The Secret Bike Ride No One Knows About.

Last weekend, I went for a bike ride that no longer exists.

It’s actually been a while since my last post here, when I wrote about the end of my month of “no measurement” and shared my “Traffic Light Dashboard” for how I want to measure my life going forward.

The month of no measurement was more of a revelation than I expected it to be. I knew going into it that I had a strong desire to take all the devices that tracked me, gave me data, and scored me and hurl them all into the ocean. I didn’t expect that actually doing it would be such a relief.

I also didn’t expect that it would make me start to question why I was doing many things in my life, including the Midlife Field Guide.

Most of us live in a world where we’re taught to try hard to be successful, to achieve lofty goals, and to ‘win’ at whatever is important in our lives. And yet there’s never a finish line. There is only more. And more. And more.

I’ve (sadly) been hard-wired in “achievement mode” as long as I can remember, but I’ve never properly stepped back to question why.

Abandoning the scoreboards that I had paid a lot of attention to (sleep, health, social media, Substack numbers, etc) felt like a giant weight lifted off my chest. I don’t want to go full tin-foil hat here, but taking a break from everything really gave me clarity around how much we are all being programmed, conditioned, guilted, and manipulated into doing things that are not in our own best interest.

It made me deeply rethink the notions of success and achievement.

• What am I doing because other companies or people have made me think I should do it?

• What am I doing because it feels like I should be ‘successful’ at it?

• What am I doing because I actually want to do it and enjoy doing it?

One of the hardest things I thought about was this Midlife Field Guide. I got into my head. I worried about the origin of the project, which began with the dream of building something big that might be my ‘next chapter’ career-wise.

I worried that the experiments were making me seem like a weirdo or one of those insufferable longevity optimizers who secretly just want to sell you supplements.

I was worried that I was doing it in public for attention or ego or to show the world that I had not disappeared, and was still doing unconventional creative work.

Worst of all, I worried that the entire premise of this project was off-base.

The description at the top of every post includes this phrase: “Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?” The more I thought about this wording, the more I worried that I was yet again trying to ‘achieve’ and be ‘successful,’ this time at midlife.

At the heart of all of this lies the cliched reality show question: am I here for the right reasons?

Last weekend, my wife Debbie suggested that she and I go on a bike ride and grab a bite to eat. It was a shockingly nice spring day here in Vancouver and it instantly felt like a great idea. So we dusted off our bikes after a winter in the garage, pumped up the tires, and headed out.

I was missing several things. I left without an Apple Watch, an Oura ring, or anything to connect to Strava. (Strava is a popular social network for athletic endeavours, mostly used for publicly posting runs and bike rides.)

I felt a bit naked pedalling off down the road without all my stuff.

Usually, when I go out for a bike ride with my regular group of guys (the “Dad Squad” bike gang), we stick to a few tried and true routes that are popular with cyclists. On this ride with Debbie, though, we were heading to a destination neither of us had been to before. It was not a standard bike route, so we stopped periodically to make sure we knew where we were going.

We ended up cruising down a variety of residential streets, going pretty slowly and talking as we biked. For a stretch, we were riding through a neighbourhood that we hadn’t ever spent much time in, and we were looking at all the unusual home designs and noting that everything looked like a time capsule to the 70s or 80s. The birds were chirping, celebrating the arrival of spring.

And that’s when it hit me.

I felt like a kid riding his bike around the neighbourhood for the first time… since the 70s or 80s. We were just riding our bikes… for fun.

We weren’t tracking our routes or segments. We weren’t timing our rides or measuring the distance we were riding. We weren’t going to post the ride publicly for others to see. We weren’t comparing ourselves to other cyclist who have ridden in this neighbourhood.

We were just riding. And it was liberating. I felt like Elliott in E.T. more than a M.A.M.L. (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra).

I often feel a bit of dread about going on a bike ride, often because of all the things that were not on this ride: timing, tracking, measurement, and public posting. On a “normal” bike ride, the ride ends with uploading it to Strava, tagging the people you rode with, and checking to see if you hit any personal bests on segments of your ride. And then you get to watch “kudos” dropped on your ride from other people ostensibly celebrating your amazing feat of athleticism.

How did I get to the point where going for a bike ride wasn’t really about the fun of riding a bike, but was about ‘how well’ I rode a bike? Or how I compared to other cyclists?

Just riding a bike for the simple joy of riding a bike was a lot more fun and meaningful than setting a new PR racing around Stanley Park.

There’s a common refrain among people who use Strava—if it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen. I’m sure it was some marketing genius at the company who came up with this line, but I’ve heard it from so many people, most often as peer pressure to get others to join and post their activities. I’m not trying to slam Strava, and I know it’s a useful product if you’re genuinely training for a particular event or performance target, but a better version for me right now is this:

“If it’s not on Strava, it’s probably more fun than if it was.”

Since that ride with Debbie, I’ve dusted off a cruiser bike that has been sitting unused in our garage for years. I’ve started doing errands and little rides on a bike built not for racing, but for… cruising around. The cherry blossoms are in full bloom here in Vancouver and it’s been glorious.

There is magic in a bike ride that ceases to exist as soon as it is done.

The most important insight out of all of this for me has been that I have regularly turned fun activities into a means to an end. I’ve felt like whatever I put my time and energy into has to end up turning into something else: success, achievement, status, scoreboards, followers, revenue, optimal health, and whatever else you can think of.

Living midlife, or any other stage of life, with a sense of urgency to “figure it out” or “optimize” it so that you’re not “wasting” your precious time feels foolish and short-sighted. It’s often at the expense of enjoying the real-time life that you are living right now.

I am trying to shift from “figuring out” midlife to embracing midlife. I want to stop optimizing and measuring what matters and instead deepen my questioning and understanding of what really matters.

Oddly, the bike ride answered my ongoing questions about the Midlife Field Guide. I’ve framed the Midlife Field Guide as a project, but my life is not a project. I viewed the experiments as a means to an end, as if doing enough of them would lead me to all the answers I’ve been looking for, and getting a gold star in Midlife Studies.

But the bike ride reminded me about why I wanted to do the Midlife Field Guide in the first place—I was excited about it and it made my life more interesting.

So, I want to keep going with the Midlife Field Guide, but with a shift. I’d now just like to focus on experiencing each experiment fully instead of figuring out “The Ultimate, Integrated Midlife Framework” (TM).

I don’t want to “win” midlife or be “successful” at midlife. I’d just like to be the author of my own midlife story and enjoy this phase of life while I’m in it.

Life is to be lived, not managed and measured.

If this resonates with you, here are a few prompts to go a little deeper:

• Do you have a version of Strava in your life?

• Have any of your fun hobbies turned into performance?

• What are you doing just for fun?

Thanks for reading this edition.

Steve