Rhythm
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: California. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
“There was plenty of Bach on my mobile phone, but I wasn’t listening to it. I had heard enough of the music to feel it subsonically in the streets of Leipzig, where Bach had walked, and I was walking.” — Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach
I was training for a charity bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, in 2010, when I discovered the five-count pedal stroke. “ONE-two-three-four-five-ONE-two-three-four-five-ONE-two-three-four-five.” Left foot leading, then right. These were long rides, often 80 miles at a stretch, out through Los Angeles County’s untold reaches, over concrete channels and across great dams and past fields, abandoned, and shooting ranges, in use; up mountains at a crawl and down like a bobsled. Back alleys and highways and dirt roads and bridges and asphalt and concrete and gravel and, ominously for my skinny road-bike tires, the occasional mud. The weather that winter and spring was something else, an altered state, rain and prismed sun and clouds sucked in from Neptune. Griffith Park one February morning was a wreckage, sundered trees and lakes upon the road. Coyotes ranged in the open.
The big ride would be seven days in the saddle, one or two of those exceeding a hundred miles’ distance. So preparation meant many hours at a stretch, which—separate from the task of generating power for so long—put its own strain on the body, which achieves the aerodynamic posture of a road bike only by some degree of contortion.
Five-count pedaling was an asset because it kept the brain a bit busier than two counts or three—so it was a trick—and because it alternated the downbeat between left foot and right, making the overall impact more symmetrical.
This cluster of months was tranquil and focused, and it has no obvious place in my taxonomy of winning and losing streaks. What I do know is that all that vast roaming came to an end the day in June after I got home from the weeklong ride I’d looked forward to for so long and felt a tremendous and debilitating emptiness, as if the monthslong enterprise of preparation had been holding a darker truth in abeyance. When life’s rhythm changed, from pre-ride to post-, my self-protective chant dissolved.
Other forces were at work: My first sustained relationship had ended the previous November, setting the stage for a more acute sensation of loneliness. After a five-year delay, I’d managed to bring my tumultuous college era to an honorable end; but my hard-won diploma now looked out on a life devoid of major projects or occupations. I liked work but did not love it. I was miles and more than a decade away from a serious writing practice. My piano-to-be still haunted someone else’s house a continent away.
Eventually this listless time found, in some unsolicited wisdom from a mentor, the momentum that would lead me (home) to New York. But in the meantime reigned the five-count pedal stroke, which I resumed only a day or two after the big ride had ended because the bike was one place I knew for sure to find solace. Now the stroke was not meditative or time-passing but propulsive, the hand on your back that cyclists often use as a metaphor for emotional reinforcement. I think I was drawn to the five-count because it felt less neatly apportioned than a typical cycling rhythm, where one foot or the other takes every downbeat. Two counts return you to where you started, but five take you somewhere else; and if where you are is not where you want to be, then there’s hope in every repetition—five ticks of it. ONE-two-three-four-five, left foot dominant then right, as if you were not just riding but leaping, to the mountain apex from which you might—with all you were carrying burned off by the fire of your rise—drift swiftly, sweetly back to earth.
Coming Tuesday: Daylight.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.