bbqbike.net

Manifesto

Manifesto

I am fundamentally a lazy daydreamer. Like most adults, there are many demands on my time, and most of those demands I would rather actually not be doing. For many of them I happily escape by daydreaming about something else while I do them. I know this goes against everything you might hear these days about the importance of being “mindful” or “present” in your daily activities, but as a proponent of lazy daydreaming, I’m going to recommend the exact opposite. That is what this series is about — making space for lazy daydreaming in your life. And after years of dedicated research and experimentation, I have found that lazy daydreaming is best pursued on a bicycle.

Now most people probably do not associate bicycle riding with being lazy, nor with the pleasures of letting one’s mind wander and your imagination to run wild. Most people think of bicycle riding as hard exercise, pursued by dedicated individuals, in pursuit of ever-increasing performance, fitness, and competitiveness. A few other people view the bicycle as a utilitarian tool that gets you to work and back in a cheap and efficient manner. Certainly bicycle riding encompasses those things. But the reason we think of bicycles as aggressive machines of fitness or practical transportation is only because those are the forms of cycling put out into the world by cycling’s most outspoken advocates — racers and bike nerds.

Bicycling is so much bigger and more important than spandex-clad racing, or feats of super-human endurance and technical skill, or human-powered eco-alternatives. Cycling is bigger than any bicycle “culture” — just as cars occupy a place in our lives and culture that is much bigger than the racers and car-nerds who are obsessed with them. The bicycle is a pure Platonic form. It wasn’t invented, it was discovered. It isn’t a product of human ingenuity, it’s a human-made machine that plugs into some strange and weird behavior of the universe in a unique and somewhat mystical way. Motorcycles share a lot of this mystique (something I’ll address in more detail in another essay) but you don’t just sit on a bicycle and tell it where to go. It is much more deeply connected to you because you are the animal that controls and powers it. It is what the band Kraftwerk was talking about when singing about the man-machine, super-human being. There is magic in the physics of two-wheeled vehicles that researchers and scientists have difficulty explaining. This magic is in its purest form in a bicycle, and the magic is there for everyone to use. You just need to grab hold of it, and in this series I’ll show you how.

But this series is not just about leveraging the magic of bicycles (the racers and bike-nerds are certainly capable of that) but making the most of bicycles while:

  1. respecting your right to be lazy, and
  2. promoting the importance of mind-wandering and daydreaming.

To achieve this, this series will focus primarily on changing the way you think about riding. (Or, if you are a beginner, helping you avoid getting sucked into competitive or focused riding.) This is pretty abstract stuff, but eventually this series will cover more practical ground about changing some of the things you might think about the bike you ride and the gear you bring.

The biggest emphasis for this BBQBicycle series is simple: just ride slower. That’s the BBQ part — low and slow is the way to go. Respect your laziness, don’t push yourself too hard. Chill out and ride. Easy enough, right? But those of you who know BBQ know that going low and slow takes a long time. This is the other big emphasis: spend more time on your bicycle. More time on your bicycle is more time to daydream and let your mind wander. To spend a lot of time on your bicycle, you need to be comfortable though, and that is where the practical matters like what bike you ride, and what gear you bring come into play.

I am of those who believe that a true manifesto should have numbered statements with descriptive annotations. And so, I present the BBQBicycle manifesto:

  1. Low and slow is the way to go. Just. Ride. Slower. That’s the first rule. Try to keep your heart rate under 60% of your capacity, even on the steepest hills. (BBQBicycle will have tips for achieving this.) If that’s too technical for you, try comparing your bike riding to a walk or a hike — don’t ever ride your bike at a level where you are doing more work than you would be if you were hiking up the same terrain. The main reason for this is riding too hard will distract you from the main reason you are out there — to daydream. But also, a lazy person doesn’t want to do hard exercise.
  2. Daydreaming is a critical part of riding.
  3. Ride by yourself. This is a critical to daydreaming. You can’t daydream while talking to other people.
  4. Feel the pure mechanical pleasure of riding.
  5. Seek out the climbs. It’s very simple: going uphill forces you to go low and slow.

Step 1: Go on Vacation

This entry is for the person who hasn’t been on a bicycle since they were a kid. The basic principles of BBQBicycle can apply to any rider, but in the interests of accessibility (and stepping outside of “bike culture”) let’s start at the beginning. If you are more experienced, you can probably skip Step 1 — but heck, nothing wrong with going on vacation!

I am going to assume here that you know at least how to ride a bicycle. If you don’t, in many places adult riding classes are available, and you should totally go do one! They are extremely rewarding and confidence-building.

If you haven’t ridden a bicycle much since you were a kid, the first thing you should do is go on vacation. Not just any vacation, you want to look for a very specific and special place: the beach community.

All around the world, there are small beach communities where, because the weather is generally pleasant (otherwise, why have a beach there?) and because they are small, one of the main forms of transportation will find is the “beach cruiser” bicycle. The beach cruiser is big. It’s heavy. It has super-fat squishy tires and one gear with the kind of brake you pedal backwards to stop. It’s got super-wide handle bars, and a huge squishy seat for American butts. If you’re lucky, it will also be old and super rusty too. In short, it is the very antithesis of the bicycle that racers and bike-nerds favor. To them, the beach cruiser is barely a bicycle at all.

But in many ways, the beach cruiser is the pinnacle of bicycles. They are dead simple, ultra-comfortable over short distances, nearly indestructible, and since they are seen as low-value, they are rarely stolen. In many beach communities you don’t even need to lock up your beach cruiser. With a beach cruiser, you don’t have to think about anything else. Just get on the bike and ride. And while you’re riding, you don’t have to think about riding. Instead think about your day at the beach ahead of you. Or the ice cream you will eat later. This is how all riding should be, but so rarely is. Try very hard to remember what that feels like because you want to bring that feeling back home with you. This is the feeling of bike riding that you will be trying to achieve in any other kind of riding you do.*

Take your beach cruise out and ride around town with no plan. Except, look for an ice cream stand. Stop for ice cream and leave your bike unlocked and propped on the kickstand. Get an ice cream cone. Get back on your bike and eat your ice cream cone while you ride your bike. This is good practice for riding in general, but you won’t realize that because all the fun you’re having will blind you to any practical effects.

While on vacation, ride your beach cruiser everywhere. To the store, to visit friends, on the boardwalk at sunset, and of course throw a towel in the basket (get one with a basket, for sure) and ride to the beach. After the beach, go out and get really drunk. (Or get drunk on the beach! In many places, that’s allowed.) After you are fairly seriously drunk, get on your bike and ride home. Try to be drunk enough that you are at serious risk of crashing. Try to get into a minor crash on the way home. There’s two reasons for this:

  1. The bike is a beach cruiser — it will be fine after a crash.
  2. Crashing will help you internalize what it’s like to fall off a bike. Falling off a bike as an adult almost never happens. But you know what? When it does, it’s really not that bad. Typically you get a minor scrape or two. The kind would would have just shrugged off as a kid, but as an adult for some reason we take dramatic steps to avoid on all occasions. A couple of good falls will help you feel more confident on the bike, because you’ll realize that falling isn’t something to be too scared of. Being drunk helps a lot in trying to crash and fall.

After a week or two of transiting around a beach town on a bicycle without ever stepping into a car, you’ll be ready for bigger things on the bicycle. And that’s when you want to start thinking about your next steps to get you riding every day in your normal non-vacation life. Every time you get on your bike, try to feel a little bit of that feeling of beach-cruiser riding while on vacation.

*As an aside, this feeling of no-brainer bicycling is a critical element to improving our cities — imagine what would happen if that feeling of traveling around a beach community on a beach cruiser bicycle were what it felt like to travel around any city or town in the US? It would be a revolution in transportation. It would be a huge reduction in stress, and increase in public health. And, most importantly, it would just make our lives much more fun to live.

Riding and Thinking

It is a cliche that people get some of their best thinking done in the shower. And I’m not going to argue with that cliche. It’s cliche because it’s true! But there’s a problem with shower-thinking, and that is that you just can’t spend that much time in the shower. Particularly in parts of the world where water is a limited resource. For most people, 15 minutes is a long shower. So what you are saying when you say you do your best thinking in the shower is that you are spending only 15 minutes a day doing your best thinking. It is therefore incumbent on us to figure out another way to capture that shower brainspace – and the way to do that is on a bicycle.

But before we get to bicycles, let’s pull apart why shower thinking is so good. There’s a few elements that are fairly unique to showers:

  1. Showers give you something to do physically that requires almost no conscious mental space.
  2. Because of this, you are active and motivated, but not obligated to be working through anything.
  3. Typically, you have given yourself permission to let your mind wander in the shower. This series of things means that you have a rare state of consciousness without concentration. Consciousness without concentration is the key. The simple activities required in the shower, and the shower of water itself, will keep you awake and alert, but your mind is free to daydream up new ideas, make connections to solve problems, or create fantasies that do nothing more than keep you entertained. If you go into a shower with a problem you need to solve, you will often find that the solution will come to you, seemingly out of nowhere. This is sort of a corollary to the concept of ‘flow’ where you immerse yourself in concentration on a project. Instead, in the shower you have freed yourself from concentration, and new connections are free to be made.

The bicycle offers a similar brainspace — but only if you know how to access it. You have to let the baggage of expectation go. The bike culture world endorses the idea of tracking your performance with your phone or cyclocomputers. They push the idea that you should ride fast, get your heart rate up, seek out new challenges, ride with friends so you can achieve higher speeds through collaborative aerodynamics. None of this stuff is bad in and of itself, but all of it requires concentration. Like in the shower, a BBQBicyclist wants to avoid concentration. For this reason the three key components of BBQBicycling are:

  1. Ride slower
  2. Ride by yourself
  3. Go for longer rides Just the fact that you are out doing a mild physical activity will get you into an awake and alert state, like in the shower. It’s up to you to not let yourself be distracted into concentration though, and the way to do that is not to push yourself physically — because then you will be thinking about pushing yourself — and to ride alone so you are in your own headspace, not someone else’s.

You might think that this is no different than driving your car. But driving a car is incredibly passive. Most of the time in a car you move into a resting state, that is unquestionably pleasant, but doesn’t lend itself to creative and clear daydreaming. In a car you “zone out.” On a bicycle, you are not constrained by zones.

How about walking? Walking is the next-best thing. It is also a good way to achieve the consciousness without concentrating state. But there’s some (relatively minor) drawbacks to walking that make bicycles a better choice:

And that brings us to the core component of BBQBicycling: ride longer. If you aren’t used to longer rides, start with a ten mile ride. Create a loop from your house that goes out and back 5 miles. That way if anything goes wrong, you’ll be likely to be close enough to your house to walk back. (And if you are precisely 5 miles away when something goes wrong, you can call for a ride from someone who is unlikely to be very put out having to only drive 5 miles to pick you up.)

Once you’re comfortable with 10 miles, up it to 20. Then 50. Between 20-50 miles you will be spending hours on your bicycle — imagine the quality of shower thinking for hours on end. This is the basic reward of the BBQBicycle.

Low and slow is the way to go

The thing that makes it a BBQBicycle is very simple: it’s a good bike for riding slow. This is achieved by a combination of two things:

  1. A bicycle that is set up for riding slowly.
  2. Your own willingness to ride slowly.

The mechanical part of building a bike that is good for riding slowly is easy compared to developing your own willingness to ride slowly. The problem is that bicycles are super efficient forms of transportation. [Might want to look up and cite some science on this here.] You wouldn’t think it, but the extreme efficiency of bicycles actually creates problems for riders, and those problems fall into two big categories:

  1. Riding a bicycle takes so little energy that many people who get onto a bicycle sort of instinctively expect it to do all the work, like a car. And they are subtly disappointed when it doesn’t, so they switch to an electric scooter or something. The BBQBicycle rider revels in how easy it is to ride a bicycle, and makes the most of that to spend their time daydreaming.
  2. Riding a bicycle takes so little energy that riders (particularly riders who really get into it) can push themselves far beyond their normal physical capacities – and so make cycling extremely hard. This is the “it never gets easier, it only gets faster” phenomenon. The BBQBicycle rider must not succumb to this temptation.

The BBQBicycle tries to find the middle ground between these two things. Well, not the middle exactly, maybe a step above #1, and a long way to go to #2. That ground is covered by riding slowly, without too much effort, but steadily for a significant period of time. It is low geared, slow riding, and you will have a way to go.

So how slow is slow? This is tough because it’s going to be different for everyone depending on your fitness and abilities. But it is best measured by your heart rate and respiration. If you are out on a ride for an hour or more, the BBQBicyclist aims to spend about 80-90% of that ride pedaling steadily, but not enough to really raise your heart rate significantly. Basically, you want to be doing about the same amount of work as you would do at your average walking speed. The magic of the bicycle is that your average walking speed amount of work will be much faster on a bicycle. Just to get some kind of fitness improvement out of your time on the bicycle, you want to spend 10-20% of your time with a somewhat raised heart rate – maybe about 60% of your maximum. Small hills tend to be good for this. Every once in a while, you may find it is nice to crank things up, and really push yourself up into your maximum capacity, and see how fast you can go. There’s nothing wrong with this, and it can be good for giving yourself a mind-clearing reset, but if straining at your limit on a bicycle and going fast is the thing you enjoy on your bicycle, you should join up with a road riding crew, and stop reading this now.

Also: Learn to RIDE your bike. Many people just pedal until they are moving, and then coast. This is fine if you are just doing an oceanside ride on a boardwalk, but if you want to get anywhere you need to start pedaling more. Not like you need to push yourself until you are the edge of your capabilities, but for actually traveling somewhere by bicycle, and for making it an effective exercise, you need to pedal at about the same exertion level as going on a reasonable walk. Basically, you should only be coasting when you are slowing down, or traveling downhill. Any time you can put some effort into the pedals, you should be turning them. The problem is that bike riding is SO easy, that people get on their bike and expect to put out the same energy as driving a car — which is none. Remember that you want to be putting out the same energy as a moderate walk. And the magic of a bicycle is that it will turn that moderate walk energy into a travel distance equivalent to, if not more than, a car (in a dense city anyway).

What bike should you ride?

Now you have a sense of why BBQBicycle might be for you. But how_ do you actually do it?

And the first part of how is: what bike do I ride? The answer that is pretty much any bike you have in the garage or locked up in the bike room of your building! The less like a fancy modern road bike the better. Probably the best bet is if you have an old mountain bike or “hybrid” that doesn’t have shocks on it. These bikes are great because they have very little that can go wrong with them (that’s the problem with shocks) and they are already set up with low gears. As you might imagine, low gears are helpful if you want to ride low and slow.

Before you go for your first ride on your bike that you haven’t pulled out in 6 months or more, put air in your tires. Putting air in your tires is one of the few not-magic things about bike riding. It sucks. But you want to do it for two reason:

  1. Tires that are up to pressure will make it way easier to ride.
  2. Tires that don’t have enough air in them are one of the main causes of flats. You don’t want to deal with a flat on your first ride, it will be discouraging.

Putting air in tires isn’t hard, but it also isn’t as simple as is commonly thought. You should probably check out a few instruction videos or guides to make sure you are doing it correctly. Following good instructions on the internet is the way to go, but here’s two things you need to know immediately:

  1. You can’t tell how much air is in the tire by feeling the tire. You have to have a pressure gauge.
  2. You can’t use an air hose for a car – cars have like 35 pounds of air pressure in them.* A very low pressure bicycle tire (for adults) would be 45. Most bicycles want 80-100 pounds of pressure, and for that you want a dynamite-detonator-style floor pump (with a gauge). It’s ok to use the air hose at your bike shop though – that will probably be set at 80 or 90 psi.

Once you have your tires to the right pressure, get on your bike and ride!

For your first ride, just go a couple of miles. Don’t just go around the block — that isn’t a couple of miles. But ride downtown and back, say, or across that long bridge, or circle your whole neighborhood. Maybe check on a map to see how far a mile around your house is. You might be surprised what you can reach in a mile-out-mile-back ride.

Two miles is going to take even the slowest rider a wopping 15 minutes. So assuming nothing terrible happened to you on your first ride, go right back out and ride a second ride! Depending on how comfortable you are feeling, this time plan to ride 5-10 miles. 10 miles on a slow ride will take a little more than an hour. Avoid hills for now, and pick a route you know well.

[Cover gearing here]

*An odd corollary to the fact that you can’t use an air hose for a car is that you absolutely can use a bike pump to bring up the pressure in your car tires. Give it a try next time you want to add some pressure to your car. It only takes a few pumps in most cases to raise your car tire by 5 psi. You don’t want to fill a completely flat care tire with a bike pump, but just topping it off is faster with a bike pump, you can do it in your driveway or wherever your car is parked, and will save you a few quarters.

What to know before you go