I've never been a huge fan of math. That may sound suspicious to those of you who know my educational background, but it's the truth. I can DO math, but it's a necessary evil of sorts. I don't like anything where there is one and only one right answer. I prefer to view the angles.
Biking however can easily become a litany of digits. Numbers bound freely around the conversation of longtime cyclists. mileage, kilometers, average speeds, max speeds, beats per minute, wattage output, VO2 max, feet of climbing, percentage grade.....the list grows beyond belief. The science of fitness and sport dictates a measurement for everything, a method of comparison that is unequivocal and free from the sway of post-exercise euphoria. When races are won (and paychecks earned) by the coefficient of drag reduction that results from an altered wrist position on the aero bars, it only makes sense to nail down the numbers.
So, I can tell you that on Sunday Carrie and I rode in the second coming of the Milledgeville Bike Club's April Fool's ride. We rode 34 miles at an average of 11.5 miles per hour. I can tell you I rode 3.8 miles at the Thomson trails Monday night, and that tonight Diana and I rode 25.57 miles at an average pace of 16.3 miles per hour with a max speed of 33.2 miles per hour. I burned 2300 calories on the ride tonight. I could chart the routes and give you total feet of climbing, and I might be able to puzzle out the wattage within one order of magnitude. I can say that on a Tuesday night, I have ridden over sixty miles already this week which is a record for me, as is the 16.3 mph average.
But it's much harder to tell you about the smell of the pines on a deserted road in Baldwin County as the sun broke through the morning mist and we climbed a paved ribbon past a white-washed church where large women in large hats were just gathering to worship. It's harder to tell you about the moment when we realized halfway through our ride tonight that we were stronger than we thought, and the way our legs and lungs burned as we proved it for the rest of the ride. If you're not a cyclist, telling you that we could barely walk when we got off our bikes and it almost made us laugh out loud at the accomplishment would be like speaking in tongues.
Numbers are easy. They're cut-and-dried and can reduce any rider to a bar graph to be compared to any other cyclist. But they're only footnotes compared to the rest of the ride.
