The Ups
Cycling is essentially the art of spending absurd amounts of money to reduce your travel time from "quite slow" to "slightly less slow," all while wearing clothing designed explicitly to highlight every insecurity you have about your body. Riders willingly sit on seats that would make medieval torture devices blush, pedaling furiously to maintain a speed easily surpassed by casual dogs chasing squirrels.
Cyclists are often found defending the aerodynamic benefits of shaving legs or debating whether titanium water bottle cages truly save those crucial two grams of weight—because clearly, that's what’s holding them back, not the three donuts they had at breakfast. They're a unique breed who can rationalize buying a carbon-fiber helmet worth the GDP of a small island nation, yet insist on patching a punctured tire twelve times before replacing it.
Every cyclist's greatest skill isn't climbing hills or sprinting; it's ignoring the gentle but persistent voice whispering, "Why didn’t you just take the car?" Meanwhile, the general public assumes cyclists love the environment, fitness, or personal growth, when in reality, most are just chasing an excuse to eat more pizza or justify mid-ride coffee stops that last longer than the actual ride itself.
Ultimately, cycling remains oddly addictive. Maybe it's the thrill of dodging angry geese, the constant fear of getting stuck in clipless pedals at traffic lights, or simply the quiet pride in wearing padded shorts without embarrassment. Whatever the reason, cyclists keep pedaling, blissfully ignoring logic and common sense one overly-priced component at a time.
The Downs
Cycling starts innocently enough. You think, "It’s just a bike, how expensive could it be?" Fast forward two weeks and you've remortgaged your house for a derailleur made of aerospace-grade unobtainium and a saddle that claims to be “ergonomically designed,” but feels like punishment for sins you haven’t committed yet.
Somewhere along the way, you learn to speak fluent nonsense. Words like cadence, FTP, and chamois cream enter your daily vocabulary. You start referring to roads by gradient percentages instead of names. Hills aren’t just hills anymore—they’re segments, opportunities, cruel personal vendettas from the gods of gravity.
Cyclists have a very specific relationship with pain. Too much? Ride through it. Too little? Push harder. Injury? Ice, ibuprofen, and denial. There’s no such thing as a minor discomfort—only a training opportunity. And yet these same people will complain endlessly if the barista forgets the almond milk in their post-ride flat white.
No one ever tells you how weirdly obsessive you’ll become. You’ll spend 40 minutes adjusting your seat by half a millimeter. You’ll track your rides with military precision, obsess over heart rate zones, and refuse to stop mid-ride unless there’s a very good bakery involved. Social events get scheduled around “long ride days,” and bad weather becomes less a deterrent and more of a bragging right.
There’s also a strange kind of solidarity on the road. You wave to strangers you’d never speak to in real life, nod solemnly at suffering, and bond over mutual loathing of headwinds. But the moment someone overtakes you on a climb, that solidarity evaporates and it’s war.
Conclusion
In the end, cycling makes no real sense—but somehow, that’s the whole point. You suffer, you sweat, you curse the hills and the wind and your life choices. And then the next day, you get back on the bike like an amnesiac with a credit card and a weird urge to pedal into the horizon again.
