James Hibbard > Quotes

“Entering into a relationship with the bike, I don’t just regard it with the disinterested detachment of an observer, I use it. And in return it takes me out of my head – re-enchanting life and putting me squarely back into the world of lived experience.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Poetry in motion – there is no perfection, only life.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear that same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“the bicycle is unlike so many other things in the world and how it can dislodge us from the endless stream of technical distraction which has come to characterize modern life.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“However, climbs like these don’t simply demarcate fitness, but also the cyclical passage of time. No matter how your life might change, that particular climb – your climb – remains a touchstone. As people are born and others die, you ride past the same features of the landscape – bearing witness to its changes just as much as yours: in early spring, leaves emerge from well-known trees only to wither in the gutter in the fall. While, during the last throes of winter, the brown hillsides gradually return to green – silently announcing that life has renewed itself and the worst of the cold and darkness has passed.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“More than cycling – and certainly more than thinking – having a child ties you once and for all to this world. Through his existence my fate is externalized. Spirit is made flesh, and the questions and anxieties that had once felt pressing suddenly recede into the darkness of irrelevance.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“thinker who lauded the high mountains, and extolled the virtues of bravery, fresh air, and physical effort, there is simply no thinker better suited to the sport of cycling than Friedrich Nietzsche.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“how through a combination of rigorous thinking and the self-discipline of being an athlete, I might give ‘style to my life’ and in the process avoid the sort of spiritual death that seems to befall so many long before their biological one.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Like music, painting, or writing, cycling was an art, and becoming skillful was a pursuit with an ever-retreating horizon of proficiency which was shrouded in mystery.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“The comfortable life lowers man’s resistance, so that he sinks into an unheroic sloth… The comfortable life causes spiritual decay…”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“I found that it was when I stopped trying to win that I seemed to perform the best.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Less and less do I believe in being great at anything – in notions of being smarter, stronger, or better. On a long enough timeline, any success turns into its own sort of failure.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Through a sincere, lasting engagement with nearly any activity or practice, you come to realize that in order to progress further, you must relinquish control.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“As the saying goes in the U.S. Marines about one’s rifle, but equally applicable to mass-produced bicycles – there are many like it, but this one is mine.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“I find that when I’m rested and healthy and comfortable, I tell myself I want everything small and petty and stupid to dissolve. Yet to my dismay, I find that when I’m granted this wish I can only handle it in small doses. Whether it’s the result of listening to music, reading, riding, or the few times I’ve taken psychedelic drugs, after a mere taste, my overriding desire is always to return to my small, everyday self, whose existence quickly comes to feel threatened in the face of trembling beauty which transcends the individual”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“I realize that we’re already going harder than I’d imagined. The next three days may be uncomfortable, but as I think back on the depths of my depression, I’m certain that they won’t hurt – at least not like that. This sort of pain – the burn of oxygen-starved legs and the searing of lungs – feels like nothing less than the warm embrace of an old friend.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“The very idea of myself, of the identity I have done so much to cultivate is nothing more than a series of innumerable accidents and feedback loops not of my own making”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“my fitness seeming to change the very topography of the world. Riding felt nothing short of physically addictive and I’d return home wanting to ride more for the sheer physical pleasure. My body felt lighter and stronger and it seemed that just maybe, I was even thinking better and more clearly – as if a layer of filth had been wiped from my perceptual windshield and for the first time in years, I was seeing the world as it truly was.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafes. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Rather than leading towards any sort of true insight or authentic self-understanding, this way of conceiving what it is to be an athlete instead only perpetuates the unremitting competitiveness of twenty-first-century capitalism and distracts from any hope of ‘becoming what one is.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Egocentric, single-minded obsessiveness is rewarded, and as a matter of necessity everything else falls by the wayside”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Just as music isn’t merely sound, but sound followed by intervals of silence, improvement isn’t work alone, but the right amount of work followed by rebuilding through rest and recovery. As the years went on, I realized that although I knew exactly how to will and push myself to the peaks, much to my detriment, I never mastered letting go and sliding into the valleys of recovery.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“amid the nervous tics of idle cyclists – sips of water and the pulling-up of arm warmers – bikes and equipment are discussed and admired.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“the cyclists who have always struck me as most worthy of emulation were not those who were analytical and data-driven, but rather those who used the sport as a medium upon which to impose their own style and character – in Nietzsche’s terms, those who used cycling to ‘become what they already are.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“In cycling, as in all walks of the life, it seems that the successful tend to overvalue the role played by their will while minimizing the fortuitous structural factors which have underpinned so much of their success.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“I was porous to the subtleties of smells and the currents of the gentle breezes that moved through the trees and, in the most profound sense, alone without being lonely, I drifted ever deeper into solitude.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Unlike the experience of driving a car or being a passenger in a plane or a train, the cyclist is exposed to the elements – to rain and cold, to heat, scent, and the play of light across the landscape. A rider’s speed is dictated only by their skill and physical effort; the cyclist is brought into direct contact with not just distance, but even the landscape’s topography – the exertion of every hill and the respite of every descent written into lungs and muscles.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Translated into the terms of modern sports psychology these ‘peak experiences’ took place when I let go – the race that I was just ‘training through,’ or that for some reason or another didn’t matter was almost always when the sensations were the best. Indifferent to the outcome, the calm of my well-worn warm-up routine would give way to legs that turned the pedals with such inexplicable effortlessness that it felt as if I had been made to ride a bicycle. This isn’t to say I always won – that the sensations always correlated to the external result – but on race days like this I at least never got in my own way. On days like this I loved racing my bicycle.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“If you’re looking for a certain type of answer, in the end, the sound and the fury of being an athlete means absolutely nothing at all. But, if you listen hard enough – away from the cacophony of the crowd and attuned to a different, ineffable sort of murmur – you can discern something enigmatic. Something like life itself.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels