Clipping in
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Attention. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
I’ve started riding my road bike again.
This newsletter often studies the relationship between belief and possibility. So here is an interesting case, because a belief whose grasp on me I didn’t fully comprehend—that routine use of this bike was too dangerous—limited my access to something I loved. In the unlitigated logic of trauma, the love could only yield to the fear.
After my last big crash, almost a decade ago, I turned hypervigilant. Every erratic pedestrian, every rut in the battered Brooklyn road, and every lapse in my own attention carried the threat of another slam into the pavement—the threat of more crutches, more surgery, more time away from moving. Each click and clack in my bike’s carbon frame prefigured another sudden severing of the handlebars. Wind and sun and endorphins—nature’s incentives to ride—were never equipped to evade such defenses. The peace I once found in gliding around (and around and around) the Prospect Park loop had gone.
The blow of retreating from that kind of cycling was softened by more time spent in studio and then also Peloton classes, where control over your pedaling resistance makes aerobic training easier and more predictable anyway. I discovered that, free of outdoor perils, I was a handily competitive racer. My anatomy and ability to sublimate a certain set of discomforts allowed me, in this little corner of the universe, to excel.
In 2020, I started checking out a blue hunk of steel from the bike-share station on the corner. Rule No. 1 for me in the early pandemic was to get outside every day. It began as a walk around the astroturf field a few blocks away. Then the Citi Bike program reintroduced its electrified models, and I would grab one of those if the dock had one, and soon that was the ritual: an hour’s roaming through Greenpoint or Lower Manhattan, easy and swift. Crucially, this felt so different from riding a skinny, vertiginous road bike that it didn’t activate my old fears; and if it had there was still that greater imperative, of escaping my apartment.
I’d started writing and posting, on Instagram, “episode descriptions“ of my days, as if they were installments of a TV show. Season 1, Episode 39, sometime in April, reflects the emotional heft of this daily expedition:
An airplane—one—flies over the house. The ants invade the kitchen tree. Michael rides an electric bike through the masked and blooming city that has become his deep home and wonders what will fill its silences.
For my birthday that June I bought an electric bike of my own, a sleekly muscular VanMoof, which is the equivalent of a ’70s Alfa Romeo in sex appeal (high) and reliability (no). It’s been my main, if flaky, mode of getting around for three seasons a year since. And it brought on a kind of boil-the-frog situation: Without noticing, I became a confident road rider again, bulwarked by the machine.
Last month, feeling the need to make my triathlon training more realistic, I took the old road bike in for a tune-up and new tires and placed it back into service. It’s a beauty, a platonic reduction. I had it for mere weeks before that 2013 crash, and it’s been ghosting around the apartment since, defending its existence against my relentless edit. Clipping my shoes into the pedals the other day for my first ride took several tries. Then I found myself restored to the earliest joy of this act, the reason I became an athlete at all—the sensation of becoming airborne by your own power, of unlatching from the earth. I knew this joy could be lost, or lost track of, or something in between; finding it again has been an unexpected gift.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.