Cycling Experience Quotes

When you've biked only on quiet cul-de-sacs and college campuses, the idea of riding in the city, right up there alongside the cars, seems, frankly, pretty absurd.

You don't know how good you are until you actually get out on a bike and get riding.

He put his foot on one pedal, scooted a few yards and swung his other leg over the saddle. He soared left into the vertiginously sloping hillside road and sped, without touching his brakes ... The hedgerows and sky blurred; he imagined himself in a velodrome as the wind whipped his hair clean...

I have always been an avid bike rider. Even before I became an avid bike rider, I was an avid bike stealer when I was a kid. I am very educated on bikes.

Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living!... Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well, now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it... and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!

Seattle is very similar to Minneapolis. I like the culture; I like the people. I raced a bike and won a national championship on Lake Washington in 1977, so I've had a connection there for a long time.

In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most curious and I wonder each and every time how I will respond.

After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.

The physical sensation of gliding with the wind in your face is exhilarating. That automatic activity of pedalling, when you have to be awake but not think too much, allows you to let subconscious thoughts bubble up, and things seem to just sort themselves out. And the adrenaline wakes you up if you weren't properly alert.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of the country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.

I've seen neighborhoods that I would have never driven though because I'm riding my bike, because I'm looking for side roads, looking for maybe more hills or less hills depending if I'm exercising or not. You see a lot more, and you get the flow of a city a lot more.

Taking my bike out and riding the bike path along Lake Shore Drive, that's one of the great experiences in my life. And I hope to do it as long as I can.

When you're riding a bike you're more connected to the outdoors and to other people than you are when you are stuck in your car.

Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you're losing time.

Riding a race bike is an art - a thing that you do because you feel something inside.

I can train harder and put myself through more punishing efforts now than I used to do, having done the Tour de France, and come off the road now.

I had a bike as a kid, and when I worked in Manhattan - I had a 10-speed - I rode from downtown to 68th and Madison for my day job. I knew about fighting traffic, but nothing about racing.

There were no shortcuts, I realized. It took years of racing to build up the mind and body and character until a rider had logged hundreds of races and thousands of miles of road. I wouldn't be able to win a Tour de France until I had enough iron in my legs, and lungs, and brain and Heart.

I love bikes. I used to own one, but I fell off it when I was younger and that was the end of my bike riding days until now.

The bike has very few controls. It's very simple to operate and understand and your field of vision is certainly greatly expanded as opposed to being in a car.