In a straightaway I'm slower on my bicycle than a car, but I retain an edge in agility and I disobey the law. These are really the advantages. City cycling is a ballet of sorts, a thing of rhythm and unity in motion. There are a plethora of variables that enter and exit your equation as you ride block to block. Car door, hill, streetlight, jogger, dog walker, left turn only, yadda yadda yadda. The ability of a rider to carve through time, to see ahead as a speed chess player does -- not with absolute precision, but with sufficient confidance to make a move without pausing for conscious thought -- is the differentiator between recreational cyclists and true riders.
It is the difference between tourism and adventure, between a pleasent diversion and a lifestyle choice.
My position in the world as a rider colors my other experience. I'm comfortable, even desirous of sustained physical exertion. I am comfortable with my sweat, comfortable playing with degrees of energy and torque that could be lethal if misapplied. I am urban calvary. Riding thrusts you into your environment just as driving a car removes you from it; when in transit I exist in a public space, subject to the same forces as any other object of being. This changes the way you feel about your cubicle at work, your room at home, your booth at the bar, etc etc etc.
Lately as I've been down and out some, I've taken to riding hard and high to work through things. Methodically climbing big hills in SF, I answer questions to myself; I ruminate, preachify, storm and thunder, rhapsodize; all to the rhythm set up in my thighs and pushed through my knees to my feet to the pedal crank chain gear spoke weel tube rubber road. Higher and higher. With my slick set of wheels geared all the way down, dropping one leg's full pistoning potential will cause my front end to kick up off the street even on the steepest of car-chase hills. Iggy Pop; raw power is sure to come running to you.
There's something to this, to the working and maneuvers. The downhill glee, and the syncopation of threading through other objects in motion. When I swing around a corner on a steady great arc, passing pretty crosswalk girls close enough to carry an eddy of perfume in my wake there's a thrill of quality and excellence that's absolutely priceless and addictive. There's an edge of death and danger and reptilian satisfaction to all of this, and it colors the rest of my experience. The life of a rider is saturated and high-contrast, and when we fall off our horses, there's nothing for it but to get back up and ride again.
