Bicycling USA – July 2019

THE SELECTION

10 BICYCLING.COM • ISSUE 5

I love that feeling, that letting go but being

there. I love that I can trust the bike, and I

love even more that after all these years I

have come to a place where I can trust the

biking, which is a whole different thing. I

love to take bad lines on the bad stuff some-

times, for fun, or for my own instruction, or

sometimes to show to the riders behind me

something about the way we are going or

the way we are riding or maybe something

about the way my life is going, or to feel like

I’m doing my own thing, or for the beauty

of keeping up on the worse line with the

people on the good line, or sometimes just

@TRUEBS

I love to ride light on

gravel or dirt, with my

weight a little more

behind the bottom

bracket than usual but

without planting the

rear wheel, and with a

loose rein on the bar,

so the bike can pretty

much go where it wants

to but doesn’t run out

from underneath me.

BECAUSE #BIKEISTHEWAYOFLIFE

because I am too tired to care and I love that

sometimes that is when I do some of my best

riding of the day. I love to drift the rear wheel

and I love mostly being able to get it to hook

up and being okay with the consequence

when I can’t. I love that on a ride made up of

mixed surfaces my riding friends and I call

the short sections of dirt or gravel or grass

or mud secteurs because why not admit the

fantasy, and I love that when we hit a secteur

we go faster than we were going on pavement,

because why not chase the fantasy. I love

to stop on a good old dirt road that used to

be a goat path and in the sun or the shade

depending on the day and the needs of my

soul reach back and pull a sandwich from my

jersey pocket and unwrap the wax paper and

eat one or two of the triangular quarters I

made back home, and I love that not every

sandwich I eat that way but a hell of a lot of

them are the best sandwich I have ever had

or ever will have. I love how that is impos-

sible but also ordinary, is a divine mystery

but a simple reality, and I love that the same

is true of riding, and of us.

Bill Strickland

RIDER-IN-CHIEF