Monday, April 12, 2010

Cycling for Balance?

Someone told me something interesting today. She said she once heard someone explain how cycling was a sport of balance and how it helped people achieve balance in their life. She thought this made a lot of sense and she shared it with me when I told her about my recent thoughts about the place running should have in my life priorities.

I believe this is a great image. When I ride my bike, I think about the difficult things in my life, whether they are problems or negative emotions. Because I need to pay attention to what I'm doing while riding my bike, I never give full attention to my thoughts and I usually achieve a state of mind where I observe my thoughts without judging them - the same thing we're supposed to do while meditating. Sometimes, I feel like the answers to my problems just pop into my head without me working really hard to make them happen. Other times, I feel like I'm leaving the negative emotions behind by making sense of them while I ride.

The interesting part is that I think my life got so out of balance last fall after I stopped riding my bike. I thought the bad stuff just happened, but I now think that maybe riding my bike was helping me process some feelings that I simply could not process after I stopped riding. I then got overwhelmed by my negative feelings and simply could not manage anymore!

I always thought running kept me sane by helping me evacuate the bad stuff before it made me sick (stress, anger, guilt, frustration, etc.) and that swimming kept me running. I don't think I've ever found a purpose for cycling, except going from point A to point B, but I'm now starting to wonder if cycling is the more important sport of the three?

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