First, a disclaimer. Cycling is brilliant, it makes everyone happy, it makes me happy, it is the solution to all of life’s problems both for the individual and the community as a whole.
That said and understood, I have an observation to make. Occasionally cycling makes me feel emotions that are just the tiniest bit negative.
I frequently feel guilty that I’m not doing more riding. Especially, I feel bad that I’m not having long-distance adventures. I should be attacking the North Coast 500 record, or bike packing from London to Istanbul, or doing the Transcontinental Race. The world seems full of riders doing these things.
It seems to have become the new normal for ambitious riders, for riders with my abilities, even for riders my age, and I’m out of step with it. I don’t even have the get-out that I don’t want to do these things – I’d love to. Which makes me feel all the more inadequate that I don’t.
I feel guilty too about the fact I don’t ride gravel races. I don’t even own a gravel bike, despite the fact that I can’t remember the last time the marketing departments banded together and tried so hard to make me buy something. I haven’t submitted because there isn’t really anywhere to ride one local to me.
Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. As a rider he won multiple national titles in both Britain and Ireland and competed at the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. He was a three-time Brompton folding-bike World Champion, and once hit 73 mph riding down a hill in Wales. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine
When I make that excuse to gravel evangelists (or “gravangelists” – now you have the word for these people you’ll find lots of chances to use it) they tell me I should be driving to places where there is decent gravel riding – the nearest suggested location is about a four-hour round trip. Should I really be doing that? Wouldn’t that just make me guilty for another reason?
Sometimes the guilt over the fact I’m not living my best cycling life edges into envy that other people are. It’s hard not to look at the great times people are having in various parts of the cycling world and not wish you were there too – catching a ferry on the Trans Alba race, or thundering through gravel in the American Mid-West.
“That looks horrendous. God, I wish it was me.”
Dr Hutch
When it comes to fuelling envy, it’s all about social media for me. It’s one thing to read a report on an ultra race; it’s another to see hour-by-hour updates from someone about how their ride is going. Because inevitably it looks great. Even if it’s actually going terribly, by the time it’s on Instagram it’s become a really positive, adventurous sort of terrible. “That looks horrendous,” you think. “God, I wish it was me.”
I even get envious of people doing fairly normal things. A friend recently posted a selfie with a highland cow from a gate on a lane about 10 miles from my house. “Oh, how wish I was doing something like that,” I thought, despite the fact I’d ridden down the self-same lane past the self-same cow less than 24 hours earlier. The only difference was that I hadn’t stopped to make 16 attempts to line up a photo with it.
And here’s the final problem. I don’t really put stuff on social media very often these days, and very rarely about my own riding. So I feel bad about the fact I’m not doing that. And not least because if I was, perhaps other people would be envious of me.
I mean, it would depend on how much everyone else wished they were plodding around the same half-dozen training routes with a cantankerous riding buddy, or riding e-races against a selection of cheats from six continents. But given the things other people do that make me feel bad, there’s a good chance someone somewhere would look at a photo of my mate Bernard blowing on his tea at the café and just clench a little inwardly.