I’ve always said that if you can ride a bicycle 1 kilometer, you can ride for 5 kilometers. And if you can ride 5k, you can make 10k. Then, if you reach 10k, you’ll be able to get to 20k. If you’re able to ride for 20k, you’ll be able to get to 50k, and if you can do 50k, then 100k is attainable. Experience will show anyone that making 100 kilometers by bike means they can pedal for any distance at all.
How do I know this? It’s been my own experience. When I first started to get serious about daily cycling around 2010-11, the roughly 30 kilometer journey into central Tokyo was a day trip. I had already been riding for a while by that time, but never great distances. It was always trips of 1-10 kilometers.
But heading into the city meant leaving early in the morning, stopping frequently, getting lots of rest and refreshments along the way, then repeating the pattern on the way home in the late afternoon. It was a round trip of about 60 kilometers spread out over a full day and punctuated by hours of recuperation in between stints of pedalling.
A trip into town would require days of rest to recover. But then, things changed. I’d ride more frequently and need less rest. Then, I realized my average speed was improving. I began aiming to make the journey with an average speed of 20 kilometers per hour. When I started achieving that regularly, I began cutting down, then eliminating, rest breaks. Weekend work shifts provided an opportunity to ride into the office, which showed me that I was capable of commuting daily by bike. I’d cut down what had been a full day trip into a commute of little more than an hour each way.
By the time covid hit, I was cycling close on (and over in one case) 30,000 kilometers a year, and doing it with ease. The benefits were enormous in terms of health, physically and mentally. Life intervened, as it has a tendency to do, and my cycling volume spiralled downward, but not quite ever reaching a prolonged halt.
That was until a couple of months ago when I slipped and broke my leg, pretty seriously as it turned out. I was off the bike for the better part of two months. I’m not supposed to be back on the bike yet, but my physiotherapist was much keener on me getting active than the orthapedic surgeon who banned me from doing so on the eve of the holiday season, so I figured I’d go with my gut feeling.
Given that I have a considerably more impressive midriff than I had at the time of injury because I have been inactive for so long, I reckon the greater girth also added weight to my hunch, so I have been riding again. My muscles have atrophied, stamina disappeared and energy is depleted. But I get to draw on my original experiences for encouragement, knowing that the more I ride, the better I’ll get. I’ll never get back to my peak cycling prowess, such as it was, but I don’t need to. I do, however, hope to appreciate cycling for the joy it brings me, its health benefits, and the more acute view of life that it provides if I don’t get on the bike.
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