"Cycling is my mistress. Not in the way people whisper behind closed doors. In the way something calls your name, long after you should've outgrown it. In the way a quiet obsession becomes a second pulse. She's the one who wakes me before sunrise. She's the one who pulls me out the door when logic says "not today." She's the one who knows the version of me no one else sees-the tired, hurting, stubborn, grateful, alive version. My wife sees the man. The bike sees the animal underneath."
"And if that sounds dramatic, then you haven't pedaled 70 miles into the wind with nothing but your breath and your thoughts holding you together. You haven't had a moment where the whole world collapses down to a crank, a chain, and a patch of pavement six feet ahead. The road keeps secrets -the kind even a marriage can't dig out. Every mile I've ridden, I've confessed something to the asphalt."
"The fears I don't say out loud. The grief I carry quietly. The anger I pretend doesn't bother me. The dreams I'm stubborn enough to still chase at seventy. There's no judgment out there. No expectation. No performance. Just sweat, breath, and truth. You can't lie on a bicycle. Your legs won't let you."
Cycling serves as a confessional and relentless companion that draws the rider out before dawn and sustains them through solitary miles. The physical strain forces honesty by removing social masks and exposing raw emotion. Long rides concentrate experience to immediate sensations: breath, muscle, gear, and pavement, while enabling private reckoning with fear, grief, anger, and enduring ambitions. The relationship with cycling contrasts with marital intimacy by revealing a primal, animal self beneath the social self. The road offers no judgment or expectation, only the unvarnished truth that emerges when legs and lungs refuse falsehood.
Read at Theoldguybicycleblog
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