'When I look back at what has been going through my mind, I find the tapes are missing' – the joys of cycling on your own

Non-cycling friends often say things to me along the lines of: “you must really be able to get some thinking done when you’re cycling. I imagine you think up all your columns when you’re out on the bike. They must almost write themselves!”

Normally I say something straightforwardly dishonest, which is: “yes.” That’s because the truth is difficult to explain, and I feel that it does not reflect well on me.

Michael Hutchinson

Multiple national road champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for Cycling Weekly every week.

Ironically, thinking about things isn’t something I think about too often. And that’s because when I look back at what has been going through my mind during a long ride, I find the tapes are missing. There’s nothing there. If I really concentrate I can come up with a few decisions about the route, some dark thoughts about the weather, and nothing else. Even then I’m not sure that I didn’t just invent those to make me feel better.

It's different if I’m riding with someone. Then I can often recall conversations in much more detail than I might if we had them over coffee somewhere. I think the passing landscape gives me some way to associate conversations with places. I get the same thing if I listen to a podcast. But on my own, it’s just a void.

It’s not clear whether I simply don’t think, or whether I do and I just can’t remember it. I’m sure I’m not alone in sometimes forgetting things until they come back hours later. In 2023 I got knocked off by a driver at a junction midway through a tempo effort, landed harmlessly in the verge with no damage done, and only remembered it the next day when there was hard-to-explain grass in my cleats. For all I know I’ve perfected cold fusion and developed a unified field theory while riding and completely forgotten both.

It even applies in races, where you’d imagine that the need to react to things would at least leave some trace. But even after a 24-hour race, all that’s left are vague impressions about the weather, and weirdly specific vignettes like a badly-trimmed hedge or a misspelled web address on the back of a plumber’s van.

It only happens with cycling. When I’m not doing that I think about things all the time. Even when I go for a run I can competently get myself stressed about all the things I need to get done when I get home. When I get home I don’t actually do any of them, of course, but that’s not because I can’t remember them. That’s just because I’m rubbish.

I can think and drive. I can think and cook. I can even think and think, sort of, in as much as I can write one thing and think about another and only occasionally get them crossed.

A major question is whether this intellectual abyss is still somehow doing me good. Mrs. Doc experiences the same phenomenon and is adamant that it’s a bit like REM sleep – somehow despite the echoing wastes of nothing at all (“left, right, left, right”) deep down her brain is sorting things out, getting some filing done, and preparing her to be all the more useful when she gets home.

I’m not at all convinced. It would be more believable if the first thing she does after any long training session isn’t fall asleep for two hours.

I think the truth of the matter is simple. I don’t believe there’s a long-term cognitive enhancement. I don’t believe I’m somehow thinking super-intelligent thoughts that will one day manifest as a moment of genius. I firmly believe that cycling turns me into a vegetable. And I sort of like that.