Cycling as IRL

[Cugel]

These days many people seem to live in a world that's extremely artificial. Not only do they live in a wholly-built environment 24 hours a day, 365 days a year but now also in a "headspace" that's composed of on-line stuff entirely divorced from reality. It seems telling that the TLA IRL (In Real Life) has meaning. Real life seems to be a location that many visit very infrequently, if ever.

What has this to do with cycling?

In various social activities I've noticed that many who don't cycle (or walk or go anywhere other than in a car) have no ability to grasp the perspective of the non-car travellers or goers-about. Getting a lift from someone to the bowling club (a half-hour drive away in a rather remote village) I notice the driver has no awareness at all of the needs of other kinds of road users (mostly walkers, farm vehicles, horse riders and even the odd cyclist).

In other social situations conversations often reveal that the experiences, understandings and behaviours of those who are not wholly immersed in built environment, car and antisocial media world is more or less absent. In fact, there seems to be a fear and avoidance of IRL experiences with a preference for the queer tropes, attitudes and behaviours made fashionable by the mass media and consumer not-so-durables.

************
One aspect of cycling about a lot is that it provides one of the fewer and fewer opportunities to experience IRL. In some ways even cycling is rather artificial (bikes and tarmac roads are not exudations of nature; and even "the countryside" is a 99% a human artefact) but cycling does retain something of base reality about it that driving a car doesn't. Mind, dog walking in a forest or up the fells retains even more, despite the fact that these places too are human constructs (for forestry planting and sheep herding / pheasant-shooting).

Personally I don't think I'd care for IRL experiences of a truly wilderness kind. Who wants to be eaten by a bear or consumed by a strange virus far from the hospital!? But I'm very appreciative and grateful for the habits of cycling (and dog walking) for keeping some threads of existence connected to real life rather than being lost in the post-modern world of mad human imaginings, both physical and metaphysical.

How about you?

[Galactic]

Does cycling along, watching the wee GPS arrow and heart stats while listening to a podcast on the old bluetooth earpieces fit into your 'cycling IRL' concept? Or are those using cycle computers and headphones just as divorced from reality and empathy as, say, car drivers?

Slightly rhetorical that question, I'll admit. But it seems to me that cycling isn't immune from insulation from the real world by technology. When doing a trip to the shops or 'round the block' I'll often listen to music or a podcast to while away the time while I'm cycling through familiar terrain. I'm always surprised how distracting music/podcasts are (in the sense of I'm not bored of seeing the same scenery, not distracted as in not paying attention to potential hazards and road users although it does take a conscious effort not to zone out).

[roubaixtuesday]

These days many people seem to live in a world that's extremely artificial. Not only do they live in a wholly-built environment 24 hours a day, 365 days a year but now also in a "headspace" that's composed of on-line stuff entirely divorced from reality. It seems telling that the TLA IRL (In Real Life) has meaning. Real life seems to be a location that many visit very infrequently, if ever.

What has this to do with cycling?

In various social activities I've noticed that many who don't cycle (or walk or go anywhere other than in a car) have no ability to grasp the perspective of the non-car travellers or goers-about. Getting a lift from someone to the bowling club (a half-hour drive away in a rather remote village) I notice the driver has no awareness at all of the needs of other kinds of road users (mostly walkers, farm vehicles, horse riders and even the odd cyclist).

In other social situations conversations often reveal that the experiences, understandings and behaviours of those who are not wholly immersed in built environment, car and antisocial media world is more or less absent. In fact, there seems to be a fear and avoidance of IRL experiences with a preference for the queer tropes, attitudes and behaviours made fashionable by the mass media and consumer not-so-durables.

************
One aspect of cycling about a lot is that it provides one of the fewer and fewer opportunities to experience IRL. In some ways even cycling is rather artificial (bikes and tarmac roads are not exudations of nature; and even "the countryside" is a 99% a human artefact) but cycling does retain something of base reality about it that driving a car doesn't. Mind, dog walking in a forest or up the fells retains even more, despite the fact that these places too are human constructs (for forestry planting and sheep herding / pheasant-shooting).

Personally I don't think I'd care for IRL experiences of a truly wilderness kind. Who wants to be eaten by a bear or consumed by a strange virus far from the hospital!? But I'm very appreciative and grateful for the habits of cycling (and dog walking) for keeping some threads of existence connected to real life rather than being lost in the post-modern world of mad human imaginings, both physical and metaphysical.

How about you?

On this note, I'm often astounded by the attitudes of people who have on-line turbo machines and apps (Zwift etc).

Many seem to *prefer* sweating in a garage "competing" with others or even just measuring their watts, to being out in the real world, which they perceive as too cold, wet or dangerous.

Personally, I'd rather be out in the dark and the sleet feeling alive.

[Nearholmer]

Yep, the “IRL factor” in cycling is hugely important to me, and it drives both the fact that I cycle mostly off-road, so “bike rambling” in the countryside if at all possible, and that I shove myself out of the door on some quite horrible, cold, wet, and definitely dark, evenings in winter if I can’t fit bike rides in during the daytimes.

You’re right that the vast majority of the countryside is human shaped, but the thing about the countryside is that humans are never quite fully in control, even in the most artificial places like fens and plantation forests, the balance of power is very clearly in favour of natural forces, plants, and animals, and you get to meet all of those if you cycle in it.

[Cugel]

Does cycling along, watching the wee GPS arrow and heart stats while listening to a podcast on the old bluetooth earpieces fit into your 'cycling IRL' concept? Or are those using cycle computers and headphones just as divorced from reality and empathy as, say, car drivers?

Slightly rhetorical that question, I'll admit. But it seems to me that cycling isn't immune from insulation from the real world by technology. When doing a trip to the shops or 'round the block' I'll often listen to music or a podcast to while away the time while I'm cycling through familiar terrain. I'm always surprised how distracting music/podcasts are (in the sense of I'm not bored of seeing the same scenery, not distracted as in not paying attention to potential hazards and road users although it does take a conscious effort not to zone out).

Its a long time since I had a bike computer or any other gizmo other than a bell and a flashing light on me handlebars. I found such things intrusive, as I would some ditty-droner in my ears. The best cycling experiences I've had are those in which the bike almost "disappears" and its just whatever "me" is moving through the air, gazing at what's to be seen and hearing the birdsong & similar. But I rarely cycle through towns; the villages are short; the traffic is light-to-zero.

It can be the same on a fell walk, especially in the less popular places - just fell, sky and air - perhaps with a bit to much baa-ing than birdsong though.

If there was an app (ha ha) - and I was silly enough to have a gizmo to run it on - for temporarily switching off my ability to think in language for a while, I'd run it. "The silence of animals" - no inner "voice" pestering one with artificial thoughts but instead those thoughts consisting entirely of sense-perceptions and their effects in our wetware. Would that be good? Some eastern religions purport to seek such a state but apparently it takes decades; and often fails to materialise.

[Cugel]

On this note, I'm often astounded by the attitudes of people who have on-line turbo machines and apps (Zwift etc).

Many seem to *prefer* sweating in a garage "competing" with others or even just measuring their watts, to being out in the real world, which they perceive as too cold, wet or dangerous.

Personally, I'd rather be out in the dark and the sleet feeling alive.

Forty years ago, when obsessed with cycle racing, I had a set of rollers in the kitchen. These were used in winter on the really bad weather days and were very boring. Also, I doubt they had any effect other than inducing gallons of sweat. Later I had a static trainer thing. That was even less used and soon got to the deepest layer of stuff in the loft. As you say, cycling IRL, even when the life is wet, windy, cold and dark, is so much more pleasurable! Especially when it stops as one returns to one's warm nest for a hot shower and a sticky cake.

Mind, I disliked the half hour cleaning, drying and lubing the bedraggled bicycle before getting unbedraggled meself.

Data addicts - a sad state of affairs to get into, especially when the data mocks one's efforts and describes nothing but a lot of pedal pushes. Not memorable, even with the data all arranged in neat tables. A wild winter night out in the dark with the chain gang - unforgettable!

[PDQ Mobile]

What's TLA?
I'm not good on these things.
I tried to search it and got results for some sort of land rental stuff and more!!

I had a dog for years- walked the full length of Wales with him camping- delightful, memorable.
But for various reasons didn't replace him.
However in terms of "mindfullness" I found walking with or without, preferable without.
One reason was sheep and the other was I found my focus moved more onto other things.

[Carlton green]

An interesting topic and, might I suggest, much wider than cycling. In part we can become obsessed with data and in part we don’t want to risk wasting any precious moment that could be spent on matters of higher importance or urgency.

Personally I can’t be doing with all this focus on data: it typically has scant value to me and a mass of information can obscure what’s actually important. I’m also not one to be plugged in to some electronic gizmo and more one to listen to what’s happening around me and to engage others in conversation.

Of course this gizmo that allows me to ‘talk’ to faceless others is perhaps not real life either, but it does provide us all with a medium through which to share valued knowledge and experiences that very likely would not otherwise reach us. Balance is the thing to seek out and what balance actually is is hard to find and hard to identify.

What's TLA?

It seems telling that the TLA IRL (In Real Life) has meaning.

TLA = Three letter acronym .

[Cugel]

An interesting topic and, might I suggest, much wider than cycling. In part we can become obsessed with data and in part we don’t want to risk wasting any precious moment that could be spent on matters of higher importance or urgency.

Personally I can’t be doing with all this focus on data: it typically has scant value to me and a mass of information can obscure what’s actually important. I’m also not one to be plugged in to some electronic gizmo and more one to listen to what’s happening around me and to engage others in conversation.

Of course this gizmo that allows me to ‘talk’ to faceless others is perhaps not real life either, but it does provide us all with a medium through which to share valued knowledge and experiences that very likely would not otherwise reach us. Balance is the thing to seek out and what balance actually is is hard to find and hard to identify.

What's TLA?

It seems telling that the TLA IRL (In Real Life) has meaning.

TLA = Three letter acronym .

I wuz hoping someone would ask about the TLA - a term describing itself.

One way to differentiate information classes or schemas would be to contrast info that's most directly apprehended by a human (or any other beast with sense organs and an interpreter) from info that's constructed via other info constructs, perhaps through several stages of them. The former is increasingly rare, not least because some fool always wants to re-render it into a symbolic language via several of the aforementioned constructed info parsers and interpreters.

But we humans are stuck with language. And the more educated we are, the harder it is to enter the IRL domain.

[al_yrpal]

The cycling I loved most of all was offroad in the Chilterns on bridleways. Totally natural, no forestry fire roads or gravel. Deep mud, wading through leaves with sticks and branches underwheel to challenge you on the ground. Often 20 miles without seeing a soul. Nothing like that here.

I make sure I have at least an hour every evening in the wild area of our garden sat by the pond with a glass of wine and nothing else listening to birdsong and watching the insects and fish....

Al

[PDQ Mobile]

What's TLA?

It seems telling that the TLA IRL (In Real Life) has meaning.

TLA = Three letter acronym .

I wuz hoping someone would ask about the TLA - a term describing itself.

One way to differentiate information classes or schemas would be to contrast info that's most directly apprehended by a human (or any other beast with sense organs and an interpreter) from info that's constructed via other info constructs, perhaps through several stages of them. The former is increasingly rare, not least because some fool always wants to re-render it into a symbolic language via several of the aforementioned constructed info parsers and interpreters.

But we humans are stuck with language. And the more educated we are, the harder it is to enter the IRL domain.
[/quote]
Pleased to oblige!
Thankyou.
Obvious to some I suppose.

This is real enough, today.
Though I guess only truly "wild" if you annoy them!!!
They have language too, it is said.

[Nearholmer]

For me it’s not really about data, or not data, sometimes I do put the data logger on when riding, largely to get a record of where I’ve been and to look at my HR on the tough climbs, but strictly afterwards, not during. It is more about mindfulness, being in the moment, whatever you want to call it, and about direct, rather than mediated, sensation and experience. There’s also a mild sense of adventure or exploration, given that even routes I’ve been over many times vary by the seasons, so the place becomes a slightly different place. That much more so when going somewhere for the first time, of course.

The seasons are very important, and for the forty odd years when I worked in London I always missed the proper experience of seasons, which you can only get where nature has a strong hand, and humanity a weaker one.Sure, it gets colder, wetter, and dark earlier in the winter in a city, but you don’t get that eerie sensation of all of the energy having gone out of the world, of everything holding its breath to see whether or not the sun is really going to come back again this time, and conversely no city conveys the unbounded energy of everything growing for all it’s worth, the sheer fecundity, of nature in high summer. There’s more magic in a fifty yard stretch of untended hedgerow than a thousand miles of shop-displays, of a thousand hours of TV/internet (music, books and radio get a bit closer, but even they can’t beat a hedge!).

[pwa]

On a walk with my wife and the dog today I consciously tried to stay "in the moment", casting cares and concerns away. It worked for a while. Just listening to the birdsong, taking care with slippery stones underfoot and so forth. But then my mind returned to problems with my mother, and other mental clutter.....

[Nearholmer]

My take is that cycling, especially off-road, is a better “mind clearer” than walking, because you have to concentrate more, because if you don’t you crash!

I’ve known several people who are highly intelligent, exceptionally so, but slightly prone to over-thinking and visits from the black dog, who are keen motorcyclists, one a professional risk manager who is also into free climbing, and I’ve asked them how they make the risk balance, effectively “why does a person as smart as you take those risk?”, and the answer in every case has been “because the benefits of clearing my mind by being in the moment, and I absolutely have to be, or die, far outweigh the risks”.

[pwa]

One key thing about meditative exercise is that it is ruined if your phone rings. You answer it, and you are instantly dealing with a friend or family member with problems that need sorting. If you think you can risk putting it on silent, do.

I sometimes try to shut down communication when I go on a two day break somewhere. That can be quite refreshing. It is easier to live in the moment when "real life" back home isn't intruding. I know a good campsite with zero phone signal and wifi that doesn't really work, and the enforced sense of isolation is helpful. But I take a book.