Why I Ride… A Seven Day Series on Social Media
note: this series supports my 2023 American Diabetes Foundation Tour de Cure fundraising campaign and was originally published in the Spring of 2023 as a series of posts on social media.
Why I Ride, Day 1: To Change My Body, To Manage My Inherited Risk of T2DM
Diabetes runs in my family. Risk factors for Type II diabetes, unlike Type I, are inherited. And with that inherited risk come other health complications like high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.
It is not an exaggeration to say most of my close relatives in my family have experienced these complications and some live with and must manage them everyday. Some saw their lives shortened significantly as a result of these.
I live with a similar level of risk for these complications. And in 2006, when I got my diagnosis, I was already showing the signs of more serious health risks beginning to impact my own life. I knew that if I didn’t take action, my own life could be shorter. I could have a heart attack or a stroke at a relatively young age. At that time, I was a new dad.
I wanted to make sure that I was able to see my daughter grow up and be around for her. And I wanted to keep my options open for living a long and active life.
So after talking to my doctor and doing some research, I got serious about a couple of things. One was paying attention to my nutrition and especially to foods that impacted my blood glucose and blood pressure. (for more about that, see Leslie Hart-Davidson’s awesome book Food Is Love and especially the chapter called Food is Medicine!). The other was riding a bike.
By doing both of those things in a deliberate way, I have been able to control most of my T2DM risk factors consistently over the last 17 years. I have had a normal HbA1c and low cardiac risk scores for over fifteen years. Riding a bike is a big part of that. Staying active by pedaling — many days just for 30 minutes on a stationary bike in the house — is life changing. For the better.
And when I started to understand how much it could help, I was motivated to spread the word. I think that riding a bike, and especially riding a stationary bike indoors, is a safe and easy way for folks to reduce their T2DM risk that can help many, many people!
Why I Ride Day 2: To Honor All of Those For Whom Riding Isn’t or Wasn’t an Option
When I get on my bike each day, I think about how lucky I am that I have this — something I love to do — as an option to save my life.
Both Leslie, my wife, and I lost our fathers to cancer. We’ve lost friends and colleagues this way. And Leslie lost her brother to cancer as well. Many of my grandparents, including two who had diabetes, we lost to heart disease.
At various moments in the lives of those we’ve lost, I saw them get to a place where they would have done just about anything they could to save their lives. Sign up for a an experimental clinical trial? Take chemotherapy drugs with side effects as bad as the disease they were intended to treat? Yes.
Where I ride on my indoor trainer, I have a photo of Leslie’s dad on one side of me and a photo of my dad along with an urn with his ashes on the other side. I keep them in front of me because I am riding in their honor. I am doing what they never had the good fortune to be able to do. Ride a bike to get and stay healthy.
I ride because I can never take that for granted. We’ve lost too many. And I know too many who would give anything for a bike to be their medicine. The bike is my Rx. It has saved and is saving my life. And I am grateful beyond words for it.
Why I Ride Day 3: To Inspire and Be in Solidarity with Others for Whom Riding Can Help
A funny thing happened after I started riding, saw my own health improve, and began to talk and share more about that on social media. Folks reached out to me wanting to hear more!
I post a lot on social media without necessarily expecting anyone will read or respond. I do it often to motivate myself, as a kind of show of accountability. And so when I started talking about riding and managing my T2DM risk, I didn’t know if anyone would pay much attention. But to my surprise, they have. And they stil do!
Most of the time — like 90% — they reach out quietly rather than commenting in public. I get emails or DMs or text messages. There is a pattern. First, they thank me. They say they are glad I have been sharing and that, even if i didn’t realize it, my words are being seen and heard.
Then, they may ask me a question or for some advice. It is often for themselves or sometimes for other people they love. It is usually about how to get started making their own changes…and this can take a number of forms. One is “what should I look for when buying a new bike? Or a new indoor trainer?” Another is “ok, I have a bike, what should my workouts look like?”
What folks also want to know are things they may not ask outright like…”can I do this? Is this going to make a difference the way it has for you? How long before I see some benefits?”
I know many people now who have changed their bodies and changed their lives for the better. We have a special bond, kind of like colleagues or teammates do. We are people of the bike. People for whom bikes make a difference not just in our daily commute or our recreation time. But in how long we will be on this Earth and the quality of our days.
I am so glad y’all are out there. I love hearing from you. And I want you to know that I ride for you too!
Why I Ride, Day 4: Because Bikeface… Its’ Fun!
My dear friend Dr. Patti Bills is my hero and a hero to many others. She rides bikes. She fixes and builds bikes. She teaches others to ride bikes. She raises money for the JDRF, an amazing organization that helps children with T1DM.
Patti Bills invented the most perfect word for the state of being one finds oneself in while in the saddle, zipping along a stretch of perfect country road on a perfect day, wind in your helmet sporting a big, irrepressible grin. She calls it “bikeface.” And man is it ever great.
For most of us, bikeface first happened when we were kids. That feeling of freedom, of gaining a little speed as you turn over the pedals, or as you stand on the cranks going down a little hill… Back when you didn’t need any particular reason or to have anywhere to go to just “ride bikes.” Riding bikes was the whole point!
Now days, there are more serious and/or practical reasons why I ride. For my health. To get to work. But I cannot deny that even when those are motivating me, I’m still every bit as excited to just…ride bikes. That sense of being a kid again, the sound of the wheels on the tarmac, it’s…bikeface! And I can’t get enough of it.
Why I Ride, Day 5: To Reset My Defaults About What Makes Life Worthwhile
My own riding activity can get…pretty epic. I am the first to tell anyone and everyone that you don’t need to ride the way I ride to get all the same joy and health benefits from a bike. But it’s true that I can take things to extremes sometimes. I have done many century rides, for instance, which is one hundred miles in a day. And I’ve ridden in some amazing places up mountains, over the continental divide, and traversed the state of Michigan via multiple routes.
Why, pray tell, would I want to do all that? Well, let me say again that this sort of riding isn’t really for the health benefits. Being healthy and using a bike to do it does not require you to ride across the Mitten in one day. But…doing that sort of ride does something else to change my life for the better that I think is worthwhile.
Epic days in the saddle that exceed even your own conceptions of what you are capable of have a wonderful side effect. They make you appreciate all of the little parts of life that give you comfort and make our modern existence easy. You will never appreciate cold, fresh water more than after a long, hot, dusty ride. And food. OMG. Food is magic after you spend three or four hours climbing a mountain on your bike. Pasta… are you kidding me? Ambrosia from the gods!
How about sleeping in a bed after four days of doing back-to-back centuries and sleeping in a tent? Unbelievable.
A day of pushing my limits on a bike can really do wonders for helping me appreciate all that is easy to take for granted on a typical day. And its really, really good to reset the defaults that way, I find.
Trust me, a cold dill pickle spear on a 90 degree day at the 70 mile rest stop of a century will inspire gratitude!
Why I Ride, Day 6: To Be in My Body Rather than Only in My Head
My day job is to be a university professor and, these days, an administrator. I spend a lot of time looking at screens, attending meetings to solve complex problems, and of course reading and writing words. That’s a lot of time to spend in my own head!
There are stretches when the work deadlines pile up that I feel like a brain in a jar. Just thinking and thinking and writing and reviewing for hours. I can forget I even have a body at all.
When I started my career, really when I was in graduate school for my PhD, I was immersed in days, weeks, and months of that sort of work. I spent more than a decade in that “brain in a jar” mode, in fact, before I realized that while it was animating the advancement of my career, it was also taking a toll on my health. Mental and eventually physical.
I had learn — or maybe re-learn — that my brain lives in my body, and that in fact these two are part of the same whole being! That if I didn’t take notice of my body and live in it as though I was an owner and not merely a tenant, I would feel worse and worse.
Today, riding a bike is an important way for me to feel like I can be MORE in my body than in my head, and I can feel good about taking that time knowing that if I do, I am not sacrificing any productivity but rather working to sustain it.
This is also a big part of why I ride the way I ride. I tend to prefer riding on the road and I even like riding on the trainer. Yes you heard me. Why? Because I don’t have to make very many decisions! One thing I don’t do regularly on a bike is ride on technical trails. I don’t own a mountain bike. I think they are great and I know they are super fun. But a mountain bike ride piles up more of what I am typically using my bike to get away from: decisions!
A road ride, especially outdoors, isn’t without decisions of course. But it’s a different feeling of being immersed, shutting out all but the stream of information I need to be safe, and then just finding a steady rhythm on the pedals. Ahhhh. In that moment, I’m a body acting as an engine for a bike and not a brain in a jar. The goal: make the watts and enjoy the bikeface!
Why I Ride, Day 7: To Find My Limit(s) and to Know Myself Better
Something that has always been a part of my personality and my character is also a deeply motivating factor for me on the bike. I know that not everyone feels the way I do about this issue. Indeed, I’m a weirdo even in my own household when it comes to this…but I really, really want to find my limits.
Now this does not apply ONLY on the bike. It’s one of those things about me that, once you know it, defines so much of what I do and how I do it.
But among its many other qualities, a bicycle is an almost perfect machine for testing the limits of human physical effort. Pick your category: Strength? Speed? Raw power? Endurance? Efficiency? It’s so good, in fact, that a stationary bike is the gold standard for many human athletic benchmarks regardless of the sport that one is playing.
A little story about that. I participated in a NASA study a few years back. It was evaluating the physical and motivational conditions needed to keep astronauts living in zero gravity for long periods of time healthy. I did a challenging workout every day, supervised by scientists, on a calibrated stationary bike. Every day they measured my vital signs, my watts and cadence, and my state of mind (via a questionnaire). And three times during the study, they evaluated my performance as an athlete with state-of-the art tests in a lab. This included blood tests for lactate threshold and my V02 max. These are the kinds of tests that are usually unavailable to all but elite athletes due to the equipment, expertise and of course costs of performing them.
The same lab was testing our hockey players one day using the same stationary bike. Now hockey is different than cycling, but of course these were D1 NCAA elite athletes, lifelong hockey players, many of whom had career aspirations in the NHL. They were well-trained for physically demanding shifts on the ice. So when I was in the lab, doing my tests as they were doing theirs, I couldn’t help but ask the technician how I stacked up…
The answer was surprising! Not surprising was that I had nowhere near their top-end power numbers. But… I beat them all in being able to sustain my threshold power, a measure of my overall efficiency in an endurance situation. Not bad for an almost 50 year old guy at the time!
I love knowing where my limits are not in absolute terms. But on any given day. I’m driven to ask and to know: what can I do? Can I still do X that I used to be able to? Can I get better and do more tomorrow than I can today?
Luckily I don’t have to sign up for a NASA study or compete against D1 hockey players to answer this question. I just need to get on my bike every day.
