The World is Your Velodrome
One L.A. rocker says to all the disaffected in the underworld: Get on your bikes and ride!
By Cole Coonce
In the days before MySpace, I knew Charlie, this kinda doughy, beer-addled bohemian bass player who made gnarsome noize in a three-chord surf-punk trio out of Echo Park. The band was called Pop Defect and they sold seven-inch singles out of their van. Charlie worked as a pre-barista waiter/busboy/coffee re-filler/dishwasher at the local hipster-riffic greasy spoon on Sunset and Maltman. That was his life: punk rock and food service. Which doesn't exactly lend itself to a healthy diet.
Between typical dinners of pepperoni pizza washed down with the champagne of beers (Miller High Life, natch) "backstage" at either Al's Bar or Raji's, and breakfasts of sourdough biscuits and lumpy gravy (perfect to soak up the suds from the night before), Charlie was one punk-y chunky monkey. The only exercise he got was attacking stage divers with his Fender P-Bass, loading his guitar amplifier out of the van, and licking the spoon from a huge bowl of pancake batter.
As friendships and acquaintances are wont to do, we lost contact with each other. Punk rock went mainstream, Pop Defect's van broke down in Buttonwillow one time too many, and I think either the Health Department or the IRS shut down the restaurant where Charlie worked. And then ...
A couple of years later, I see Charlie waiting tables in some pretentious restaurant for people whose clothes fit. He looks g-r-e-a-t. He has dropped 30 or 40 pounds of useless flab and no longer looks like the indie-rock iteration of the Pillsbury Doughboy. I am gobsmacked.
"Dude!" I backslap. "What happened to you? You look - in the words of Mark E. Smith - 'Fit and Working Again.' How did you get in such great shape?"
"My girlfriend broke up with me," Charlie smiles.
"Ummm ... failed relationships generally send the broken-hearted deep into a 55-gallon tub of Chubby Hubby ice cream. How did unrequited love make you skinny?"
"I was so turned around that I just got this idea that instead of continuing to do something difficult and negative - like a relationship - that I should do something difficult, yet positive. So I decided to ride a bike to Seattle," he says.
"You mean you rode a bike to Seattle from Echo Fucking Park?"
"Yeah. It wasn't that hard. I put in about 100 miles a day or so. It took a little more than three weeks."
"Jesus Christ."
"Yeah, and then this summer I rode to New York."
My jaw drops. Again. You could knock me over with a pair of Lycra shorts. But I keep my flabbergastation hidden and quiz Charlie about which highways he took across America to New York. When he tells me he followed the two-lane Highway 70 (a.k.a. Old West Highway) in Arizona and New Mexico and into Apache Country, I grill him on how he was able to climb the dizzying summits of Signal Peak (elevation 7,812 ft.) between Superior and Globe, Arizona. He admits he chimped at the base of that mountain range and hitched a ride in the back of a Japanese pickup truck.
But what I picked up on during that conversation changed my life. Charlie didn't just exercise his body and drop a ton of cellulite, he also spent those epic cycling sojourns exercising another muscle: his mind. He stared down a failed relationship and regained his self-esteem and found the proverbial peace of mind.
He was not only building up his stamina, burning fat, fighting off diabetes, lowering stress, increasing his lung capacity, and strengthening and cleansing his entire cardiovascular system, he was firing off chemicals in his brain - the ones associated with bliss, joy, and euphony.
Although he did not articulate it this way, Charlie was telling me, in essence, that if you put in enough consecutive hours (or even quarter hours) on a bike, your body's endorphins are gonna start crankin' and your mind is going to reach a certain alpha state of omniscience - maybe what New Agers call "reaching a transcendental state." In metaphysical terms, you are opening your Third Eye.
Cycling is like Prozac - only, when it wears off, you don't want to jump off of a bridge. It is like therapy, except you aren't subjected to pseudo-intellectual condescension in the form of pop psychology buzzwords. It is like heroin, except you aren't subjecting your internal organs to failure and you won't set your house on fire because you nodded off with a lit cigarette.
I am now of the strident opinion that the more citizens take up cycling, the more the cottage industries of drug enforcement, healthcare, psychology, and serotonin re-uptake inhibitor manufacturing will take direct financial hits. You can plot the damage to their profit-to-earnings ratios in a directly inversely proportional scale to the amount that the average American lardass gets off the couch, gets away from the gridlocked highways, and climbs on a bicycle.
Following Charlie's example, I started riding a bike, casually at first, and the quality of my life became better, albeit on a linear scale. It wasn't until I went through a rather devastating romantic breakup that the casual riding of a bicycle morphed into a fanatical devotion to cycling and the quality of my life improved on a logarithmic - not a mere linear - scale.
Rather than ride to Seattle, I would churn from my house up to the radio towers of Mt. Wilson and back every chance I got, 45 miles of ridiculously steep climbing. During the ascents, the vistas through Big Tujunga Canyon and the Angeles National Forest were utterly breathtaking, and the elevation gains meant that I was looking down upon magnificent hawks majestically spreading their wings as they cruised, dipped, and soared in search of a mid-morning snack. The roads cut through the brown, jagged hills with such a sharp, jutting geometry that entire passages and canyons never saw sunlight and the pavement stayed cold and the chill would be absorbed through the tires, onto the spindles and forks and eventually onto the handlebars and the seat. Brrrrrrr. But the cold would become invigorating and the twists, chicanes, and hairpin curves would open up into direct sunlight and I would begin sweating profusely as the ride would yield to outrageous and difficult ascents to sundry summits in the San Gabriel mountains.
"Fuck you," I would mutter to the mountains, whose very verticality mocked my abilities as a cyclist, and by extension, a human being.
"I win and you lose, motherfucker," I would exhale and address the bicycle, the daunting ascent, and every subatomic particle that makes up the universe. "I am going to climb this hill."
And I would. I would conquer Mt. Wilson, spitting out my anger with every turn of the crank that drove the bicycle's chain.
It's weird - the concepts of bliss, joy, and euphony. From my vantage point at the radio towers, I would look down upon mile after mile of urban density that culminated at the ocean and realize I loved every minute of the so-called suffering, maybe because I knew that if I could endure this climb, then I could endure anything the city of Los Angeles - much less any member of the opposite sex - threw my way.
Moreover, after a couple of hours of this stuff, my brain was so raging with the results of endorphins and the right chemicals, I would become my own self-help infomercial. Because of the bike, I was lengthening my life span, and it is a life I could not wait to suck more marrow out of ... which meant, when was I going to climb on the bike again?
Yes, I would look down upon Los Angeles and know that the world was my velodrome, and it is there for my amusement and benefit. Besides, if Charlie could conquer it, so could I. And if I can do it, so can you.
Published: 02/02/2006
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