I have been riding my bike a lot lately (well, not as much as I'd like due to the very wet and windy winter we've been having as of late), and many of my friends and acquaintances have been asking me why I ride so much and how can I possibly enjoy it.   I have lots of reasons and even more answers and could go into a long esoteric discussion, but I think Lance Armstrong summed it up pretty succinctly  in his article Back in the Saddle, printed in the December 3, 2001 issue of Forbes.  

Now I am, of course, nowhere near the rider that Lance is (Is anyone?) and I certainly don't ride anywhere near as much or as hard as he does and I have not even come close to going through anything like he did with his cancer and subsequent surgeries and chemotherapy; however, I still relate intimately to the "pain" he writes about while on the bike and I get the same satisfaction and fulfilment, maybe for different reasons, but with similar results.

  Lance wrote:

People ask me why I ride my bike for six hour a day; what is the pleasure?  The answer is that I don’t do it for the pleasure.  I do it for the pain.  In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most self-aware and self-defining.  There is a point in every race when a rider encounters the real opponent and realizes that it’s…himself.  You might say pain is my chosen way of exploring the human heart.

That pain is temporary.  It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it subsides.  And when it does, something else takes its place, and that thing might be called a greater space for happiness.  We have unrealized capacities that only emerge in crisis – capacities for enduring, for living, for hoping, for caring, for enjoying.  Each time we overcome pain, I believe that we grow. 

Cancer was the making of me:  Through it I became a more compassionate, complete, and intelligent man, and therefore a more alive one.  So that’s why I ride, and why I ride hard.  Because it makes me hurt, and so it makes me happy.

Now me - I was not made by cancer.  I was made, am still being made, by my life without any real suffering.  I guess you could say - no, you can definitely say - I have been blessed.  I have suffered nothing even close to anything like cancer and the horrors of chemotherapy, though I have lost a friend or two to it.  But I do notice that when I ride, especially while climbing a long steep hill, sweat dripping off my face, my legs burning with lactic acid, my lungs aching for more oxygen, I am, utterly, alive.  I smell the air, I hear the birds, I feel the wind.  I feel my heart pound and  the blood flow.  My mind and senses are hyper-alert, and just as Lance, at my most self-aware.  And though I cause and feel the pain, I rejoice in it.  Because it means I am alive, that I am living.  When it is my turn to go, I will die living - I refuse to live dying.