study - for a more precise measure find out how many 'calories' are contained in a litre of petrol. I am willing to wager it is a fantastic endowment.*]

The second thing you notice (as you move away from noticing yourself to seeing yourself in context) are the people and the landscape that imbues your life with meaning and texture. The great thing about cycling is it naturally stimulates instantaneous co-operation.

I have been on cycling tours before. Several other tours involved raising money for the church, and so in the past I have blamed God for the good naturedness of my cycling companions. On this trip - which was for a children's charity - I had no such luxury. I'm forced to concede that cycling brings out the best in people. It's either that, or it simply attracts a certain sort of person to the sport.

I have commented before to a friend of mine that when you attend these cycling expos before big events, you notice how slim and healthy everyone looks. This is definitely a wonderful breed of people who - I think - see beyond the bubbles and insulation that is the veneer of a society used to motoring almost everywhere.

What is staggering for me is the richness involved in sweating and struggling with so many companions over so many days, literally feeling the sculpture of the country from here (Johannesburg) to the sea - and then getting into an aeroplane and being back where we started in 1 hour.
Flying has made life ridiculously easy. And is flying pleasant? Apart from the stress of airports (the parking, the queuing, the ticket lottery) you sit in a coffin-like missile, doors close, there is one announcement, then you get out, hundreds of kilometres somewhere else and start queueing again. You see a faint patchwork of the outdoors drifting under veils of smoke.

Then, you get into your car, and you drive (in my case) about a third of the distance of that upcoming cycle race, 94.7, much of it on the actual race route, and you're home in 20 minutes. When you compare the 4 days of toil to the absolute ease of getting back to your life (1 hour and 20 minutes of flying and driving to the specific destination - excluding transfers) you start to realise what a luxury our energy endowments are today. How quickly we go back to all the old habits. Computers go on, televisions blink on, cellphones grow busy and what happens to us? We switch off. How long until we switch on again?

You also realise that these luxuries I've mentioned harm us not so much in the behaviour they encourage, but in the behaviour they prevent (us talking to each other, feeling the sunshine, radiating confidence). Our gadgets and cushions immunise us to some extent from putting our skins in the wind, the mists, on the roads and in the rays of sun. There is no glass bubble separating cyclists on a road - in contrast they are an organism that are constantly processing information, sharing, learning, growing more efficient and more insightful. A living, breathing, organic thing.

Now, as it happened, when I turned down the last street on my way home, skin still warm from the sun, muscles carved with powerful new muscle memories, lots of new names and faces added to the database, the song by Sting, Fragile, started playing in the car on 94.7.

If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
Drying in the colour of the evening sun
Tomorrows rain will wash the stains away
But something in our minds will always stay

We are the world. We need to slow down - especially now - because of how fragile we are. Train more (if need be, work less). A bicycle remains the perfect anti-dote, a vaccine for all that ails our world. Or a swimming pool, or a pair of running shoes. By exploring our fragilities, we grow stronger and more resilient, but also - I feel - more compassionate, and more in tune with both ourselves the context, the connection we have with our environment and with those we share it with.

Given the pace of change in the world right now, we need to maintain the humility of the bicycle but retain all the power, community and adaptation that comes with the bicycling lifestyle. This means not getting caught up in the hubris of the news, and routines, and rusharound habits, or worst of all the arrogance and mythology of the invulnerable corporate mogul and all the accoutrements. There is a different truth. The view from my bicycle is that the truth that matters is the one that plugs you back into the world, connecting you to yourself and those that surround you in the world. And to find that truth all you have to do is slow down to your bicycle's pace.

*1 litre of oil contains about 38MJ or 10.5kWh. One man-day = about 2.9kWh


Note: I will be loading additional photography each day this week, so watch this space.