The author of the blog Lovely Bicycle says for a while she couldn’t get past the first line of the historic cycling memoir about bike racing, The Rider: “Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafes. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.” What bugs her, she explains, is roadies’ tendency to “…intellectualise and aestheticise cycling. If I ask a typical hockey playing acquaintance, ‘Hey, why do you play hockey?’ He will grin and sort of shrug and say, ‘Oh you know… It’s hockey, I love it,’ And he leaves it at that. He does not write or visit philosophical blogs about hockey.” What she ponders here, even as she’s a huge fan of cycling, is the very disturbing tendency among roadies to solipsistically believe that what they do is noble, and superior not just to other forms of sport, but even to any other form of riding a bicycle.

Read more awesome outdoor stories like this at Adventure Journal.

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