Be sure to really suffer out there!
Among the books I got this Xmas were two with a common theme: bicycle racing. Having little else to do this week, I sat down and read them both on Saturday, and I found an interesting, if not totally unexpected, commonality.
First, I’d like to share a few citations with you. I’ve kept a larger part of the context, but I’ve bolded the particularly pertinent sections.
The first excerpt is from Tim Krabbé’s novel “The Rider”, his not-really-fictional telling of his participation in the 150k half-day Tour de Mont Aigoual race. It’s one of the few true classics of the genre: In interviews with riders that I’ve read and in conversations I’ve had with them, the same thing always comes up: the best part was the suffering. […] How can that be: suffering is suffering, isn’t it? […] Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. ‘Good for you.’ Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few suitors these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms she rewards passionately. That’s why there are riders. Suffering you need; literature is baloney.
The next two excepts are from Lance Armstrong’s new/second book, “Every Second Counts”: I’d suffered more in winning the Tour a second time […] But in a way, suffering made it more gratifying. Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a life as bliss. It’s a great enhancer. It might last a minute, or a month, but eventually it subsides, and when it does, something else takes its place, and maybe that thing is a greater space. For happiness. Each time I encountered suffering, I believed that I grew, and further defined my capacities-not just my physical ones, but my interior ones as well, for contentment, friendship, or any other human experience.
And he goes on to say: The experience of suffering is like the experience of exploring, of finding something unexpected and revelatory. When you find the outermost thresholds of pain, or fear, or uncertainty, what you experience is an expansive feeling, a widening of your capabilities. Pain is good because it teaches your body and soul to improve.
Here’s one final example, from Paul Fournel’s Oulipo avant-garde classic “Need for the Bike”, wherein he talks about bonking, which he calls “blowing up”: Why not give up the bike after a blowup? Because the blowup is a journey, and the cyclist is first and foremost a traveler. Then because, after a blowup, your organism is altered. There’s a kind of purification in falling flat, an impression of fasting. A threshold is crossed …
I find it interesting that suffering is such a universal thread in writing about cycling. The discussions go far beyond the more familiar “no pain, no gain” mantra and describe suffering as necessary, integral to happiness, and even transformational. The texts, especially Krabbé and Fournel, wax poetic when talking about the suffering of cyclists, reading more like Zen Buddhism or Existential philosophy than a description of riding a bike. Here’s more of Fournel’s treatise on bonking. Note the eloquence and panache that he uses to describe this most humbling of experiences. There are warning signs of a blowup, but they aren’t appreciably different from from the signs of normal tiredness. Now that I think about it, metaphysical anxiety might be one hint. Riding is absurd-climbing to descend, going in circles, behind this mountain there’s another, why hurry? … Riding is absurd like peeling vegetables, skiing, thinking deeply, or living. The moment these questions come up, while you’re riding, you should take note. That’s when your quads are demanding more oxygen from your heart than your lungs can provide. That’s when it gets foggy. If you’re on a friend’s wheel, he’ll pull away by two bike-lengths without accelerating. You come back, dancing on your pedals, but then you lose the two lengths again. You do this rubber-band trick ten or so times, and then you let him go, telling yourself you’ll catch up soon. In fact, the next time you see him is when he turns around and comes back, worried, to find out what happened. At that point you won’t recognize him, or, better yet, you’ll recognize him, but only as someone who might buy your disgusting bike.
Well, if drugs make for more interesting novelists, and tortured lives make for better painters and composers, why shouldn’t the kind of cycling-induced mental impairment I talk about in this previous post (Defining the Natural High, 6/11/03) produce better philosophers? It does, however, make me wonder about my recent enquiries into Existentialism and Buddhism, though!