I have written about rides before. I had never written during one.
There is a difference, and I did not understand it until Thursday morning. Writing about a ride afterwards is an act of retrieval — you sit down somewhere comfortable and go looking for what happened, and what you come back with has already been sorted, ranked, tidied into a shape. Writing during one is something else. Nothing has been sorted yet. You are still inside the thing.
Here is what I wrote, exactly as it came out. I have not corrected it.
Today a day that I recall no date with an ink that was not prepared to scrible on this paper. Thursday it is morning the first time I ever write mid Route of my Roadbike!
Oh my Roadbike what type of a feeling it makes me feel? Unstoppable? Capable? Powerful? For how long my pen had its cap on and this paper waiting for this moment where all gathered in an event that usually amazing beyond any set of words to crystalize.
Me, my bike connected through clipless paddle, open a paper and the world is ours to shape and write?!
An ink that was not prepared
I like that the pen gets a character. It “was not prepared to scribble on this paper” — as though it had been carried around for months in the expectation of something more formal, and was caught off guard by a bench and a squared page and a person still breathing hard.
That is roughly accurate. The notebook had been in the bag for a while. The pen had a cap on it for longer. Both were being saved for an occasion that never quite announced itself, which is the ordinary way that most things go unwritten — not refused, just deferred until the conditions are right. The conditions are never right. Thursday the conditions were: hot already, no shade to speak of, a bench, and about four minutes before the heat made the decision for me.
Four minutes turned out to be enough. It may have been the point.
What the stop does
The interesting thing is not the writing. It is the stopping.
A ride has a momentum that resents interruption. You are moving, the numbers are accumulating, there is a route in your head and a distance you told yourself you would cover, and every stop is a small negotiation with the part of you that is keeping score. Stopping to take a photo is permitted — it takes ten seconds and produces something. Stopping to write is a different order of interruption. It costs minutes. It produces nothing you can show anyone.
Which is why it works, I think. The photo is a way of not stopping. You lift the phone, the moment is captured, you clip back in, and you have successfully avoided being anywhere. The pen makes you stay. There is no way to write three lines quickly enough to pretend you did not pause, and by the time the third line is down you are no longer a person on a ride who stopped — you are a person sitting on a bench, and the ride is something you were doing earlier.
That shift is the whole thing. It lasted four minutes and it changed the character of the morning.
Unstoppable? Capable? Powerful?
Three question marks, which I notice now and did not notice then.
I was reaching for the word and could not find it, so I put down the three nearest approximations and let the punctuation do the admitting. None of them is right. “Unstoppable” is a poster. “Powerful” is a gym. “Capable” is closer and still not it, because capable is a judgement about what you could do, and this was not about capacity. It was about the specific and slightly absurd fact of being a body that had moved itself thirty-something kilometres across a city under its own power, and would move itself back, and had nothing to prove by doing so.
The page says the event is “amazing beyond any set of words to crystalize.” I let that stand too, because it is the honest report — not that the feeling is ineffable in some grand way, but that I sat there with a pen and did not have the words, and wrote that down instead of pretending otherwise. There is a version of this entry where I go home and find better words at the desk. That version would be a lie about Thursday morning.
The clipless pedal
The last line is the one I keep returning to: me, my bike connected through clipless pedals, open a paper, and the world is ours to shape and write.
Clipless pedals are a strange piece of equipment to think about. You are bolted to the machine. Your shoe locks into the crank and stays there, and the connection is not a grip you are maintaining — it is a mechanical fact you have to deliberately undo. New riders fall over at traffic lights because they forget this. The bike does not let go on its own.
Sitting there, I had unclipped from one thing and clipped into another. Same gesture, roughly: a deliberate connection to a piece of equipment that converts effort into distance. The pen is just slower about it.
I do not want to push that further than it goes. It was a hot morning and I was pleased with myself for stopping, and the metaphor arrived because metaphors arrive when you are tired.
But the pen did stay uncapped.
Entry 1 of 40,075. A record kept in the margins of a ride toward the length of the earth’s circumference — thirty kilometres a day, a few lines a day.