It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels

A universal truth of bicycling is this - pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

And though history sadly doesn't credit the man who first thought of tilting a bicycle's steering axis, it is more likely to be because of feet striking the wheel than an understanding of stability.

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 . . . you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through.

The great Australian cyclist Alf Goullet and his partner rode a staggering 4,442 km (2,759 miles) in the six-day event at Madison Square Garden in 1914. That’s near enough the width of the USA, from ‘sea to shining sea’. It’s 600 miles (966 km) further than the modern Tour de France, which takes three weeks. It remains the record today. Goullet wrote after the event, ‘My knees were sore, I was suffering from stomach trouble, my hands were so numb I couldn’t open them wide enough to button my collar for a month, and my eyes were so irritated I couldn’t, for a long time, stand smoke in a room.’ Note no buttaching. Goullet won fifteen six-day races including eight at Madison Square Garden. He lived to be 103.

I remembered an Ernest Hemingway quote: ‘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 . . . you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through.

It was always scary, Charlie replied, but that was why you did it, right? If it was safe... it wouldn’t be fun.

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world . . . It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance . . . the moment she takes her seat, she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.

During the boom in velocipedes - known with good reason as 'boneshakers' - tyres were made of solid iron.