On any occasion when I come home from a ride and Mrs Doc is around, she will always ask me how the ride was. For any ride where I didn’t find an envelope full of cash or get abducted by aliens, I reply, “It was fine.”
I offer no further information, and she demands none. When she gets back from a run (she’s currently training for an ultra-marathon) we do the same routine in reverse. It’s not that we don’t care-it’s simply that we know how unrewarding asking about a ride or a run is.
Michael Hutchinson
Columnist
Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week
There are other members of my family who have proved slower to learn. Anytime I’m back at the family home and return from a ride, my father will ask if I’ve had a nice time.
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“It was fine, thank you.”
He will press on. “Where did you go?”
“Well, out to the lighthouse, back up through the middle of the peninsula… you know, nowhere really.”
“Did you see anyone?”
“No,” I’ll lie; it’s a thinly populated rural area and if I say yes, he’ll ask me exactly who, and I won’t know.
“Were there any tourists at the lighthouse?”
“No.” Unlike my father, I can’t identify tourists by sight.
This can go on for a long time. He wants something I can’t give him. The whole interview has hanging over it the unspoken question, “Why are you doing this, if you don’t go anywhere, you didn’t see anyone you know and you didn’t see anyone to scoff at either?
Surely something interesting happened? And I’m going to get it out of you.” He can’t believe a child of his is so simple-minded that I just ride around the countryside aimlessly.
He could ask me a more open-ended question: “I’m glad you had a good ride. What did you enjoy about it?”
That would be worse, because it would confirm his worst fears: “Well, there’s a bit of road that was really rough last time I rode it, and they’ve resurfaced it over the winter. They’ve filled in the big pothole at the bottom of the hill near the harbour. They’ve cut some of the hedges and cleared up the clippings for the first time in the history of County Down. And I drafted a tractor for two miles and the guy driving it said he liked my helmet… I think that’s what he shouted.”
The pleasures of most rides become nebulous the moment you try to articulate them. Clearly if you ride a major event or set off on a significant adventure, it’s different. But most days, you just go for a ride, and the better it is the less there is to talk about. It’s telling that if you’re reporting on the highlights of a ride with a friend, you’re as likely to tell someone about what you talked about as what you saw, despite the fact that in the moment the conversation is completely incidental to the pleasure.
My dad’s post-ride interview is difficult to escape from. The only sure-fire method is to ask what he was doing while you were on your bike. The problem with that is that he will tell me. My father is a birdwatcher. He can do several minutes non-stop on oystercatchers, great northern divers, his favourite the black guillemot, and his often-repeated assertion that “There’s no such thing as a seagull”. It gets me out of the cross-examination, but it’s not really an improvement.
It’s why I value the conversations Mrs Doc and I have post-run or ride. Sometimes we manage to edit it down to just a couple of grunts. It’s always one of those precious moments when I feel we understand each other best.