Pedaling squares

A lot of people ask me what it means.  In the world of cycling, the peak of performance and technique is to keep a fluid and smooth cycling cadence as you pedal the bike.  Unfortunately, human anatomy, geometry and physics limit this ability, so the skill of a smooth spin only comes after a long time on the bike, and is easily lost with any absence from riding.

I haven't ridden with any frequency in years, and with all the usual excuses of work, family life, illness and other responsibilities.  But when I was a kid, I loved to ride my bike, and made a several year foray as a citizen racer in my teens.  I have a garageful of bikes I don't ride, that get dustier and dustier, the tires rotting away from the rims and the leather saddles developing a fine web of cracks from the dryness of neglect.

But the other day, while straightening out the garage, I leaned my Litespeed road bike outside against the truck so it wouldn't get knocked over.  In the middle of heaving boxes and moving bags of water softener salt, I glanced outside and the familiar diamond profile of my bike was suddenly on fire in the sunlight, gleaming and luminous.  The memories came flooding back:  tucked down in a tight wedge over the handlebars and screaming down Sugar Hill in upstate New York, the speedometer approaching sixty three miles per hour, the fork acquiring a queer harmonic resonance as I wondered if the front wheel would fall off; the soft crunch of the tires over pebbles and the squeak of the chain as I grunted and groaned up interminable steep hills outside of Binghamton and Erie; and then the abrupt transplantation to Arizona, sightlines of twenty miles in every direction and *no cars* and a headwind determined to kill me.

It was as if in the middle of middle age, my past reared up and slapped me in the face.  Is it ever too late to remember dreams? To try again?  When my dad died last spring, I made a promise to myself to serve with humility, to be a better person, to try to be a light to others (even if it was a dim one!)  I realized it is never a black to white kind of change, but instead the constant erosion of life that models us, changes us, destroys us and renews us.

So I aired up the tires on the Litespeed and rode it around the block, praying the dry rotted tires wouldn't blow--and they didn't, being quality Continentals!  At first awkward, shifting my hands from hoods to the tops of the bars, squirming on the now rock hard saddle, feet stabbing at the pedals . . . pedaling squares.  And then, suddenly, for all too brief a moment, it all fell together.  Power moving from my legs to the pedals, the ground flowing backwards with a gentle hiss, me almost floating over the handlebars and clicking smoothly through the gears, heart, breathing, cadence all in harmony..

I'm still not sure if existence is a progression to chaos or organization--most of the time I'm inclined to think chaos--but every once in a rare while things move into place and instead of pedaling squares, I'm spinning perfect circles.



"Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."


T. S. Eliot   "Little Gidding"