I read a blog post yesterday about cycling that I am still thinking about today.
It hit home with me, expressing thoughts and beliefs that have crossed my mind, but that I have never taken the time to think through fully nor write about. Even if I had, I couldn’t have written so eloquently or insightfully. The blogger is Dave Horton and his blog is – thinking about cycling. I encourage you to check it out.
With his permission, here is an excerpt from Horton’s post, Who is cycling for (click on the link to go directly to the post).
I hope you won’t just settle for this excerpt, I highly recommend following the link and reading the entire post. What he says is profound and so right. Read the comments too, some are essays on cycling in their own right.
I have posted in the past about why we ride, this post is more about why others do not. Read it, you won’t regret it.
Who is cycling for/by Dave Horton
This might seem a strange question. Surely, cycling is for everyone? Well, after three years’ research for the Understanding Walking and Cyclingproject, my clear answer is that – in Britain today – it’s not. Our task of course is to make it so.
So who then, have we found cycling to be for? Primarily, for a hardy bunch of inadvertent elitists. People like me, perhaps like you, who ride despite the generally atrocious conditions which effectively discourage the big majority of people from doing likewise. Often we don’t notice conditions are atrocious because we’ve got used to them, and/or our skill levels have improved in order to deal with them.
We cycle, we take our capacity to cycle for granted, and we sometimes drift towards an expectation that other people should find it as easy, or almost as easy, as we do. We fail to understand how difficult other people find it. Read more here…