The Alchemy of Fun

Photo: Mike McManus

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be hooked on cycling. Through thick and thin, trials and tribulations, why is cycling a life-long passion for so many people? Why do many of us refer to ‘riding like a kid again’ as an experience that renews our love of riding bikes when we find ourselves struggling? Is there a spark at the core of the matter?

I’ve observed many of us explain our passion for cycling by evoking concepts we think non-cyclists can relate to: exploration, adventure, freedom, satisfaction, camaraderie, green-ness, utility, economy, convenience, etc.. These are all ideas, socially and culturally underpinned and embedded, layered upon sensations and emotions.  It's not 'culturally acceptable' to say the reason we love cycling is that it feels good. All the stuff about exploring, freedom, fitness, competition, yada yada, is layered on top of simple sensations some of us - not all - value. All sorts of emotions are intertwined with these concepts, and they function as layers that render cycling satisfying even when it isn't 'fun.' The sense of accomplishment, learning, improving, etc., expands the 'good' of cycling well beyond the somatic. These layers underpin how we move through the chapters of our cycling lives.

Do we get hooked because we 'feel good about riding' though? As in, after we ride, we feel good about having ridden: Type-2 fun. I don’t think so. Ideas and valuations of rides post hoc are not enough to sustain years of cycling. Being hooked, loving cycling, is about something deeper, fundamental, and fleeting; it’s alchemical.

My contention is that riding bikes is transcendent. It is at once ‘wrong’ and ‘right.’ From the first moment we find our balance and roll freely on two wheels, we experience an ‘I can’ previously unimaginable, and a sense of ‘getting away with something.’ It’s fun.

But it’s too simple to say fun is what hooks folks on cycling, and leave it at that. 'Fun' is a term we use to categorize experience, usually over a duration of time well in excess of a moment. When we evaluate an experience as conforming to our personal definition of 'fun,' we draw on our memories of our experience, weigh the 'highs' against the 'lows,' and render a judgement. When we say, "Yeah, that was fun," we don't tend to mean that every moment of our experience was literally 'fun.’ We consciously or unconsciously select from our memory of experience/phenomena to construct a judgment, reported as a claim: “Yeah, that was fun.”  The operative term, ‘fun,’ signifies a broad range of experience, from sensations and emotional states to psychological stages. Something lies beneath 'fun' and that thing is primal.

The thin line: 'pure fun'?

Pure fun is what hooked most of us on bikes in the first place, and it's what keeps us coming back. It precedes 'fun,' which is a conscious label we apply to an experience post-hoc. Fun is not an emotion, and it's not a sensation. It's a social construct, and it's interpretive and relative.

At the most basic level, the (primal) pure fun of bike riding can be boiled down to the coupling of 'pre-reflective,' corporeal sensations we experience when we move, as a body-bike, and emotion, something like 'joy' or 'elation.' It underpins how we recollect an experience and assign it a label: 'fun,' 'not-fun,' 'scary,' 'boring,' 'annoying,' 'disappointing,' etc..  Underpins, because recollection entails reflecting back on one's experience over a duration of time, which for most people will not be a seamless sequence of events from beginning to end, but a series of peaks and valleys, determined by emotionally charged perceptions and sensations. Emotion is what makes things memorable. If the number of peaks - pure fun moments - outweigh the number of valleys - things that went wrong, like mechanicals, moments of fear, crashes, etc., the entirety of the experience is rendered 'fun.' We tack on superlatives like 'super-fun' and 'mega-fun' when the pure fun factor is high enough to dominate the balance. These are the days we feel totally 'on it' as we ride challenging terrain that pushes back against us. We engage in battle, we win. Or, perhaps more apt: we harmonize. In a world of chaotic dischord, the sense of being at-one feels good, and it feels right. 

Pure fun is a form of 'Type-1 fun,' which is direct and experienced in the moment. It's the sort of fun we seek as children, before we start talking ourselves into doing things that will suck, but we'll feel good about having pulled-off after the fact: 'Type-2 fun'. Pure fun is about how we feel, not about what we think. It's about a feeling of 'rightness' in the face of 'wrongness,' a mixed emotion, alchemical: joy/elation/relief.

Defiant sensations

Pure fun manifests in the instants we pull off moving through space in ways that transcend human experience on foot. As we learn to ride bikes better and better, our personal ‘edge of control’ threshold shifts. As riding in a straight line becomes easy, and we build confidence and a sense of control, we find ourselves pushing the limits of our ability, succeeding, and failing. If things go well, we have the opportunity to experience thrills and spills, with the balance lying on the thrills side of the equation. 

At the somatic level - pre-cognitive - acceleration and deceleration across the X and Y axis is the foundation that generates the 'push back' we feel as we engage terrain. Where fear should manifest, and undermine our ability to maintain control, the confluence of ability and challenge sparks a flicker of positive emotion that reinforces the rightness of our movements, creating a positive feedback loop. It's alchemical, magical.

What's alchemical about it? There are two interlocking components. First, at the somatic (sensation) level, the G-forces we feel on bikes transcend pre-industrial human experience. We have not evolved as a species experiencing G-forces. Birds have. When we feel G-forces, moving vertically and laterally through space, we experience a strong contrast of weightlessness and weightiness. It's kind of profound. It's not 'natural.' It 'feels wrong.' When we pull it off, however - meaning, don't crash - emotion attaches to the sensations: relief. This is split-second stuff, of course. We've just felt something we shouldn't feel, and we've survived. What do we call the emotion we experience? Thrill. We're thrilled. It's thrilling.

There's a thin line between 'fun' and 'fear' when we defy physics. The thrilling sensations of weightlessness and G-forces are not coupled with emotions in the moment we experience them; and they are fleeting. Think about it; we don't feel speed itself. We don't feel ourselves rotating at 460m per second on planet Earth. Why? because our speed is constant; we're not accelerating and decelerating. We only 'feel speed' when we accelerate and decelerate, though we can perceive it if we visually relate ourselves to stationary objects, like trees along a road. Seeing speed isn't a sensation, however. 

The sensation of speed, weightlessness and G-forces, is about pressure: an easing or an intensification. It's about our bodies feeling very unlike what we consider 'normal,' because our 'insides' are interacting with our 'outsides' out of unison. Our guts are still moving upwards while our bones are already moving downwards. Our bones are pushing outwards as our skin is pushing back; the skin is where opposing forces meet.

Fun not Fear: It's Magic

The sensations I'm talking about often precede disaster. They often coincide with a lack of control. In the latter case, when defiant sensations are rapidly coupled with additional sensory information that is processed - based on experience - and judged as conveying a lack of control, an emotion is layered upon, or associated with, what is being felt: fear. In contrast, when the same primal, defiant sensations are experienced alongside a sense of control, the experience crosses over from 'thrilling,' to 'fun.' 

'Thrilling' is about the sensations and an accepted lack of control over what is happening, but a conscious understanding that we are 'safe.' For example, a roller coaster is thrilling, assuming one actually believes it's safe. If one doesn't believe this, and is pressured by friends to get on, the experience won't be rendered 'thrilling' or 'fun.' It'll be 'scary.'

In the context of cycling, unlike roller coasters, what we're doing is NOT SAFE. We - ultimately - know this. While we might feel the same sensation of G-force as we pass through a depression on a trail as a low-point of a roller-coaster track, the fundamental difference is that how we react to the sensation makes a difference to what happens next. On the roller-coaster, death-gripping the safety bar, clenching butt cheeks, and closing our eyes won't affect what happens next; we're literally being taken for a ride. On a bike, if we react in ways that lead to being taken for a ride, the emotion that manifests is fear.

The magic of cycling manifests when we find ourselves experiencing sensations that could easily segue into fear, but instead segue into elation. This occurs when we do the right things to control our bike-bodies, in defiance of physics, in ways not natural to humans, and pull something off that maybe 'shouldn't be possible.’ Thrill meets intention and influence, and every time we 'slay the dragon' we embolden ourselves. We're playing a game, pushing juuuuust enough, to the edge of control, knowing we're doing something that is somehow 'wrong,' yet also so very 'right.' For some of us, this is what it is to be alive. It's fun.