I love this piece, Centering by Patrick Brady of Red Kite Prayer, one of my favorite cycling blogs. Centering is what cycling has done for me countless times throughout my life and still does. ~Susan
An excerpt from Centering by Patrick Brady:
“Three days into a three-week tour I had my first moment of reckoning. I was on a Western Montana highway with mountains to my right and little other than blacktop before me. This was my first big chance to go deep on the thing I loved doing—riding my bike. However, as I was buffeted by the backwash from a passing semi, I was thrust upon the spiky end of a realization.
There were hundreds of miles between each of my big destinations. I was going to be pedaling a long damn time.
Going for a ride had always meant getting on my bike and heading to some destination; home, my apartment, work. A bike ride started in a familiar place, went someplace interesting and then returned to a familiar place. To this point in my life those adventures had been contained within a single arc of the sun. But now I was confronting the idea that I wouldn’t reach either the end of an adventure or my destination before the sun set.
I didn’t appreciate that I’d put myself to a kind of test. For days, I would wake, break camp, and then spend the day riding, only to arrive at another campground, with my destination closer only in my intellect. To my eye, I was still nowhere.
I was going to find out just how much I liked riding a bike. But what is riding a bike? Is it the going someplace? Is it what you see on a ride? Is it the fun you had in riding the particular terrain? That question eluded me, didn’t compute. I didn’t know enough to ask it.
When was it I finally understood that cycling is the act of pedaling a bicycle and pointing it in a direction, no more, and certainly not less?
It was a day in France, on an Alpine climb longer than many movies when I began to understand. I looked down at my legs and watch the circles my knees traced, my feet going round and round with the pedals.
This is what cycling is.” —Read more of Red Kite Prayer’s Centering here