I'm Lazy, So...

Well, I still haven't written anything new so it looks like it's back to the old. This was written about 3 years ago after a non-cyclist asked me what a recover ride was. It got my brain perking, thinking about what it meant to me as opposed to the general population. Enjoy!

Recovery Rides

If you hang around cyclists long enough you’ll hear the term ”recovery ride” used quite often. The conversation might go something like this:

“So, how’d you do today?”

“I had a nice easy ride… very relaxing”

“See anybody else out there?”

“Yeah, at one point some loser on a piece of department store junk blew by me, but I just let him go. If I wasn’t on my recovery ride, I would have hammered it and dropped him like a bad habit!”

So, what is this recovery ride they speak of? It all depends on who you talk to. Most cyclists will tell you it’s an easy spin the day after a hard ride, like a century or a race; or maybe you spent the previous day climbing mammoth hills or doing intervals. The recovery ride works out all of the byproducts of the metabolic process and gets the kinks out of things. For me it’s something different.

Now before I can give my definition, I need to tell you a little about me and why I ride. I’m forty-something and not the best physical specimen around. I’ve been riding bikes off and on for most of my life, but didn’t get very serious about it until I was closing in on my 30^th year. Up to that time, riding was just another way to get from point A to point B if it wasn’t too far and I didn’t feel like driving. The bike spent most of the time on the back porch and my butt was behind the wheel of something with more horsepower. That changed thanks to good old Phoenix traffic jams and unreliable vehicles.

I was living on the west side at the time and working downtown at one of the hospitals. The traffic on the way home was always very slow. It was stop and start, taking several cycles to get through lights, and just generally frustrating. Then, just to add insult to injury, car problems set in. I hated riding the bus, so the bike became my primary mode of transportation by default.

During this stint as a bike commuter I discovered a couple of things that surprised me. First, it usually took me 40 to 45 minutes to drive home in the crush of cars that clogged the streets in the afternoon… it only took me 27 minutes on the bike! The second thing I discovered was even more surprising. By the time I cranked myself past all of the poor helpless souls trapped in their stalled, smoking boxes on wheels and rolled into the driveway at home, the stress of the day seemed to have disappeared. I was literally burning off all of the bad energy clouding my brain and infecting my body. What started out as a negative situation was having a positive effect; I was becoming a happier person.

Do you remember what it was like as a kid when you learned to ride a bike? For me, it was my first real taste of freedom. The bike was my magic carpet, taking me to places that were previously out of reach or required parental participation. In commuting by bike, I had rediscovered that freedom. I was no longer confined by my petroleum-fueled prison. I could feel the wind flowing over me and see the world unobstructed.

Emotion became my fuel of choice now. I could take all of the anger, frustration and disappointment, stress… whatever was nagging me, and concentrate the energy, focus it on the pedals and fly! I’d spin like a man possessed, burning away the blackness until all that remained was the pure joy of being one with this fantastic machine that had given me such a gift… and this brings me back to where we started.

So, what’s my definition of a recovery ride? Well, when you consider the mental and spiritual benefits I reap every time I climb in the saddle and set the wheels in motion, there can be only one answer… every ride is a recovery ride!