Jock Time, Part III: On Becoming a Bike Guy/In Search of Total Psychic Obliteration
It’s the summer of 2026 and after nearly two years I find myself still incapable of running – caught somewhere between the residual agonies of a particularly nasty case of plantar fasciitis and the spectre of its possible return. Every day I see runners on the street and find myself seething at them like an incel, wanting what I know I can never have: look at their light steps, their smooth, efficient pace, their lithe bodies, their stupidly churning arms…oh, how I hate them!
To deal with this, I have turned to bike riding. Three months ago I picked up a 90s road bike with downtube shifters and extremely questionable brakes. Having overcome the better part of my vehicle anxiety (the result of, some years ago, getting my bike tire stuck in a streetcar track, face-planting directly into traffic, and emerging unscathed except for a horrible new awareness of my own mortality), I now have within my sights a vision of my future as a gleefully spandex-clad menace, a total bike anarchist, red lights are for suckers, pulling on my stretchy shorts and becoming a new, dangerously insouciant person. It’s the same effect as wearing a sick leather jacket, except nothing to see here is cool.
(I am ambivalent about seeking the freedom that comes from making yourself abject, the pleasurable shame of knowing you look dumb as hell and nobody can do anything about it)
Biking has, outside of the silly little outfits it necessitates, been a fairly adequate substitute for running: I get to be outdoors, in a stimulating and typically pleasant environment; I get to improve my cardiac fitness and calm my mind; I have become familiar enough with the network of bike lanes that I can freely get around. I am pushing myself to go on longer and hillier rides (the other night I was talking to this guy I knew at a show, and he told me that he’d just finished a bike ride from Quebec City; the next day I took myself on a loop of just under 12 kilometers and collapsed under the weight of my own inadequacy). I have even managed, once or twice, along the rare smooth stretches of asphalt, to get lost in the experience in a suitably pleasurable way, although I have yet to achieve the state of total psychic obliteration I could reach while running. I wonder if this capacity is now permanently lost to me, or if, were I to become sufficiently monomaniacal about biking, I might recover it. I try not to think about it too much: moderation is safer.