How do you respond when someone says, “Bicy-cling is good exercise; that must be what keeps you so slim.” Or when someone asks, “How do you occupy your mind while cycling? Don’t you get bored?”
One response is to acknowledge the comments and then change the conversation since the passion that drives hard-core cyclists is difficult to explain to those who have never experienced it. Another re-sponse is to suggest books that portray the spirit of strong, passionate cycling. Two I like are Tim Krab-bé’s The Rider and Mike Magnuson’s Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180. On their co-vers, one book is described as “a cycling classic” and the other as “so much fun you’re nearly tempted to skip your next ride and keep turning the pages.”
On the surface, these two narratives differ sharp-ly. Krabbé is a Dutch chess player and novelist who in his youth was an amateur bicycle racer. First pub-lished in 1978 in Dutch, his book is described as a
sports novel or autobiographical novel. He builds his story around a single race—the mythical Tour de Mont Aigoual in 1977. Magnuson, a novelist, essayist, and teacher of creative writing at Southern Illinois University, tells about one year of his life when he changed from being the fat man who couldn’t keep up on the group rides at Carbondale Cycle to the one who on many nights was strongest of them all. Krabbé’s story combines a minute-by-minute account of one race with flashbacks from The Rider’s several-year history of competitive cycling. Heroes in the story include some of the great names of European cycling. In contrast, Magnuson sketches his life-long fascination with cycling and intertwines a second plot, his twenty-five years of chain-smoking, hard drinking, and Double Whoppers with cheese.
Keith Watkins writes on religious history, theology, and bicycling.
He lives in Vancouver, Washington, just north of the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. [email protected]
If there is a hero in Magnuson’s transformation, it is the Lance Armstrong who, following recovery from cancer, slogged his way up Boone Mountain in a driving rain and decided to pedal back down instead of giving up his bike and his career as a competitive cyclist. And also a man named Saki, now deceased, who was the heart and soul of Carbondale Cycle and its gang of skinny, aggressive, care-for-one-another cyclists. (On my one visit to Carbondale a few years ago, Saki befriended even me, despite the fact that I couldn’t keep up with the guys on an easy evening ride.)
The one thing about these two books that makes them alike, despite their differences, is that they re-veal how the mind works when cycling is near the center of a rider’s being. No matter how brutal the body game of cycling, for Krabbé and Magnuson the mind game challenges even more. Even though it is
always affected by the glucose and oxygen supplied by its bodily host, cognitive power still commands, controls, and overrides the muscles that beg for relief.
With his intense, emotionally charged descriptions, Krabbé keeps readers focused on the race itself, describing the fast mental game of strategy and tactics. He reveals the pro-cess of testing oneself and others in the race, of establishing momentary alliances by means of subtle nods and whispers, of risking everything in the unintended breakaways that crack a race wide open and sometimes destroy a racer’s chance to win. Krabbé re-veals the bodily pain and the mind’s anguish during a race. The fleeting memories of The Rider’s personal history interrupt the flow of the race, but they build suspense as he rides to its dénouement. Describing the dramatic finish of the race, The Rider says: “Right now I’m a com-plete rag. I open my eyes and my mouth wide. I get my legs back when they’re turning again. I have a black heart pumping powerlessness to all parts of my body.” Early in his book, Krabbé quotes a great French cyclist, Jacques Anquetil: a rider “is made up of two parts, a person and a bike.” Extending the metaphor, Krabbé says: “Of the two, the mind, of course, is the rider. That this mind has recourse to two instruments, a body and a bicycle—both of which have to be as light as possible—doesn’t really mat-ter.” The trouble with some cyclists, he was thinking to himself, was that they were only bodies, lacking the mind to direct the body to go beyond its limits. Although Magnuson’s book is a cyclist’s story, it is even more a testimony to per-sonal redemption. He started smoking and drinking when still in high school. He also loved bicycles in a tremendously passionate way and during his early twenties was riding 250 miles a week. Magnuson gave up cycling, however, to “major in tavern sports.” In graduate studies and his early years as a college teacher of creative writing, he continued a way of life that combined work, family, hard drinking, and a certain degree of aggres-sive cycling that generated internal anger because he couldn’t keep up. On his thirty-ninth birthday, realizing that he had to choose which sport was more important, Magnuson quit smoking, and soon thereafter the drinking stopped, too. Then
Passion on Two Wheels 3
came a crash diet. Hard cycling and the radical change in his pattern of ingestion dropped his weight from 255 pounds to 180. Even when he resumed a more normal diet, he main-tained his abstinence from smoking and drinking and continued his hard, near compulsive cycling. His family life changed significantly for the better, and his professional life was radically transformed.
When he wrote his book, at age forty, Magnuson declared: “my quality of life is the best it’s ever been…There’s much, much work yet to do—on the bike, with my career, with my family, my personal relationships—and in order to do work of any sort, with any degree of competence, a person needs to be self-critical, not in a destructive way but in a way that generates the motivation to continue improving.” Magnuson’s graphic descriptions of his cycling experience imply that while the bi-cycle was the instrument of his transformation, it can do the same for other people only if they are committed to cycling with a deeply seated passion. Describing a terribly difficult race up a steep mountain in a driving rain, he reports that “people are stopping, getting off their bikes and pushing them, or simply sitting in the ditch and placing their heads in their hands—but I don’t stop pedaling. “The Red-necked Phalarope spins endlessly in circles because that is what he’s meant to do on Earth; I ride my bicycle because that’s what I’m meant to do. I’ll never stop pedal-ing.” Reaching the summit, Magnuson hands his bicycle over to a volunteer. “When the bicycle slips from my hands and the worker wheels it away into the rainy mountaintop distance, I burst into tears.” For thirty-five years, I have been an aggressive cyclist. Although I’ve never entered bike races, I’ve done long, intensive rides and have experienced some of the dynamics that Krabbé and Magnuson describe—riding against myself and pushing hard in tours and long distance events. While my devotion to the sport has been less intense than Krabbé’s and Magnuson’s, my mental processes have been similar to theirs. These two books, The Rider and Heft on Wheels, portray the enduring experience of passion on two wheels. Magnuson states the matter well when he declares that cycling is more than exercise and recreation. It is a way of life.
Note: These two books have been around for a decade and more, but their usefulness con-tinues: The Rider by Tim Krabbé. Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2002). Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180 by Mike Mag-nuson (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004). An earlier version of this review was written in January 2007. This revised version was published in my electronic journal in November 2014.
