“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need”. Jagger/Richards
The fact that Mick Jagger is a bike nut doesn’t necessarily mean he’s thinking about bikes all the time or revolving every single thing in his life around them, as some of us do to the point of slight irritation. But I keep coming back to this particular lyric. It sums up the way I’ll often go out on the bike and come back having incidentally achieved something I didn’t actually set out to achieve.
A long time ago, in the days when I often used to think of riding as training for something, I’d occasionally find myself achieving some sort of higher plane of being. It happened more often with running than with cycling. I’m guessing it’s what a lot of runners refer to as a ‘runners’ high’, but I don’t really know. I used to imagine my running legs pedalling in smooth circles, I could barely feel the ground and I’d often find myself smiling inanely but not quite knowing why. To onlookers the smile probably looked like a grimace but I was inwardly happy.
I often seemed to solve issues on those runs, but that didn’t happen as much as I would have liked. A far more regular running or riding scenario is one that involves mustering enough willpower to get ready and get out of the door just because I know it’ll do me good. Experience tells me that in the vast majority of cases, regardless of how hard the run/ride is, I’ll feel better afterwards.
And then there are those times when, for one reason or another, I go out for a run or a ride simply because I need a distraction, an escape, a displacement activity to solve an often hard to fathom mind-block or build-up of background stress. Often I just need something to do, and I’ve learned over the years that a ride is often the one thing I need to do even at times when it’s not the thing I consciously want to do.
I recently found myself half listening to one of those religious authority types on the Radio Four ‘Thought for the Day’ slot. He was talking about the likes of him having nothing pressing to do on Easter Saturday: something to do with it being an officially sanctioned ‘nowt to do’ day betwixt Good Friday and Easter Sunday. So to cut a long story short (which I think is what the ‘Thought for the Day’ slot attempts), religious types can often be found occupying themselves with displacement activities, like mooching around in out of town retail centres abstractly handling commodities. Displacement activity in the natural world is what animals do when caught between two stools, between a rock and a hard place; think cats starting to groom when they should be fighting or fleeing, or humans scratching their heads when they don’t know what to do or say.
But displacement activity can easily progress from being a distraction to being a raison d’etre. This is fortunate, to the point of being critical to our well-being. Why? Well, it’s good to know that our activities can sometimes be uplifting as well as useful. Most of us lead plain, ordinary lives in that anonymous expanse of vaguely PC no-persons’ land that few people notice. Facebook occasionally ups our profiles to the point of being relevant for a scant few minutes but, with few exceptions, we quickly return to the personal limbo-land that lies part-way between gurning accidental lottery winners and drug-fuelled petty thieves.
To put it bluntly, few of us have, or ever find, the ability to create a real impact. The best we can expect is to find a few outlets to keep us happy. Even lottery winners and thieves need outlets; occasionally achievable ways of preventing the superficial ups from becoming suicidal downs. A lot of the stuff we end up doing in life is essentially an attempt to create a brief escape from other stuff we’ve ended up doing. Those brief escapes are usually obvious and intuitive choices – think joyful spreading of wings; whereas the other stuff has often happened to us by default – think bird in a cage. Depressing eh? OK, we’re not all dialled that way, but one way or another a lot of us seem to spend our lives looking for parole from the little prisons we build for ourselves.
Why do we love blasting around mucky trails in the woods on our bikes? Lots of reasons, some abstract, some complex, some basic instinct, most all three. But the main reason is that it’s a simple, even almost socially acceptable, way of escaping… otherwise known as displacement activity, distracting ourselves from all those deeply responsible things that guilt, conscience and emotional fragility frequently tell us we should be doing.
The beauty of escapes and distractions is that they occasionally achieve what they subconsciously set out to achieve. At least, some of them do. Getting out on a bike nearly always does it for me. Computer gaming worlds don’t. Even if I really don’t feel like going for a ride I still try to force myself out of the door, because when I do, the aftermath almost always makes me feel like a happier, slightly more fulfilled human being; often providing me with just that little bit of extra ability or momentum to deal with the stuff I’m probably trying to escape from. Or at least make it feel benign instead of virulent.
Only the strictest disciplinarians try to escape from being distracted because most of the things that are good distractions are also fun and life-affirming.
As mountain bikers we all have our own way of finding distraction and escape in what we do and the way we do it. We’re all searching for something similar, whether we know it or not, but attempting to impart personal mountain biking wisdom is like trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. And, taking the egg analogy a couple of steps further than necessary, there’s more than one way to crack one. Someone once told me they made scrambled egg by making an omelette and putting it in a liquidiser. Who am I to question such pretzel logic?