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bikerace by redfloor

I don’t know about anyone else, but coasting is one of the highlights of biking for me. After building up some momentum, or working hard to get up a hill, it’s a great moment to let the wind hit your face, stop pedaling and breathe for a moment.  So of course, biking also fits into my extended metaphor. Here’s what I learned about coasting.

You can’t coast uphill

If there is one thing that I wish I could change about biking, this would be it. Imagine being on one of those extended hills, your legs hurt, and you are only half way up. If you could just take a moment and let momentum carry you, the rest of the trip would be easier. The problem is, you lose so much momentum that you have to work harder to get back up to speed than you would have if you were just moving at a constant speed to begin with.

Similarly, there are some times in your life where slowing down will hurt you badly. As I just started grad school/seminary, I can tell you from experience, your assigned reading is one of those places. Like I said in a couple of posts before, there are times in your life where you simply must keep pedalling.

It’s okay to coast after a hill

So what do you do? You push over the hill, and you use the other side to regain your energy. It’s ok, and even healthy to relax during the downhill stretches. While there will be many people who tell you otherwise (sometimes parents, sometimes fixed gear enthusiasts) I personally recommend taking some time after your hill to appreciate what you’ve just accomplished and to reap the benefits you’ve worked hard for.

Pedaling downhill can make your uphill easier

That being said, there are times when a strategic decision to work harder in a downtime pays off significantly.  If you are heading into a valley, which is to say, starting approaching a downhill segment that leads directly into an uphill segment. Using the acceleration that the hill provides as you go down, in addition to your own leg power, can give you enough momentum to help push you up and maybe over the next hill.

Coasting horizontally is ok too

Because sometimes, the natural ebb and flow of a situation does not coincide with what you personally need to survive. In which case, don’t feel guilty, if you have some momentum going, to take a little bit of time to recharge. This may simply be taking a day off, stepping outside and going for a walk, or turning off your email for a couple of hours. It isn’t something you want to do all the time, but a well placed rest can be a beautiful thing.

keep rollin rollin rollin by Nico van Diem

So as I continue biking to work a couple times, I start learning about my own level of fitness, how quickly I can get there, and how tired I’d be when I arrived. For the most part things like that were consistent. There were some days, where the ride would, for no apparent reason, take longer and be much more difficult, and other days where it would be surprisingly easy. The reason remained hidden to me until I started noticing the wind.

While I was taking the bus I never cared about the wind, beyond how cold it would make waiting at the bus stop. But as I started biking I realized that the wind could make as much difference to my commute as hills did, and to handle it correctly I had to adjust my speed, the gear I was pedaling in, and my expectations according to how the wind was blowing.

In the same way, there are intangibles that can have as much influence on the success or failure of any effort as the tangibles. Things like culture, attitude, perception, vision, relationships are key intangibles that we should be paying attention to, particularly in ministry. Instead, we work on all the tangibles, things like program, curriculum, software and wonder why it’s so much harder to do the same thing today.

Similarly, we often substitute the tangible goals (e.g. number of attendees at a racial reconciliation workshop) for the intangible goals that are at the heart of what we are working for (e.g. having people dedicated to being anti-racism). We’ll often hit what we aim at, but it may not be what we want.

What are some ways that you’ve seen the intangibles important in your work?

Journey to Myself from humblebee - sxc.hu

The first days when I started biking to work, I made a rookie mistake that I believe must be pretty common. See, every time a biker (or even a car) would approach me from behind I would speed up. Instinctively I believed that I should be travelling as fast as they were, after all we were on the same road and in the case of bikes, travelling using the same vehicle. The result was predictable, I usually burned myself out during the first part of my ride, making the second half much harder.

At the same time I found someone online talking about cadence. In biking terms, cadence is the rhythm at which you are pumping your legs. Many sites suggested that while biking, you should aim for a cadence of 60 – 120 full cycles per minute. Cadence became the solution to my speed problem. Here’s what I learned, and how I think it applies to life beyond biking.

• Use your cadence to determine your workload, not your speed: Aiming to travel at the same speed of the other bikers was counter-productive. It made it harder for me to finish the trip that I had started on. What worked was to find a rate of energy output that was appropriate for me, my level of fitness and my bike and use the amount that is healthy for me to work to determine the rate at which I got work done.
• Gear down to keep your cadence constant: While biking, if you are using such a high gear that you can’t keep up your cadence can be damage your knees.  In biking, and in life, there is no shame in gearing down when the circumstances make your journey difficult, and no glory in trying to be badass about hills. In biking, it’s healthy to gear down when you are going up a hill. In life it’s healthy to cut back on things when life screws up, doing otherwise can be damaging.
• Gearing up is a good thing too: Here’s the funny thing about biking. Biking in too low of a gear ends up being more tiring than biking in a higher gear (or two). It’s unexpected, but you do yourself and your goal no favors by setting the bar so low that it takes very little effort to achieve it.

In essence, instead of determining your acceptable level of work by the level of work of those around you, you need to look at your own abilities and circumstances, and set a pace that is natural and challenging for you, and avoid trying too hard to match folks around you, not taking your circumstances into consideration, or setting the bar to low.

rollin' by DerMatze - sxc.hu

I used to bike to work almost every day for a couple of years, and while biking there were some things that I’ve noticed about biking that seems to apply to life in general. I’ve always wanted to write them down somewhere, and I guess my blog is a good place to do it (plus it gives me a fallback when I need posting inspiration). Here’s the first.

When you start biking, you realize something pretty quickly. Biking to work is hard. Your legs tire out pretty quickly, you start breathing hard. Ok, maybe that’s just me.

In any case, the first couple times I tried to bike for any real distance, I got tired, decided this was too hard, and I should stop for a bit. So I pulled over to the side and took a short rest break. My hope was that this would give me some energy for the rest of the trip. I actually found that the opposite was true. Once I stopped pedaling, my body seemed to decide that it was time to acknowledge how tired it was, and the short rest was not long enough for it to recuperate. Not only that, but I had lost any momentum I had up to that point, and I the trip was just as long as it was before I took a break.

There are three things that this taught me that is applicable to regular life.

1. My legs can do more than I think it can: When we push ourselves then we see what we are truly capable of, not just what is easy for us.
2. Momentum is a powerful thing: It’s a lot easier to keep going than it is to restart
3. The trip will always be the same length: Stopping in the middle does not magically make the last half of the trip shorter. Eventually you still need to the work to finish the trip.

The bottom line, is that if you mean to accomplish something, whether biking or in life, sometimes you just need to keep pushing through until it is done.