Living in New York City has its great advantages, however being able to pop out the door for a quick ride in the countryside is not one of them. Between the cars that whiz along down the West Loop Road started at 8:00 and the threat of quota-filling NYPD officers issuing US$270 tickets to cyclists for running red lights at 6:30 am, Central Park is only the best-least awful place to ride a bicycle hard and fast in the City.
But, beyond the training/health reasons that I ride my bicycle, are two fundamentally important parts that cycling plays in my creative and spiritual life: process and flow. The first has to do with the informational and stimulation overload that occurs each day, where some of us are bombarded with input from when the New York Times arrives on my computer screen fully formatted at 5:15 am and the BBC news begins to play on Podcastalarm.com at 5:30 through the day with dozens of emails per hour, Skype calls, Windows Live Messenger chats with my teams around the world, websites that need to be monitored and the constant back-and-forth that leaves little time to just sit back and take in the big picture. So, I like to spend an hour or three on the bicycle, like today, just processing it all. It is on these long rides that I can look at things strategically and plan responses to the patterns of information or actions that I see, like pieces of a mosaic being randomly assembled in my mind’s eye. It is this pause to process it all that helps me to break the pattern of knee-jerk nibbling away at issues and problems and formulate ways to deal with the small stuff at a higher, broader level.
The second benefit of cycling, for me, is that it gives me the time to experience “flow” as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. From what I understand from his writing, “flow” are those experiences where time is compressed, you are totally absorbed by the experience of the moment and you lose a sense of self, and by extension, any kind of self-importance. For me, this happens on the bike, particularly when I am overwhelmed by the total need to concentrate on breath, legs, irregular road ahead, managing the pain and those inner voices all speaking at once encouraging a slower pace. As much as the body needs sleep, it also needs a certain amount of “flow” time each day.
But the cycling environment needed to both process and flow cannot be found either while riding through the urban jungle of Mid-Town Manhattan or with the Cat 1-6 riders in Central Park, and for this reason, I like to invest some time getting out of the City and into the countryside. Surprisingly, it is not that far away from NYC by train.
This morning, I left our apartment at 6:15 am, arrived at Grand Central Terminal (about fifteen blocks away) at 6:25 and was pulling out of the station on the MetroNorth Hudson Line at 6:41, bound for Croton Harmon. Less than an hour later, at 7:34 am to be precise, I started my Garmin Edge 800 and pedaled out of the train station and through residential neighborhoods up and up around Croton Reservoir.
My route was just 60 km on mostly rolling backroads, the occasional two-lane highway (usually with broad shoulders, particularly along State Highway 100) up towards the northeast and then turning back to the southwest through thickly forested hills bordering the archipelago of lakes that make up one of the two major watersheds for water in New York City.
The GPS is my cruel mistress, calculating my speed over the last dozen kilometers and projecting my arrival back at the Croton Harmon train station. The non-stop train to 125th St and then Grand Central leaves at 10:34 am, and today the Garmin reported that if I continued to laze my way up these hills, I’d arrive back at the station at 10:37, narrowly missing my fast ride home (although there is a second train that makes more stops leaving at 10:40, but there is a time penalty for taking that train since the ride takes 54, rather than 47 minutes.) As my pace increased and wattage soared, the ETA on the GPS began to drop to 10:30, then 10:25 and today I though that I had just enough time to spare to take a photo:
This picture was taken just about here, looking north
In the end, I arrived at 10:25, with lots of time to spare.
So, this is one of the best early morning training rides accessible from New York City by train. You miss the hassles of navigating Manhattan to the George Washington Bridge and the traffic of 9W up through New Jersey and are immediately out in the country after a short ride up along the Hudson River, which is spectacular most mornings.
So, today was process and flow and back to the office by noon. All mornings should be so glorious and surprisingly productive, since not all work is done sitting in front of a computer or while in an endless stream of online meetings and answering countless emails.
Comments