So I did something really extreme. I took all the cyclometers off my bikes. Lemme ’splain.

I’ve been going a little nuts lately. Like “sudden flashes of violent emotion” nuts. Waiting for our little girl to hurry up and get born is making me crazy. Not just the waiting but a kind of mounting pressure that I will shortly be the sole breadwinner for a family of four.

But I can’t entirely blame that, although I certainly feel a little buried by my life lately.

I have dozens of “projects” hanging around: bike “training” of dubious necessity; bicycle improvement projects; web stuff I want to build & learn; work projects that have no ROI but enormous future-proofing potential; home improvement stuff; landscaping stuff. Projects. But I’m not 24 any more, hell I’m not 34 any more. My energy for “projects” is nil.

But it isn’t entirely a lack-of-energy thing either, although I sleep never and have free time less. (By way of illustration: I have more time to take showers at work than at home.)

The thing of it is, I have goals and hopes and aspirations. Lots of them: big (“new backyard”), small (“paint backdoor“), vague (“learn more Django”), specific (“ride bike 100mi/wk.”). When I have a hope or a goal: I’m stretching to attain. There’s a gap between the state I’m in and the state I wish I were in. It’s this gap that’s really driving me nuts; it has always driven me nuts. Difference is, when I was 24 (or 34!) I could turn that nuts energy into action, and get stuff done. When I was 24 it drove me to learn and build web things. When I was 34 it drove me (us, rather) to move to China and learn Chinese.

That I never actually finished these projects is immaterial. It felt good to have them going, to make progress, to aspire to something. But these days the weight of obligation — a wife and dog and kids and mortgage to feed — pretty much nullifies the energy overage I could always tap for projects.

The Buddha’s second noble truth is that suffering arises from craving. We suffer in proportion to the amount we desire. I always knew but never understood this; because I desired so little, and because I had surplus ego. Before 2008 or so, my life was pretty much entirely about me. But now I am (and, by extension, my projects are) the least important thing in my life. Ego is now in seriously short supply.

And, to add to the suffering, one of my longtime desires is for a simpler life. But living an uncomplicated life without furniture or a credit score is just capital NOT going to happen (see: wife, kids, dog, mortgage). Think how perverse this is: what I want is nothing and what I have is abundance. Thus I suffer.

Which brings me back to the cyclometers.

Last week I checked out a cyclist’s training manual. I’ve been shopping for GPS/heart-rate monitors. It worried me that some of my mileage is “off the books” — because does a mile count if a cyclometer doesn’t register it? And then there’s the 70 or so bicycle-related blogs and Twitter accounts I read every day. My bike love was finding expression in numbers. This weekend I had a beautiful ride over Parrett Mountain and the Chehelem hills; but I was stressed that it was “short miles” (only 43!) and I was too slow (only 15.9mph!). I had let the desire for attainment overwhelm the joy of riding. If I’m ever going to let go of all that desire, the bikes are a good place to start. Because it should be possible to experience joy (“whee, I’m on a bike!”) without desire (“...but I’m only going 15.9mph!”). Quit counting. Be here now. Obsess less, ride more.

Short answer: twelve.

Last week someone asked me how many bikes I own and have owned. I couldn’t give a straight answer. So I made a spreadsheet.

I’ve never owned more than four bikes at once.

The average bike spends 3.6 years in my possession. At any given time since college I’m likely to have 2.7 bikes in my quiver.

Unlike a lot of bikey people, I don’t collect bikes. Among my bikey friends, four is a pretty small number. My habit since about 2003 was to own two-plus bikes; the “two” is usually a commuter and a faster road bike; the “plus” is usually a mountain bike and/or beater that I seldom ride. Usually the “plus” bike was really cheap; perhaps as cheap as “free.” Free bikes always seem like a good idea but I never ride them.

My bikes are well-loved. I rode in a charity century this weekend; every time I do this I’m impressed at how nice many enthusiasts’ bikes are. Clean chains, no scratches or chips or cable rub, shiny saddles that aren’t peeling. I think some people have very nice carbon fiber bikes that they only ride on special occasions. I’m not like that. My bikes either get ridden several times a week in all weather or, apparently, not at all.

ONE

This morning when I got the trailer loaded up in POURING FRICKING RAIN I thought “today is a ‘tough’ day, not a ‘fun’ day.” Before we even left the driveway I was defeating myself. I started up the street with this totally beat-down attitude, I had to stand on my pedals for the first hill and then Orion shouted “GO DADDY GO!” Suddenly I felt like Superman. Fun and Tough go together, the tougher I am the more fun it is. This was one of the wettest commutes I’ve had all winter and I got to work loving it. But if I hadn’t adjusted my mental state (OK, if Orion hadn’t adjusted it for me), it might have been pure misery. Same bike, same guy, same rain, different mental models.

TWO

Back when I started riding kinda sorta seriously — about eight years ago, and parenthetically my life was a total wreck — I was living in NW PDX. One day I saw Council Crest park on a map and decided to ride my bike there, knowing it was going to be all uphill. Man, was I overmatched. I made it to about Ainsworth school (about halfway up) and had to stop. My clothes were just soaked with sweat, I couldn’t breathe, it was really pathetic. I saw someone else riding up Vista and decided I was gonna lick that hill and I wasn’t gonna push my bike. If I got tired, I was going to stop and take a break until I was cool enough to get on the bike again. So with one more stop (around Patton) and another (maybe somewhere on Greenway?) I made it all the way up. The next time I rode up that hill I stopped only once, maybe around Fairmount? The third time I rode up that hill I didn’t stop until I reached the top. In about 3 weeks I went from zero to hero. Maybe not even a month later I rode my bike solo down the OR coast. You don’t have to be tough to conquer hills, you conquer hills and become tough. And it happens much quicker than you might expect.

THREE

Greg LeMond famously said “it never gets easier, you just go faster.” There’s a metaphor for life right there. From my perspective, it’s easier to add 60 minutes to my commute than to find 60 minutes for yoga. In the summer my 7 mile commute will balloon to 20+ miles. I already have to go work, right? By the same token, I’m not spending money on yoga anymore, and having only one car saves us $6000/yr. So: hills, time, money ... obstacles like that are veils. Once you see through them, they become crucibles. Crucibles wherein you purify your perceptions: of your body, money, time, values, life.

About five years ago, I got a gig out by Tannesborne (about 15mi from where we were living at the time), it didn’t even occur to me not to ride my bike there. One day I drove for some reason, and I couldn’t believe how far it was. 30 minutes in a car felt way longer than an hour on a bike. Somehow riding a bike dilates time for me, I feel like the more I ride the more of it I have.

Dave Moulton wrote today about the evolution of mountain biking. He asked for his readers’ “take on the period” — here’s mine:

I grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1970s when banana seats gave way to BMX. My favorite thing wasn’t jumping ditches though so much as taking long rambles up dirt roads, I’d be gone for hours. In retrospect I was probably never more than 2 or 3 miles away from the house but it felt much farther. I had a fear of county roads and blacktop traffic, so I stuck to dirt roads: section road, irrigation access, that kind of thing.

We moved to the “big city” Lincoln in the early 80s and I bought my first grownup bike, a late 70s vintage 10-spd “racing” bike. I think it was a Sekai. I rode this and a Schwinn Varsity until high school. My new favorite bike thing was to ride those 10-spds all day, either around town into new neighborhoods, or to outlying towns. At age 13 I rode my Varsity 52 miles (round trip) on a surprise visit to a girl in a neighboring town. I taped cans of Coke to the frame for sustenance, and ate a slice of pizza before the ride home. The girl was out of town, that taught me to always call ahead.

For about 5 years I barely rode at all. It was too “uncool” to be seen on a bike at my gearhead high school, or so I felt anyway. I kept that unhealthy obsession with cars until college when I got my first MTB, a Giant Rincon (1992).

The Rincon reawakened the joy of being gone all day on a bike. This time it was back to dirt roads, and wasteland like timber claims or Wilderness Park (an undeveloped city park southwest of Lincoln). I also lived exactly the right distance from campus for steady bike commuting: too near to drive, too far to walk. After college I took the Rincon — and its successor: a Yokota mountainbike — with me on my archaeological adventures across the Great Plains. I never had the Xtreme Mad Huck personality ascendent in 90s MTB culture, I never railed on sketchy descents or caught big air. My ideal ride was a long distance on two-track in the hinterland. Exploring. Cow-trailing. Unsuspended steel MTBs excel at that.

I took the Yokota with me to grad school — I had long since given up cars entirely — where it was my primary mode of transport. Ironically, once I moved to Oregon — where we have actual mountains — I pretty stopped mountain biking. This was the mid-90s and MTB culture was no longer under the radar, and in Oregon at any rate you couldn’t just go ride a bike on all that sweet singletrack. Either it was closed to bikes, or it was developed into a kind of skills park for Mad Hucking. Mostly, to ride a MTB bike in Oregon it helps to have a car; you have to drive to a “trailhead” where you spin around for an hour or so then drive home. It has always struck me as absurd to drive somewhere to Have Fun by biking (or hiking, or skiing) around in little circles. Other than riding a bike to work, I never spent much time on a bike between 1995 and 2001.

Not quite a decade ago I bought another road bike — actually kind of a cross/touring bike, a Bianchi Volpe. That set me on my last — and most durable — love affair with bikes. With a road bike (or better, a ’cross bike), as soon as you step out the front door you’re Having Fun. That bike kept me sane through my divorce, when my all-day-bike-riding habits became a little obsessive. The peak of that period was my solo tour down the Oregon Coast.

This was how I met Jenny: she saw me carrying my bike into our apartment building (we were neighbors), and she asked “do you know any good rides around here?” I didn’t ask her out right that second but I eventually did, and the story had a happy ending. Much of our early courtship — and most of our vacations, even today — are had on bike. Sometimes on that Bianchi, or on one of its roadie successors.

Last spring I won a fancy new Kona mountain bike. I never would have bought this bike myself, and I’m kind of at a loss for what to do with it. Mostly it’s seen semi-legal singletrack in the weirdly-zoned terrain of SW Portland. I guess you still have to drive a car somewhere to have fun on a mountain bike, and I still think that’s stupid.

On Saturday, I rode my Vanilla road bike 90 miles — all on blacktop — into the beautiful rural hinterlands around Portland. I don’t get to do this as often as I used to but it’s still my favorite bike thing to do.

On Monday I rolled over 10,000 miles on the Vanilla. Sadly I didn’t have a camera, so you’ll have to take my word for it. An occasion like this is a good time to reckon what my mileage is like over a long period.

vs.

Right now I have 10,030 mi. on the Vanilla and 3516 mi. on the Soma. I know that I’ve ridden 3365 mi. since September 11, 2007, because on that day I rolled over 6666 mi. and blogged about it. 869 days have passed since that day, so I can get weirdly accurate numbers for my aggregate mileage:

This leaves off a few miles I’ve ridden on my newish Kona mountain bike, which I never bothered to fit with a computer. Also, I’ve changed the batteries on both road bike computers, which means there are a few miles off the books for those bikes as well. But really, I can’t imagine I have more than 100–200 mi. unaccounted for.

This year I resolved to ride 100 mi./week, every week, without rolling miles from long weeks into short ones. Which means I have to dig up an extra 44.58 mi./wk.

I can do a wee bit more math, this time less precise. I have previously calculated that, for my weight, and over the hills I usually ride, and at my usual pace, I burn about 550 kcal/hr. riding my bikes. (“kcal” means the same thing as “calories” in general usage.) This lets me reckon the following:

So, and not to put too fine a point on it, the excess mileage I’m making to meet my resolution lets me drink a hard case of New Belgium Fat Tire beer every week, and still lose weight.