Tag: bike

Man Multiplied by Machine

~ Mr Shit50s ~ Leave a comment

In the first of a mini-series about cycling, theshit50s talks bikes and better mental health

Original images: Richard Reid and Clker Free Vector Images/Pixabay

RIDING MY BIKE is keeping me sane at the moment.

We’ve been going out several times a week lately – my bike and I. Usually early in the morning, before the winds get up, and in gaps between the rain showers that are making this second lockdown Spring tooth-grindingly disappointing.

Often, when we start off, I’m not feeling very strong – either mentally, or physically.

I’ll be anxious, or hungover, or both. But I go, anyway, because I know that 30 or 40 kilometres of riding will reset me in a way that a night’s sleep often can’t. I’ve learned that simply focusing on the road, and climbing a few stiff-ish hills, will settle me down enough to handle the day.

What also helps is that the bike feels kind. Cycling is much more forgiving exercise than running, which was always my go-to anxiety cure until recently. 

But, now I’m struggling with injury and my overall fitness, running doesn’t flow for me like it used to.

The broadcaster Max Rushden wrote a column about jogging recently that described exactly how jerky and laboured my own running style has become: “less fluid movement, more a set of individual competed actions. Land. Stop. Lift leg. Stop. Repeat.”

But I don’t have this problem when I’m cycling: instead of having to fight my body when I run, the bike co-operates with me.

When I’m not strong, the efficiency of my bike is sweet relief”

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You Only Ride Twice

~ Mr Shit50s ~ Leave a comment

Finding it hard to sleep? Imagine being back on your bike…

Original image: Rudy and Peter Skitterians/Pixabay

SINCE I TURNED 40, and started getting up at least once a night to visit the bathroom, I’ve found it increasingly tough to get back to sleep in the small hours.

As well as my glitchy personal plumbing, work and life stresses gradually helped me to perfect the art of waking up at about 4am, and then failing to drop off again.

Typically, I’d spend a couple of hours a night lying awake with my worst, most useless, thoughts – about someone horrible at work, for example, or being mean to an ex-girlfriend 20 years before.

And then, when I finally gave up on the prospect of sleep at around 6.30, I’d get up to start another day – gloomy and totally keyed up, as well as just fucking tired.

Lately, however, I’ve stumbled upon an unexpected solution to my insomnia. 

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Give Us Hills, Not Pills

~ Mr Shit50s ~ Leave a comment

If you’re feeling blue, you could do worse than get on a bike

Original image: Keith Johnson/Pixabay

I FELT that I had to cycle yesterday morning: even though I was tired from riding the day before, and my bad knee was sore. Even though it was 9.30am on Monday and I ought to be working.

I was feeling moderately bad, mentally. The excitement of my birthday week and the weekend that followed it had dissipated and left me with a bad case of the Monday blues.

There’s something about the mess of a Monday – Sunday’s unwashed dishes, the pile of washing in the basket, unread emails piling up in my inbox all weekend – that unmans me, and makes me want to run away from my life.

I caught myself ruminating that maybe now that I’d reached 55, I should stop there and end it all because I’d reached the end of my usefulness. I thought about how my brother and I don’t talk and how it was probably my fault…

Then, just after I set off, I saw a pensioner and told myself: “You live like a pensioner. You don’t have the energy or the discipline to live a full life. All you’re fit for is staying at home and pottering around until you die.”

As I said, I wasn’t having a great day. But the longer I cycled, the more forgiving of myself I became.

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Biking Saves The Big Day

~ Mr Shit50s ~ Leave a comment

I spent my birthday cycling across London in the rain, so I could cycle up a hill in the rain

IN THIS CORONAVIRUS year, I’m particularly ticked off with my parents for giving me a November birthday.

Trying to party in November is as daunting as entertaining young children in the dreaded February half term: for starters, the days are short and dark, and everybody’s mildly depressed from lack of Vitamin D.

It’s cold and wet, the leaves are off the trees and slushing up the pavements, and no-one can bear it outside for long. So, unless you want to hunker down for hours in a pricey café, or brave the insane crowds at the free museums and art galleries, you’re fucked. 

But at least in February, we have the option of paying through the nose for our fun. This lockdown November – with no pubs or restaurants, cinemas or museums, shops or art galleries to celebrate in – I began to worry that it might be my worst birthday ever. 

Back in the day, we would have got by very nicely on smoked salmon, bagels, fizzy wine and a day spent entirely in bed. But I’m 55 now, not 25 and – anyway – the kids are here, working from home.

So I threw my leg over the bike, instead. I spent my birthday riding across London in the rain, so I could ride up a hill in the rain.

And it was brilliant.

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Riding It Out

~ Mr Shit50s ~ Leave a comment

As I approach a dreaded birthday in lockdown, my bike has become my only solace

I’m turning 55 this week, which seems like a terrible birthday.

In marketing terms, I’ll no longer belong in the company of anyone who’s still in their early 50s, and I’m dead to hip young 45-year-olds. 

Also according to the people who sell us things, I’m now likely to think, buy and do the same stuff as someone who’s 64.

By my own reckoning, turning 55 means that I truly am moving from middle age to old age – but without the wisdom and perspective to appreciate getting older.

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Full Of Sap, Short Of Maps

~ Mr Shit50s ~ 1 Comment

I prepared badly for my first big cycle ride of the year – but as I get older, I’ve learned to grit my teeth and improvise

A map with possible cycle routes to East Anglia
Original map image: NordNordWest/Lukasb1992/Ottobdn via Wikimedia Commons

AS THE SONG so eloquently puts it, it’s been a long cold lonely winter, little darling.

But, lately, the Springtime has got to work on this old-enough-to-know-better body.

Outside, The Sap was beginning to rise and it was pleasant, at my age, to realise that I was still capable of stirring in response.

It was March already, and the wind and the rain had stopped for a bit: time to dust off my bike gear and get out there.

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The Long Road To Forgiving My Father

~ Mr Shit50s ~ Leave a comment

I took a long, hard bike ride at the weekend, hoping to learn something about my dead father. In the end, I found out something unexpected about me and my own children.

A path through countryside

MY DAD committed suicide almost a quarter of a century ago, and yet I am still in a relationship with him. 

He still makes me angry, because – before he asphyxiated himself with his car exhaust – he left my brother a loving note and chose not to write to me.

He still makes me insecure, because he obviously didn’t like me much.

And this rage and self-doubt he left me with combine – still – to put me in preposterous competition with a man who has been in the ground almost 25 years. 

I want to beat him by living longer (tick); by being a better Dad (tick?) and by beating my own depression (tick, sort of). 

And at the weekend, I was going to be better than him on the bike. 

Continue reading “The Long Road To Forgiving My Father” →