At 5:12 AM on May 1st, while the world around me still slept, I clipped into the pedals and set off.
The plan was simple: ride 100 kilometres.
The destination? Nowhere in particular.
The roads of Cambridgeshire were almost empty. In those early hours, there were few cars, few people and very little noise. Just the bike, the road and the first signs of daylight beginning to appear.
As the sun came up, the kilometres passed. The legs felt good, the bike was moving well, and somewhere along the way I even picked up a few PRs.
Then came the flat tyre.
No revelation. No thunder from the heavens. Just the familiar feeling that something wasn’t quite right, followed by the discovery that one of my tyres had decided it had had enough.
Impermanence, meet inner tube.
Bike upside down. Wheel off. Hands dirty. New tube in. Pump. Check. Back on the road.
Not much of a kōan, perhaps, but certainly enough to interrupt whatever plans I had been making.
The villages continued to pass, one after another. The morning grew brighter, the roads busier, and my legs gradually began reminding me that 100 kilometres is still 100 kilometres.
By the end, the numbers looked something like this:
Distance: 102 km
Elevation: 550 m
Moving time: 3 hours 50 minutes
Calories burned: 1,552 — not that the body keeps count
Flat tyres: 1
Bicycles successfully returned home: 1
Perhaps the deepest teaching of the morning was this: resistance causes suffering, but a patch kit brings peace.
Or perhaps there was no teaching at all.
There was a long ride, an early sunrise, a puncture, some PRs and a pair of tired legs.
That was plenty.
