Wandering

In training season, before I leave the house, I often know by heart the route I will follow, and nearly to the minute how long it will take to complete, as well as the usual average speed. The hours leading up to the critical moment of departure during training season are filled with competing rides jostling in my mind to be chosen, with those only recently done competing on the grounds that training means repetition. Then, one route will suddenly crystallize with a feeling of completeness and appropriateness. It will be my ride du jour.

This time of year, however, when training has tapered off to become just plain old riding, I find myself leaving the house with not much of a riding plan, and after no real mental preparation or evaluation of options. In fact, with schedules winding down overall so that there are fewer demands on my time, I am finding a definite lack of a need to start early or define an upper boundary to the length of time I'm away. So, I have taken to wandering around on my bike.

Wandering is a completely different mode of riding than purposeful, route-driven training. Instead of completing a well-worn route by ticking off the mental cue sheet as you go, and monitoring time and speed and hydration and nutrition as the miles go by, you instead think mainly of what to do next, and have to improvise as you go. This improvisation takes a fair amount of getting used to after a season of pre-programmed riding, especially if you are integrating familiar roads as you go. It's easy to lapse into a habit, like accidentally driving to work on a weekend just because you're on the highway with that exit on it. If you don't concentrate, you might find yourself on the old route and have to work your way out, grumbling at your own Pavlovian responses to the jingle of a familiar landmark.

You have to learn to plan ahead, but in smaller batches, and strike a balance between going far enough afield to make it a long ride (usually, you know about how many miles you want to log), without going so far astray that you end up either needing a map or logging 40 miles when you wanted to do 25. This leads to relearning pieces of routes and how they relate to each other. The wandering season is a time of discovery, and I have often been surprised to realize how two routes I've ridden as unconnected traversals turn out to be linked by a sneaky little sidestreet or an unusual set of twists and turns.

This kind of stitched together riding makes wandering feel a bit melodramatic, like a plotline forced together for maudlin effect. Terrain can add to the unintended drama, as you may find yourself having scripted in 10 miles of hills unintentionally or a long stretch of divided highway, something that would make any work of fiction or drama deathly dull. Making sure there is some comic relief, a pastiche of emotions, and interesting characters can make all the difference to the wandering cyclist's level of enjoyment.

But the fun of wandering is in the freedom, the fact that today's ride has no label in your log, in fact may be completely new if not in parts at least as a whole. And who knows? You may just find a new combination, a new route, that will be enshrined in next year's training load. And then you'll have to wander away from it again . . . next year.