Cycling advocacy is surfing a rising tide of passion. Every time a car driver runs over a cyclist, the war is re-stoked with vigor. Every time a cyclist escapes a stalled parade of cars, motorists scream a violence of frustration to the freedoms their enemy seems to so nonchalantly enjoy. They complain, they shout and they scream their frustrations through horn tooting bellows and the therapeutic vitriol of prime time talk-back radio.

But it’s a strange kind of war. I am convinced there’s more than a modicum of envy driving the reactions we cyclists seem fated to endure whenever we confront these self-abusing slaves of the motorcar. Read the vitriol. Read into the rage. Dig and you will find, time after time, expressions of frustration over perceived airs of insufferable righteousness we cyclists seem to so consistently convey. We are, apparently, ruthlessly arrogant about what must surely be pretensions to fitness, mobility and ecological sensibility. We are senseless, apparently, to the sober responsibilities of conformity to this contemporary socially constructed, economically rationalised age. We are the wild irresponsible children wielding spanners to their well ordered works. Why can’t we suffer like they do?

But there’s much more to the passions that fire my own particular advocacy of cycling and ‘cycling mind’ (which I’ve officially proclaimed to be the cultural phenomenon of ‘bicyclism’), than the thrills of rebellion. This is a life defining passion; but I’m not just in it to reduce my personal carbon load.

Cycling has indeed become a statement of practical action in relation to doing the ‘right environmental thing’. Riding a bike’s not some kind of a statement of insincere intent (like ‘I donate to good environmental causes’ … and switch my lights off, and proudly proclaim the energy star rating of my ‘fridge). No, cycling is direct action; just like chaining yourself to a tree to stop the forest-leveling bulldozers from moving in – or joining Paul Watson’s Sea Shepherd anti-whaling crusade. Cycling is real. Cycling is proactive. Cycling is putting the rhetoric to work.

But there’s more to it than that.

Cycling keeps the biological clock tracked to a slower, more measured pace. Serious cycling keeps us fitter for longer (until we get run over by a car…). Cycling is proactive, holistic medicine without pills, potions and the whackier rituals of the incense chanting plasti-zen, off-the-shelf health food alternative consumerist crowd. Cycling’s the real deal of hard-earned wellness of body and mind. Rewards are gained in direct proportion to physical effort; and enduring life-embedded persistence. One ride a month at granny pace spinning down a hill is the packaged weight loss programme the deluded seem to think will achieve their aims. No, money can’t buy fitness of the hard-won kind. Fitness that’s earned through effort is the only elitist indulgence with which I am prepared to engage. I love stuff that only dedication and persistence can buy. Persistent fitness is something even trillionairs can’t buy. Manageralist tyrants can’t take these achievements away. These are assets beyond the protective possibilities of the world’s biggest vaults.

But there’s more to it than that.

Cycling is obsessively compelling as an endeavour of itself. Just like I am sure flying would be if only we had wings. Effort and rewards are directly linked and at the command of your legs. Is there a freedom of movement quite like this from other endeavours? Like running, swimming, skiing or paddling a racing kayak? Not for me. Cycling can take me further, faster and for longer than anything else I could do. It’s more all-season, free access, infrastructure independent than anything else. There’s no chair lifts, car portage, time rationed barriers and irksome apres-posing rituals attached to the riding I do. Running is close. But cycling is complete.

But, yes, there’s more to it than that.

Cycling is my kind of club. Anyone and everyone can apply for membership. But only those willing to pay the entry fee of physical and mental dedication are permitted to stay. There’s no slave class of caddy carriers here. There’s no side-line cheer squad apres-associate memberships on offer in this sporting club. You are a cyclist; or you are not. Money is not in the equation of membership. You can pretend. You can spend. But we all know who is real or not. All is revealed on every hill we ride together. This is a club where mind, body and machine mesh together like nowhere else. There are no bald mid-life crisis fatties hiding-behind-the-wheel in the world of skin tight lycra and muscle powered speed.

I must confess that now we are getting to the core. There’s another thing about cycling that can explain the life-hold it has over me. Cycling is the most technical endeavour with which I can engage while still being in control. My confidence in machines of any kind extends to the limit of my maintenance and engineering expertise. I need to know how things work before I can trust the workings of the thing I am working with. Every tiny bit; every part and the way those parts connect. These are the things I need to know and understand. If something goes amiss 60 km out on a remote rural trail, I am in command of my fate to return home. There’s a sense of security there that is totally alien to my experiences with any car. Or motorbike. The bicycle is an holistically beautiful machine. There’s nothing to disguise under the ruse of styling or anything else that’s fake. There’s a beauty of precision and mechanical perfection in every single part. There’s an astounding beauty in the synergies of how those parts interact. There’s a beauty in the abject honesty of design and purpose. In my view, the bicycle is the highest level complexity to which any machine can extend before trust and blind faith enter the equation of use. Anything more complex than a bicycle and you are no longer on your own. Your enterprise then becomes a vehicle of dependency with behind-closed-doors specialist skills and their moderation through the marketplace. Your vehicle then becomes a vehicle of disenfranchisement from the pleasures and satisfactions of doing stuff yourself – and of being in total control. I am passionate about doing stuff myself. I don’t like being undone by the undoing of others. Those who have also lost careers to the egotistical excesses of machine management managerialism will understand…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.