Halfway up the Squaw Pass road from Bergen Park to Echo Lake, I pulled my bike to the shoulder at the sound of a strange creaking in the woods.
It turned out to be an aspen scratching the back of a neighboring tree, where a bare spot inscribed in the bark attested to a relationship that renewed itself with every fresh breeze.
That, I thought, is something nobody would witness driving by in a car.
Sounds, sights, smells that go unnoticed when you’re sitting behind a windshield become vivid and often memorable when you’re pedaling along the same route on a bicycle.
The melodic greeting of a meadowlark. The gurgle of a spring-fed stream. Flowers sprouting knee-high beside a culvert. An elk lurking in the dark timber. A coyote patrolling a fenceline. Three shades of green in pines on a hillside. A hint of vanilla emanating from a stand of ponderosa. The sharp odor of road kill, making its presence known yards before you pass it.
Then there are the audible reminders of what you’re doing: the whir of well-tuned spokes, the clicking of maladjusted gears, the thump of wheels striking sidewalk cracks you would naturally leap if you were on foot.
Even taste can come into play, as you sample the salty residue left on your helmet strap by the sweat on your brow.
On a bicycle, all your senses are engaged, for riding is above all a physical experience. From your fingers, curled around the brake levers, to your toes, ensconced in rigid-soled shoes, your body – at least on the best days – becomes one with the machine, mixing exertion with endurance, strength with fluidity. The visceral rhythm of the pedal strokes, the balance between push and pull, the back-pressure of the wind – all can combine to tranform even a mundane training ride into something beyond mere exercise.
And yet, it’s the psychosocial aspect of riding that keeps me putting in time in the saddle year after year. Besides its obvious health benefits, cycling gives you a great feeling of camaraderie, whether you’re out for an afternoon with friends or on a week-long tour with hundreds of others. Paradoxically, it also can give you plenty of opportunity to be alone with your thoughts, to let your mind run loose, to daydream in a way that’s impossible or inadvisable with other modes of travel.
True, some such musings may be mere mental thumbtwiddling, like my recent pondering over the difference between the terms leveling off and leveling out (leveling “out,” I decided, has a more extended connotation) or my calculation of how much faster I would get up the 8 miles left to the summit by upping my speed to 6 miles per hour from 5 mph.
But given enough time and distance, you may be able to do something more productive, like lay plans for your next vacation, reshape your career goals, sort out the pros and cons of a new relationship or think through some other personal challenge.
Beyond all this, riding rewards you with the feeling that you’re actually getting somewhere. Even if you’re doing a loop, you’re moving. And in a world where much of the time you may be stuck in a scenario that never changes, that alone can keep your spirit from going flat.
Staff writer Jack Cox, who will embark Sunday on his 20th Ride the Rockies tour, can be reached at 303-820-1785 or jcox@denverpost.com.
