Status Updates From Le coureur et son ombre (Ho...

"You always ride along with the elders with a cautious curiosity, afraid your time will come too and also comforted by their presence because age gaps are unbeatable." (pg. 116)

Really sat with this quote for a while, reflecting on the broader application of how I've had that feeling in so many spaces where I've been among my elders (in my discipline, field of study, life, church, and generally). It feels grateful.

"[B]eauty is the very principle of cycling." (pg. 107)

"[H]owever useful as tools, the obsession with figures amounts to a strange process of embalming. [...] Being the natural enemy of words (which vaguely and endlessly attempt to create meaning), measuring annihilates the possibility of a tale. [...] To pedal is to give a meaning to things, nothing more and nothing less. Cycling is a privileged way to inhabit that place where images are created." (pg. 106)

"Physical decline leads to the quest of other acmes, otherwise life would be unbearable. I am reaching the point where every one of looks back and stares at the undecipherable appearance of the path behind and bravely tries to believe that we are starting to understand." (pp. 105–106)

This resonated deeply and gave me pause. Even when we reach a stage where we can "look back" on life, we are still figuring it out.

Just wrapped up Chapter 11 and found myself going back to the mental images I have when I read Hemingway.

So much of his imagery and language (albeit originally in French and translated for this edition) in this chapter reminds me of Hemingway's writing and imagery in "A Moveable Feast" and "The Sun Also Rises." It's beautiful, rich, raw, stark, and vivid. You can feel it. Taste it. Smell it. Breathe it. I love it.

"Picture a street on which they sprint tirelessly, alone in their world, as usual. A street swarming with chairs and crossed legs, with packed terraces under the garlands, with crippled plane trees and money fountains littered with hard luck and small coins."

"His cranium at that very moment must look like the ceiling of a Renaissance nuptial bedroom, painted with bloody allegories, a mess of clouds and anger."

"He lives, like every time he rides and tries to ride fast, inside himself. ... He ignores his pain, he avoids it, he turns it down, he eludes it. He fools it. He moves along with it every time it comes too close, he lies to it. He moves it around, too: that is why he bites his tongue. A drop of blood to rush for, to take the pain to a part of the body where it cannot do any damage." (pp. 71–72)

"Obviously, the peloton cannot be boiled down to its name....It is malleable, and that is an understatement: it is shaped by the wind, the road, and the goals of the individuals who compose it."

I really resonate with the idea of this quote. On the bike, it's me and nature around me. And much of the time, that's just how I want it to be.

“For me, it was all a matter of wind and barren horizon. I wanted to be alone on the brink of the world—nothing else mattered.”

Riding is a release and painful shelter from a stormy world. I feel this.

“Every rider learns by pedaling to locate that wound inside and to tear it open fearlessly. Pedaling brings consistency to the thick and genuine void binding the skin to the world. […] From that day, like all riders, I did my best to spend as much time as possible away from the world, sheltered by that sweet rampart of familiar pain.”

More bedtime reading for the kids. This book, admittedly, doesn't really lend itself to reading aloud. But, I'm enjoying the opportunity all the same... if only because of how metaphysical and esoteric the prose is about something so enjoyable as cycling. It is certainly above their age range, but I appreciate the opportunity to process that with the kids.

"But too colorful a style often blurred the shades and ignored the absolute, limitless way to ride that turns training into asceticism and performance into a kind of gnosis. Too often, champions were celebrated only in the naïve light of their pure achievements—or worse, of their success—without recognizing how they were motivated by their unhappiness, their taedium vitae." —Olivier Haralambon

Started reading this to the boys for our bed time reading, and instantly fell in love. Scratches the perfect itch of waxing poetic about cycling, while also tapping into the philosophy I loved reading in undergrad. It's like Foucault and some of the greatest names in cycling had a metaphysical baby... and it's perfect. Can't wait to read more.