Momentum Rider

Given that world is not flat, one has to negotiate the gradients, up or down. A casual bicycle ride to the George Washington Bridge led to a stop at a bakery and discovery of Russian snacks at Washington heights, and that in turn, impromptu, led me to ride all the way to Nyack, NY, a distance of about 30 miles, on a mountain bike with slime.

I am a momentum rider. I dislike steady climbs or descends, and find them boring. I like sharp ups and downs, riding hard going downhill until pedalling has no effect on the bike at its max speed, or inching up the slope when again hard pedalling yields very little progress. I live on momentum too it would seem, eating 1000's of calories during the week and burning them in a day on the weekend.

The lesson from the chautauqua's in The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance may have been that one should pace oneself while hiking, or be tidy in organizing one's mind and their motorcycle repair shop. Instead, I learned to go with the momentum.