Cyclist Quotes

My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them. My dream holiday would be a) a ticket to Amsterdam b) immunity from prosecution and c) a baseball bat.

Well, when you were nearly run over by the cyclist-and i was holding you and you were looking up at me - all 'kiss me , kiss me, Christian

The art of bicycling is a purely mechanical attainment; and though its complications may at first seem hopeless, sufficient practice will result in final mastery.

I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse. The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another.

Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

Everything is still out there: the rooftops and chimneys, the graffiti, the office towers and the cyclists; soon there will be sheep and that immense sky the keep out in the countryside... Once I thought there were two realities, inner and outer, but perhaps that's a bit meagre; I'm not quite the same person I was last night...

Cycling nowadays is tantamount to attempting suicide.

You're too late. She's my wife." "No, she's your widow." His revolver cracked, and I saw the blood spurt from the front of Woodley's waistcoat. He spun round with a scream and fell upon his back, his hideous red face turning suddenly to a dreadful mottled pallor.

...So you can put that in your pipe and smoke it Mr. Busybody Holmes.

Arthur McKnight had raised a 10M round on the idea that skaters, boarders and cyclists were hot to film themselves acting out Feartoshred’s dares: catapult over a creek or a river, surf the Big Island at dawn wearing a fluorescent tee and ski goggles.

I’ve been in Amsterdam, I’ve been able to enjoy many aspects of cycling here. One thing I have not been able to do yet is bike with my sweetheart. But now that you’re here, I’m so excited to ride around town with you among all the thousands of other cyclists while I hold your wrist or you hold mine.

I don't miss the doctor's version of a bad day, but I do miss the good days. I miss my colleagues and I miss helping people. I miss that feeling on the drive home that you've done something worthwhile. And I feel guilty the country spent so much money training me up for me just to walk away. I still have a very strong affinity with the profession -- you never totally stop being a doctor. You still run to the injured cyclist sprawled across the road...

Cycling is an excruciating sport - a rider's power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain - and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose.

A crystal clear Colorado sky opens above us, a blue so deep it makes you dizzy. The occasional bright white wispy cloud dances across the firmament, punctuating the deep blue vault of heaven stretching over this paradise.

We all wrap ourselves in the mythology we want other people to see us in.

In 1955, one sign—on the façade of a secondhand bookshop on Oudezijds Achterburgwal—read: BICYCLES PARKED HERE WILL BE DESTROYED.

Two cyclists. For every person that wants to hurt me, there are more who want to help.

Below there are cyclists, lorries, men; it is a grey street and a grey subway;—it affects me as though it were my mother.

Walking with my doggy is so much fun! And she makes me laugh, she makes me run. Licking she likes to make some good new friends, Kindly enough with cyclists who spin with no end.

The other cyclists used to take breaks to watch him do it. Lean their bikes against the incline and time him with the second hand of their wristwatches. 62.8 every time. That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.

I also hate cyclists posing in sunglasses and all the pro gear, thinking they’re cool when they couldn’t even pedal up the modest slope of Yang-teh Boulevard. You know the type: guy with a bulging gut who parks his expensive bike by the side of the road to show it off. Whenever I see a guy like that, I hope his chain falls off. Or that he gets a flat or a broken spoke.

Furthermore, as is the case with so many of the younger literati, he dresses like a tramp cyclist, affecting turtleneck sweaters and grey flannel bags with a patch on the knee and conveying a sort of general suggestion of having been left out in the rain overnight in an ash can.

Another protester said that more cyclists on New York City’s streets looked “ridiculous.” She gave the reporter the tired refrain “This is not Amsterdam.” DOT has no Amsterdam-ometer in its traffic analysis toolbox to measure changes in the street on a scale of one to ten windmills. Analyzing

This is getting tedious," Dee muttered. "Drive on. Turn right into the yacht club. I have an idea." He looked at Virginia. "Can you stop them?" He jerked his thumb at the cyclists. Virginia Dare gave him a withering look. "I have stopped armies. Or have you forgotten?" "I doubt you'll ever let me," he sighed. Then he stuck his fingers in his ears. Rolling her window down, Virginia placed her flute on the edge of the glass, took a deep breath, closed her eyes and blew gently. The sound was appalling.

A forced marriage is no marriage.

Out on the Nevsky, in the deepening dusk, a long double file of cyclists came riding, guns slung on their shoulders. They halted, and the crowd pressed in and deluged them with questions. "Who are you? Where do you come from?" asked a fat old man with a cigar in his mouth. "Twelfth Army. From the front. We came to support the Soviets against the damn' bourgeoisie!

The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it's getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for a repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different. I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is the personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers, and depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends.

Trick-cyclist or assuager of discontents, whatever his title, the psychiatrist had now passed into history, joining the necromancers, sorcerers and other practitioners of the black sciences. The Mental Freedom legislation enacted ten years earlier by the ultraconservative UW government had banned the profession outright and enshrined the individual’s freedom to be insane if he wanted to, provided he paid the full civil consequences for any infringements of the law. That was the catch, the hidden object of the MF laws. What had begun as a popular reaction against ‘subliminal living’ and the uncontrolled extension of techniques of mass manipulation for political and economic ends had quickly developed into a systematic attack on the psychological sciences. Over-permissive courts of law with their condoning of delinquency, pseudo-enlightened penal reformers, ‘Victims of society’, the psychologist and his patient all came under fierce attack. Discharging their self-hate and anxiety onto a convenient scapegoat, the new rulers, and the great majority electing them, outlawed all forms of psychic control, from the innocent market survey to lobotomy. The mentally ill were on their own, spared pity and consideration, made to pay to the hilt for their failings. The sacred cow of the community was the psychotic, free to wander where he wanted, drooling on the doorsteps, sleeping on sidewalks, and woe betide anyone who tried to help him.

I delve into the mysterious and counterintuitive world of helmets and high-visibility gear later in the book. But it's worth immediately noting this: while they're not inherently bad, they're less a safety device for cycling than a symptom of a road network where no cyclist can truly feel safe.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. ~ T.S. Elliot

handlebars. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, during various confrontations between young people and the Amsterdam police, it

Before we begin to investigate that, let us try to realize what we do know, so as to make the most of it, and to separate the essential from the accidental.

Ahhhh. The comfort of a familiar routine out in the desert of unfamiliar exploration. Dark chocolate for the soul.

Men are bad cyclists, hunters of wild animals, kamikazes, samurai and Christian martyrs.

It’s easy to miss something you’re not looking for. On a busy road, this could be fatal—look out for cyclists!

who cursed and swore at him from a moral high ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit.

The cyclist hit me, and it's vile after my life ends in the afterlife. Lots of incense, resin, apes and giraffe-tails--all acquired tastes. I don't like that kind of thing.

The heat tamped everything down. Aside from a handful of certifiable runners and insane cyclists, the park had been left to the birds and squirrels.

... nearly forcing him into the path of a cyclist, who cursed and swore at him from a moral high ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit.

These ladies with Dachshunde are the most dangerous, violent and evil beings ever to stalk the streets in search of cyclists to maim and kill.

Before you even think about picking a business idea, make sure you have easy access to the people you want to help. An easy way to do this is to think about where you have easy access to a targeted group of people whom you really want to help—like, say, new moms in Austin, cyclists, freelance writers, and taco obsessives (like me!). CHALLENGE Top three groups.

A solitary cyclist was coming towards us. His head was down and his shoulders rounded, as he put every ounce of energy that he possessed on to the pedals. He was flying like a racer.

The city continued on its way. Boys tried to sell me drumsticks, girls played hopscotch, the Bihari badly worker carried his gathri of ironed clothes to the homes from which they had come, and the buses honked at suicidal cyclists. At one level this was vaguely confusing. Surely, something should acknowledge how much things had changed? At another level, it was oddly comforting.

The ark was like a portable computer hard drive and Noah was a one-man Geek Squad, and he dumped God's most important files onto it before he zorched the virus-ridden computer that was the world.

Really, in a lot of ways being a cyclist is like being a vampire. First of all, both cyclists and vampires are cultural outcasts with cult followings who clumsily walk the line between cool and dorky. Secondly, both cyclists and vampires resemble normal humans, but they also lead secret double lives, have supernatural powers, and aren’t governed by the same rules as the rest of humanity—though cycling doesn’t come with the drawbacks of vampirism. Cyclists can ride day or night, we can consume all the garlic we want, and very few of us are afflicted with bloodlust or driven by a relentless urge to kill.

To address this, we must wage a war on the militants. First, we must make it an offence, punishable by many years in jail, to ride a bicycle in anything other than what I like to call home clothes. Cycling shops selling gel for your bottom crack and outfits with padded gussets will be raided by the police and the owners prosecuted. This way, cyclists will be stripped of their uniforms and made to look like human beings.

Likewise—now don’t laugh—cars and trucks should view the bike lanes as if they are sacrosanct. A driver would never think of riding up on a sidewalk. Most drivers, anyway. Hell, there are strollers and little old ladies up there! It would be unthinkable, except in action movies. A driver would get a serious fine or maybe even get locked up. Everyone around would wonder who that asshole was. Well, bike lanes should be treated the same way. You wouldn’t park your car or pull over for a stop on the sidewalk, would you? Well then, don’t park in the bike lanes either—that forces cyclists into traffic where poor little meat puppets don’t stand a chance.

The press spread fears about the effects of prolonged cycling. Overenthusiastic cyclists might develop ‘bicycle hump’ by leaning too long over the handlebars; acute cases of ‘bicycle foot’ and even ‘bicycle face’ were reported

Traffic was in confusion for several days. For red to mean "stop' was considered impossibly counterrevolutionary. It should of course mean "go." And traffic should not keep to the right, as was the practice, it should be on the left. For a few days we ordered the traffic policemen aside and controlled the traffic ourselves. I was stationed at a street corner telling cyclists to ride on the left. In Chengdu there were not many cars or traffic lights, but at the few big crossroads there was chaos. In the end, the old rules reasserted themselves, owing to Zhou Enlai, who managed to convince the Peking Red Guard leaders. But the youngsters found justifications for this: I was told by a Red Guard in my school that in Britain traffic kept to the left, so ours had to keep to the right to show our anti-imperialist spirit. She did not mention America. As a child I had always shied away from collective activity. Now, at fourteen, I felt even more averse to it. I suppressed this dread because of the constant sense of guilt I had come to feel, through my education, when I was out of step with Mao. I kept telling myself that I must train my thoughts according to the new revolutionary theories and practices. If there was anything I did not understand, I must reform myself and adapt. However, I found myself trying very hard to avoid militant acts such as stopping passersby and cutting their long hair, or narrow trouser legs, or skirts, or breaking their semi-high-heeled shoes. These things had now become signs of bourgeois decadence, according to the Peking Red Guards. My own hair came to the critical attention of my schoolmates. I had to have it cut to the level of my earlobes. Secretly, though much ashamed of myself for being so "petty bourgeois," I shed tears over losing my long plaits. As a young child, my nurse had a way of doing my hair which made it stand up on top of my head like a willow branch. She called it "fireworks shooting up to the sky." Until the early 1960s I wore my hair in two coils, with rings of little silk flowers wound around them. In the mornings, while I hurried through my breakfast, my grandmother or our maid would be doing my hair with loving hands. Of all the colors for the silk flowers, my favorite was pink.

Occasionally the poster pictures a pair of cyclists; and then one grasps the fact how much superior for purposes of flirtation is the modern bicycle to the old-fashioned parlour or the played-out garden gate. He and she mount their bicycles, being careful, of course, that such are of the right make. After that they have nothing to think about but the old sweet tale. Down shady lanes, through busy towns on market days, merrily roll the wheels of the “Bermondsey Company’s Bottom Bracket Britain’s Best,” or of the “Camberwell Company’s Jointless Eureka.” They need no pedalling; they require no guiding. Give them their heads, and tell them what time you want to get home, and that is all they ask. While Edwin leans from his saddle to whisper the dear old nothings in Angelina’s ear, while Angelina’s face, to hide its blushes, is turned towards the horizon at the back, the magic bicycles pursue their even course.

First was a lone cyclist, in a red jersey, toiling intent and confident out of the westering sun, passing to the melody of a high chattering cheer. Then three together in a harlequinade of faded colour, legs caked yellow with dust and sweat, faces expressionless, eyes heavy and endlessly tired. Tommy faced Dick, saying: 'I think Nicole wants a divorce - I suppose you'll make no obstacles?' A troupe of fifty more swarmed after the first bicycle racers, strung out over two hundred yards; a few were smiling and self-conscious, a few obviously exhausted, most of them indifferent and weary. A retinue of small boys passed, a few defiant stragglers, a light truck carried the victims of accident and defeat.

The Dutch life is beautifully attuned to the deliberate pace of bicycle riding. It has the same calm and slow rhythm which allows the Hollander time off for coffee in the middle of the morning, for tea in the afternoon, and tea again in the evening. . . . To a Dutchman a bicycle becomes a matter of individual expression, almost a part of the body, controlled subconsciously and leaving him free to meditation. There is no noise, no smell of gasoline, so he can notice little things like birds and flowers, which the automobilized American leaves in the roar and dust. An

If you visit London, you’ll occasionally cross paths with young men (and less often women) on motor scooters, blithely darting in and out of traffic while studying maps affixed to their handlebars. These studious cyclists are training to become London cabdrivers. Before they can receive accreditation from London’s Public Carriage Office, cabbies-in-training must spend two to four years memorizing the locations and traffic patterns of all 25,000 streets in the vast and vastly confusing city, as well as the locations of 1,400 landmarks. Their training culminates in an infamously daunting exam called “the Knowledge,” in which they not only have to plot the shortest route between any two points in the metropolitan area, but also name important places of interest along the way. Only about three out of ten people who train for the Knowledge obtain certification.

In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk... I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up. Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shop girls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths... the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with *eaux de toilette*, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief. It is all fakery and self-advertisement - *truquage and battage*, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia - all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres - is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the MANCHON DE FRANCINE read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers. To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis from the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret! And the odious and tiresome travesty - the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron's legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandiere retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time - of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!... Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long? The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!

Independence changed everything. Independence changed nothing. Eight years after the British left, we now had free government schools, running water and paved roads. But Jaipur still felt the same to me as it had ten years ago, the first time I stepped foot on its dusty soil. On the way to our first appointment of the morning, Malik and I nearly collided with a man carrying cement bags on his head when a bicycle cut between us. The cyclist, hugging a six-foot ladder under his arm, caused a horse carriage to sideswipe a pig, who ran squealing into a narrow alley. At one point, we stepped aside and waited for a raucous band of hijras to pass. The sari-clad, lipstick-wearing men were singing and dancing in front of a house to bless the birth of a baby boy. So accustomed were we to the odors of the city—cow dung, cooking fires, coconut hair oil, sandalwood incense and urine—that we barely noticed them.

How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill Road past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the open ground to the left the willow-trees had been blown, driven and cracked until their branches gave way and lay about the drenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts of twigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weeping leaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their exper- ience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.

Delhi was teeming and vast, but its pockets of green offered space to breathe and time to stroll. Mumbai raged unharnessed: if you strolled you would be trampled, or at least knocked over by a cyclist. Even the tendency towards idling was noticeably absent. In Mumbai, everyone meant business and the feeling was addictive.

Each year, the city government, the police department and the local newspapers warned adult Amsterdammers to take precautions. Before going to bed the night before Luilak, adults were advised to: disconnect their doorbells, bring garbage cans indoors, close all windows, avoid sleeping in street-facing rooms and wear earplugs.

Keep your hands on the break hoods or about a thumb's length from the stem on either side of the bar. You will have more control, breathe easier, and stay loose.

Applying these recommendations for a 150-pound (68 kg) athlete, the possible range, excluding the U.S. RDA, would be 3 to 6 ounces (84 to 168 g) of protein each day.

Even if you never, ever ride the bike it will still age. So you might as well ride it while it's pretty and enjoy the process of making it ugly.

I feel like a racehorse crashing out of the gates, bent on gulping every moment the world has in front of me right now. Life is good.

you’re not on time unless you’re early

if there are no snakes at your feet, do not lift rocks from the side of the road

...the concept of marketing is almost as old as humanity itself...suffice it to say here that it took almost no time for a wily serpent to sell Adam and Eve on a shiny apple from the Tree of Knowledge, at which point they became not only the first humans but also the first marketing demographic, and God expelled them from the Garden of Eden for being total consumerist dupes. (p. 40)

Avec un vélo, l'homme peut partager les bienfaits d'une conquête technique sans prétendre régenter les horaires, l'espace ou l'énergie d'autrui. Un cycliste est maître de sa propre mobilité sans empiéter sur celle des autres. Ce nouvel outil ne crée que des besoins qu'il peut satisfaire, au lieu que chaque accroissement de l'accélération produit par des véhicules à moteur crée de nouvelles exigences de temps et d'espace.

Forgotten by everyone, that is, except by the city’s youths who used these bikes to indulge both their inherent mechanical skills and their penchant for vandalism. Under their guidance such bikes followed a familiar pattern of decay: “First, the bell disappears. Then the light and back rack. Finally, the seat, the tires and, sometimes, even entire wheels. But the frame remains standing—for hours, days, months, years. . . .

The car is “a system of human dissociation.”5 Behind the wheel of their private mobile spaces, drivers are far less likely to mix and mingle than pedestrians. By isolating drivers from fellow human beings, driving can engender hostility and mistrust. Pedestrians, cyclists and public transit riders are forced into a greater awareness of their environment and as a result are more likely to concern themselves with its wellbeing. Like

Firstly, contrary to popular leftist dogma, speed does not cause accidents. In our towns and cities cyclists, pedestrians and elderly drivers cause accidents. On the country roads it is cyclists and dangerous drivers and on the motorways it is dangerous driving which causes accidents, obviously the faster a vehicle is travelling the greater the damage which will result from an accident however that is just a consequence rather than the cause.

My darling, dear Marcel, I return less quickly than this cyclist, whose machine I would like to borrow in order to be with you sooner. How could you imagine that I might be angry or that I could enjoy anything better than to be with you? It will be nice to go out, just the two of us together; it would be nicer still if we never went out except together. The ideas you get into your head! What a Marcel! What a Marcel! Always and ever your Albertine.

Men of letters, following in the painters' wake, conspired suddenly to find artistic value in the turns; and red-nosed comedians were lauded to the skies for their sense of character; fat female singers, who had bawled obscurely for twenty years, were discovered to possess inimitable drollery; there were those who found an aesthetic delight in performing dogs; while others exhausted their vocabulary to extol the distinction of conjurers and trick-cyclists.

Embodied in objects was a partial sense of sharing. They didn't lift their eyes from their respective sets. But noises bound them, a cyclist kick-starting, the plane that came winding down the five miles from its transatlantic apex, rippling the pictures on their screens. Objects were memory inert. Desk, the bed, et cetera. Objects would survive the one who died first and remind the other of how easily halved a life can become. Death, perhaps, was not the point so much as separation. Chairs, tables, dressers, envelopes. Everything was a common experience, binding them despite their indirections, the slanted apparatus of their agreeing. That they did agree was not in doubt. Faithlessness and desire. It wasn't necessary to tell them apart. His body, hers. Sex, love, monotony, contempt. The spell that had to be entered was out there among the unmemorized faces and uniform cubes of being. This, their sweet and mercenary space, was self-enchantment, the near common dream they'd countenanced for years. Only absences were fully shared.

Once the mobilization button was pushed, the whole vast machinery for calling up, equipping, and transporting two million men began turning automatically. Reservists went to their designated depots, were issued uniforms, equipment, and arms, formed into companies and companies into battalions, were joined by cavalry, cyclists, artillery, medical units, cook wagons, blacksmith wagons, even postal wagons, moved according to prepared railway timetables to concentration points near the frontier where they would be formed into divisions, divisions into corps, and corps into armies ready to advance and fight. One army corps alone—out of the total of 40 in the German forces—required 170 railway cars for officers, 965 for infantry, 2,960 for cavalry, 1,915 for artillery and supply wagons, 6,010 in all, grouped in 140 trains and an equal number again for their supplies. From the moment the order was given, everything was to move at fixed times according to a schedule precise down to the number of train axles that would pass over a given bridge within a given time.

Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.22 It wasn’t the goal of winning the Tour de France that propelled the British cyclists to the top of the sport. Presumably, they had wanted to win the race every year before—just like every other professional team. The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.

I didn’t need to follow these particular bicycles anymore.They’d found their rightful place. They’d descended through the seven rings of fire--of importation, sale, impoundment, auction, contraband, confiscation, and donation--and here they were again in the hands of fresh new cyclist. It was as if the bikes had graduated from weird times on the traveling freak show, having filled the roles of the reptile man, the fire-eater, the sword-swallower, and now in retirement they’d become staid, calm, dutiful, and serviceable again--like postal workers, customs clerks, and crosswalk guards with colorful, secret pasts.

and carrying a blue umbrella, stepped on a loose paving stone while crossing Bishops-gate and drenched her left trouser leg in dirty water. If she were the type to swear she might have let rip, and wouldn’t have been alone—the city was full of angry pedestrians, hooted at by angry drivers and sworn at by angry cyclists, while angry buses trundled past full of angry passengers, and the angry sky rained angry rain, and the angry morning would never end. But she kept any fury to herself. Her mind now throbbing with extra tasks—when to get to the dry cleaners, and what to wear on the alternate days of the week she’d earmarked these trousers for

When I finally leave the market, the streets are dark, and I pass a few blocks where not a single electric light appears – only dark open storefronts and coms (fast-food eateries), broom closet-sized restaurants serving fish, meat, and rice for under a dollar, flickering candles barely revealing the silhouettes of seated figures. The tide of cyclists, motorbikes, and scooters has increased to an uninterrupted flow, a river that, given the slightest opportunity, diverts through automobile traffic, stopping it cold, spreads into tributaries that spill out over sidewalks, across lots, through filling stations. They pour through narrow openings in front of cars: young men, their girlfriends hanging on the back; families of four: mom, dad, baby, and grandma, all on a fragile, wobbly, underpowered motorbike; three people, the day’s shopping piled on a rear fender; women carrying bouquets of flapping chickens, gathered by their feet while youngest son drives and baby rests on the handlebars; motorbikes carrying furniture, spare tires, wooden crates, lumber, cinder blocks, boxes of shoes. Nothing is too large to pile onto or strap to a bike. Lone men in ragged clothes stand or sit by the roadsides, selling petrol from small soda bottles, servicing punctures with little patch kits and old bicycle pumps.

The worst effects of breathing polluted air are experienced where it is densest: in traffic. Spending time on and near highways, freeways, and other busy roads is terrible for your health. How near is a question that is still being studied, but researchers believe that the effects are worst within either a fifth or a third of a mile. People in cars or buses are exposed to considerably more air pollution, perhaps because of, rather than despite, being in a closed space. People walking and bicycling on or next to roads breathe more air, but inhale somewhat less pollution; and cyclists have been found to have even less risk if they are on paths that are separated from the road.

There’s not much here that tempts me though. I look for folks who appear to be having fun, but can’t find any. Row after row of sad faces hooked up to slot machines like arms connected to IV's, drugs pumping into their minds. Table after table of drained souls looking to leave scraps of happiness and dignity on the green felt of the blackjack table.

We watch on as a young woman passes us by, her eyes glued to the screen of her phone. She almost walks into a cyclist, looks up for a split-second and then eyes back onto the screen and walks on, unbothered, like nothing has happened. It is clear to us, the world’s center of attention had shifted in the last few years, its center was now in our hands, its currency was measured in likes and shares. Information these days swirls in an endless, never-ending tornado of tweets, news feeds and viral sensations, each single word, no every single letter actually, fighting for our attention, fighting for a moment in the spotlight before fading into the depths of digital oblivion, to be forgotten forever.

When you’re afraid of going forward, you fall. By advancing, you constantly prevent the worst thing that could happen: falling. You might fail, but look at it this way. A cyclist and someone, who is terrified of biking, have an accident. The cyclist will know why he fell, and will make sure it doesn’t happen again; he will continue biking, however. The other person will make sure it doesn’t happen by never biking again. I had an acquaintance tell me something that still sticks with me now: doubt will get you out of action, and action will get you out of doubts.   Success is waiting for you. Stop overthinking it, and move forward like it’s the Tour de France.   You won’t be doubting yourself again.

A disproportionate number of retailers, I noted, offered nothing but translucent ochre trinkets: back in the Königsberg centuries, the city made its millions from amber – a substance whose precious allure I have never fully grasped, and which to my mind was very fortunate to have retained its prized aesthetic appeal following the invention of barley sugar. But

Generally speaking, a web of great mystification has been woven around time. Above all, the mystification about the ostensible objectivity of time. Utter nonsense. Time is a completely subjective matter, but every person is not a subject, and that is the problem. Timepieces are perhaps exact, but time is not, time is a matter of personality, or even of affinity.

Many kids would hit the streets at about 4 a.m., though early birds got started even earlier; the first calls regarding disorderly behavior usually reached the police by 2 a.m. Celebrants of Luilak (which means “lazybones”) would ring doorbells, beat drums, blow horns, crash pot lids together, scream “Luilak!,” sing a Luilak song, drag strings of empty tin cans behind their bikes, overturn garbage cans, bang windows, break windows, light bonfires, ignite fireworks, drink bottles of milk left out by the milkman, set buckets of water over doorways and trigger false fire alarms. They did anything and everything to annoy sleeping adults. This yearly debauchery—particular to Amsterdam and a few surrounding towns and with unknown origins—was centuries old.*

I’ve met a couple real cowboys in my life, and I’ve seen an awful lot of fellas who like to dress the part without any real need. Drugstore cowboys we used to call them. The real ones tend to be a lot less flash and sparkle, and tend to carry themselves with a lot more humility. I suppose the real work that cowboyin’ involves helps a fella grow accustomed to the taste of humble pie.

drop the economist’s beloved notion of ‘externalities’, those incidental effects felt by people who were not involved in the transactions that produced them—such as toxic effluent that affects communities living downstream of a river-polluting factory, or the exhaust fumes inhaled by cyclists biking through city traffic. Such negative externalities, remarks the ecological economist Herman Daly, are those things that ‘we classify as “external” costs for no better reason than because we have made no provision for them in our economic theories’.21 The systems dynamics expert John Sterman concurs. ‘There are no side effects—just effects,’ he says, pointing out that the very notion of side effects is just ‘a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’.

It is now time to face the fact that English is a crazy language — the most loopy and wiggy of all tongues. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language do people play at a recital and recite at a play? Why does night fall but never break and day break but never fall? Why is it that when we transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when we transport something by ship, it’s called cargo? Why does a man get a hernia and a woman a hysterectomy? Why do we pack suits in a garment bag and garments in a suitcase? Why do privates eat in the general mess and generals eat in the private mess? Why do we call it newsprint when it contains no printing but when we put print on it, we call it a newspaper? Why are people who ride motorcycles called bikers and people who ride bikes called cyclists? Why — in our crazy language — can your nose run and your feet smell?Language is like the air we breathe. It’s invisible, inescapable, indispensable, and we take it for granted. But, when we take the time to step back and listen to the sounds that escape from the holes in people’s faces and to explore the paradoxes and vagaries of English, we find that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms can be lit, homework can be done in school, nightmares can take place in broad daylight while morning sickness and daydreaming can take place at night, tomboys are girls and midwives can be men, hours — especially happy hours and rush hours — often last longer than sixty minutes, quicksand works very slowly, boxing rings are square, silverware and glasses can be made of plastic and tablecloths of paper, most telephones are dialed by being punched (or pushed?), and most bathrooms don’t have any baths in them. In fact, a dog can go to the bathroom under a tree —no bath, no room; it’s still going to the bathroom. And doesn’t it seem a little bizarre that we go to the bathroom in order to go to the bathroom? Why is it that a woman can man a station but a man can’t woman one, that a man can father a movement but a woman can’t mother one, and that a king rules a kingdom but a queen doesn’t rule a queendom? How did all those Renaissance men reproduce when there don’t seem to have been any Renaissance women? Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane: In what other language do they call the third hand on the clock the second hand? Why do they call them apartments when they’re all together? Why do we call them buildings, when they’re already built? Why it is called a TV set when you get only one? Why is phonetic not spelled phonetically? Why is it so hard to remember how to spell mnemonic? Why doesn’t onomatopoeia sound like what it is? Why is the word abbreviation so long? Why is diminutive so undiminutive? Why does the word monosyllabic consist of five syllables? Why is there no synonym for synonym or thesaurus? And why, pray tell, does lisp have an s in it? If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? If pro and con are opposites, is congress the opposite of progress? ...

He bought her flowers and took her to the Timmerman Opera House down the block. He gave her a bicycle. They spent evenings riding together on the smooth macadam of Yale and Harvard streets, the picture of a happy young couple blessed with looks and money. (“White pique hats with black watered-ribbon bands and a couple of knife feathers set at the side are the latest novelty for women cyclists,” the Tribune’s society column observed.) As Emeline became more accustomed to her “wheel,” a term everyone still used even though the old and deadly huge-wheeled bicycles of the past had become thoroughly obsolete, she and Holmes took longer and longer rides and often rode along the willowed Midway to Jackson Park to watch the construction of the world’s fair, where inevitably they found themselves among thousands of other people, many of them also bicyclists

As a bonding exercise one weekend, Musk, Ambras, a few other employees and friends took off for a bike ride through the Saratoga Gap trail in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Most of the riders had been training and were accustomed to strenuous sessions and the summer’s heat. They set up the mountains at a furious pace. After an hour, Russ Rive, Musk’s cousin, reached the top and proceeded to vomit. Right behind him were the rest of the cyclists. Then, fifteen minutes later, Musk became visible to the group. His face had turned purple, and sweat poured out of him, and he made it to the top. “I always think back to that ride. He wasn’t close to being in the condition needed for it,” Ambras said. “Anyone else would have quit or walked up their bike. As I watched him climb that final hundred feet with suffering all over his face, I thought, That’s Elon. Do or die but don’t give up.

If we thought that the eyes of such a girl were merely two glittering sequins of mica, we would not be athirst to know her and to unite her life to ours. But we sense that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due solely to their material composition; that it is, unknown to us, the dark shadows of the ideas that this being is conceiving, relative to the people and places that she knows— the turf of racecourses, the sand of cycling tracks over which, pedaling on past fields and woods, she would have drawn me after her, that little Peri, more seductive to me than she of the Persian paradise—the shadows, too, of the home to which she will presently return, of the plans that she is forming or that others have formed for her; and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. I knew that I would never possess this young cyclist if I did not possess also what was in her eyes.

But there wasn’t much peace to be had on Southern California freeways during the morning rush hour. The pace alternated between brief intervals of violent acceleration, and total gridlock. He was navigating the I-5 and 805 merge—known euphemistically as the ‘Golden Triangle’—when a motorcyclist riding a blue Kawasaki ZX6 cut in front of him, passing so close to Derrick’s front bumper that he felt his body tense for collision. Somehow, it didn’t come. Still crossing the freeway on a reckless diagonal, the bike barely missed getting run over by a semi-truck in the far right lane. The truck driver blew his horn long and angrily. Without looking up, the cyclist raised his left fist and made the time-honored ‘bird’ gesture. Then, he darted down the off ramp, and sped away on the East 56 freeway. Derrick shook his head in amazement. “What the hell is wrong with people?” Not more than thirty seconds later, he passed an Amber Alert sign that read, “SHARE THE ROAD. LOOK TWICE FOR MOTORCYCLES.

Книгите имат свой живот и своя смърт. А онези, чиито автори не са вярвали в смъртта, имат и задгробен живот. Други пък, чиито писатели са вярвали в прераждането, биват написани отново. Невъзможно е да се отдели съдбата на книгата от съдбата на нейния автор, а във всичко това се наместват и съдбите на читателите. Другояче казано, не читателят е този, който търси книгата, а той е търсеният, а има и произведения, които се крият по забутани места чак докато не се озоват в ръцете на онзи, за когото са предназначени.

Sir James Fergusson MP presided over a Highway Protection League meeting at the Westminster Palace Hotel in London in 1905, where delegates were told “the reckless conduct” of some motorists amounted to “tyranny on the highways” which was “shameful.” Motorists were getting away with murder, the meeting heard: “The old legal maxim that if a man fired a gun into a street and killed a person without meaning to do so he was guilty of murder, should be applied to motor drivers who recklessly [rode] down inoffensive people.

That is the moment I begin to despise the idea of fame. What does it do for the bearer of the laurel? Who cares if your name is in the paper? Who cares if you are mentioned as one of the top-ten cyclists, boxers, batters, painters, poets, artists, fly fishermen in the world? Who cares if your name is written in history books? When you have died you can't read those history books. When you have died the small trace you have left behind, even if you win a Tony, an Emmy, an Oscar, an election, will lose its vibrancy, fade into an outline. Oh yes, him, I heard of him, I knew someone who read him once. What difference does it make to the corpse if his books are in libraries or not in libraries? Who cares if his plays are revived on the summer-stock circuit for one hundred years? Isn't the simplest touch of a child's arm on the face more important, isn't the good meal, the brush against a thigh, a hand held during a movie, a swim in the sea, aren't those things of equal importance as the sands of time come rushing down on our heads burying ambition and love, good and evil, breath, blood, brains, waste, memory, alike in oblivion?

A tailwind, on the other hand, is one of the most beautiful experiences you can have on a bike. There’s no wind in my ears, so I hear everything around me. The chain purrs sweetly as it pulls the gears under the coaxing of my legs. The soft hiss of my tires on the smooth hard pavement, the sound of little critters scurrying in the desert around me as I pass. Smells aren’t as big a deal out here in the dry desert, but even the smells are more accessible in a tailwind, since I’m moving through air at a slower relative speed, and the smells linger around my face long enough to register and enjoy them. Relative progress, speed, sights, smells, sounds. It all goes together to create a gestalt for the ride that’s pure sweetness, and I never want it to end. Hozho.

I’ve put down half a pitcher of water by the time she comes to take my order. She fills another pitcher and sets it in front of me, standing with her pen in her hand, distracted, waiting for me to order. It’s early afternoon and well north of 100 degrees. Perusing the menu, I comment on the heat. “Man, it’s hot out there.” Setting her order pad down on the counter, crossing her arms, tapping the back of her pen against her lower lip, she looks out the window at my bike leaning there. Her eyes drift to mine with that look women can give men. You know the look, the one that says, “I’m wondering if you’re trying to act dumb, or if you really might be that dumb.” Not necessarily mean, just curious. I smile sheepishly beneath the pressure of the question behind her look. Every man reading these words knows exactly what I’m talking about here. You get the look, so you know you’ve said or done something really stupid, but you don’t have a clue what it is you’ve done or said that is so outrageously idiotic. Which just makes it worse. She sees all this wash across my face, and a small smile plays at the corners of her face. Still tapping the pen against her lower lip, she brings her elbows down to rest on the bar, leaning in a little closer to me, as if letting me in on her secret. “Honey, it’s June. It’s the hottest month in the Sonoran Desert.” Pausing, she looks again at my bicycle leaning against her window. “You’re riding a bicycle across the black asphalt in the hottest desert in the hottest month.” She pauses there, looking into my eyes, raising one eyebrow, letting me know a question is coming. “What, exactly, did you expect?” Hmmm. Good point. I might have heard those words whispered to me by the desert itself earlier today. “Right,” I say, closing the menu and handing it to her, keeping my eyes on hers. “I’ll take the burger.” We smile at each other as she takes the menu.

Every Inch of the Way is a great page turning adventure which is as close as you can get, without actually saddling up and pedalling yourself into the unknown. It takes real magic to turn a great adventure, into a great book. For one thing, most people can't relate to the mindset of the long distance cyclist and I found myself laughing along to Tom's thoughts and observations, wondering if they were in - jokes, shared by those who had seen the world at the speed of a bike, for example his relationship with Serbia's stray dogs! . But his anecdotes have a great balance of the cultures and places, as opposed to just inward reflections, so I am sure would be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in travel and human experience. A lovely story, written from the heart.

(Riders had heard stories of some cyclists setting alarms to wake up in the middle of the night to exercise, so that their EPO-thickened blood wouldn’t cause them to suffer cardiac arrest in their sleep.)

In a very simple way the amount of pain that a professional cyclist goes through, even on a normal day, far exceeds what most people would experience in their entire lives.

Indeed, at 92.5, LeMond’s is among the highest VO2s ever recorded by any athlete. VO2 is reckoned to be the most significant measurement in endurance athletes; it refers to the volume of oxygen, in liters per minute, transported by the athlete during exercise. The Norwegian cross-country skiers Espen Harald Bjerke and Bjørn Dæhlie are believed to have the highest ever recorded VO2, at 96. By way of comparison, Lance Armstrong’s has been reported as 85; that of another multiple Tour winner, Miguel Indurain, was 88. Figures appear to be unavailable for Bernard Hinault. LeMond’s VO2 of 92.5 could, therefore, be the highest ever recorded by a cyclist. By way of further comparison, the “normal” VO2 for a man in his 20s is between 38 and 43.