How Cycling Changed My Life

I can still remember the moment my life changed; it was an instant. It took 3 or 4 rotations of the pedals on my rental bicycle through the forest to know I had stumbled onto something magical.

That’s how long it took me to rediscover my love of cycling and realise I had found a way to conquer the dark clouds that would build slowly but surely on the horizon every so often.

Suddenly I’d found a way to explore the world on my own terms. A way to push my body to its limits whilst taking in new and old sights from an elevated perspective.

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), author of Sherlock Holmes

Cycling changed my life.

That’s some statement but absolutely true. It’s also quite peculiar when you consider the life I had at the point. I had recently become a dad and in fact on the dreary October afternoon I decided at the last minute to wander into the forest from our local bike rental store, I was due to pick up my daughter from nursery.

My wife and I were enjoying married life as well as raising our daughter together. Work was work but providing us with what we needed. I had my health, good family and a few good friends.

So on the surface, life was pretty good. But that’s the thing sometimes with the surface; it can be woefully deceptive. The reality was far from the serene picture it appeared.

Life has a way of taking the wind out of your sails slowly, ebbing away at your spirit moment by moment without you even realising it to the point where you’ve got nothing left but aren’t sure where it all went. The “it” might be referred to in many ways, perhaps spiritual energy, emotional energy — life energy. What it was, there wasn’t much left.

Cycling helped me to get it back and these are the reasons why:

1 – Something To Get Excited About

Once I became a parent my entire focus shifted.

Overnight the most critical thing in life became keeping my daughter happy as usually everything else flowed from there; if she was happy, the whole house was happy, if she wasn’t then oh boy my wife and I would hear about it.