Happiness is Bike Shaped

My friends often tease me that I never smile in the photos (selfies) I take when I am out on my bike. I don’t know why my face refuses to crack a smile because, for me, I’m at my happiest when I’m hitting the open road on my bike. In fact, I’d go as far as saying, happiness for me is definitely bike shaped.

I bought my first bike as an adult rider out of necessity rather than the actual desire to ride the thing. I’d just moved back to a small town in the UK after a five-year stint living in Budapest, a city much like London or New York where a car is not only unnecessary but an actual inconvenience.

I was in the first stages of starting a new online business, we'd just bought a house and our first child was on the way. Needless to say, money was tight. A bike would be the perfect method of transport to get me around town, quickly and efficiently, not to mention to help me slow down the inevitable weight gain caused by sitting in front of a laptop 12-hours a day trying to kick-start my business.

That first bike was a long way from the much more efficient road bike I now ride. I picked it up on a whim while out shopping for a baby stroller at my local Toys-R-Us. It cost less than £80. It was a lot of bike for my money — the thing weighed an absolute ton. It’s a good job there are no hills in the town where I live or I might just have given up after my first ride. As it was, my first three-mile ride down along the beach (which completely exhausted me) quickly turned into something I quite enjoyed and then grew into a bit of an obsession.

That three-mile ride is now a daily 20-mile commute with supplementary weekend rides taking me anywhere from 25 miles to my personal record of 104 miles.

So why does cycling make me so happy? Where do I start? There are so many different reasons.

A Space to Think Creatively

As someone who earns a living from writing, I need to find space in my kind to let the creative juices flow. I’m one of those people who has a million ideas a day but those ideas never come to me while I’m sat in front of a computer. Taking an extended bike ride every morning allows me to work on those ideas, separate the wheat from the chaff (there is no such thing as a bad idea but some of them are better than others), and start planning how I can put them into action. This means, by the time I find myself in my office, the words just flow out of me and things happen. Like many creative people, I’m a terrible procrastinator. This probably has something to do with the fact my mind is always running at 100% speed. My daily bike ride, helps me slow down mentally, break that chain of doing nothing, and get creative. I’ve also been able to combine my love for cycling and my career as a writer, earning commissions for bike-related articles in the national press and even writing a book about one of my favorite rides. It might be a little anecdotal to attribute cycling to my professional success, but it certainly hasn’t done my career any harm.

Better Physical Health Leads to More Positive Mental Health

I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I was not stereotypically “jolly” when I was a “fat dad”. Despite riding my bike every day, a bad diet and job that requires very little more than lightly tapping away at the keyboard meant I was piling on the pounds. I was 15 stone at my heaviest and this made me very unhappy. I looked terrible in photographs, I didn't sleep well, and my blood pressure was all over the place. It was the COVID-19 pandemic that made me change my ways. While there are no guarantees in life, it's clear that overweight people struggle if infected with the virus more than others. For the sake of my family, I wanted to face the pandemic in the best possible shape I could. I combined my 20-mile daily bike commute with an intermediate fasting diet and quickly dropped two stone. Keen not to fall back into bad habits — I'm committed to maintaining this regime as part of a weekly routine. Tuesdays and Thursdays are now known in the Hayes household as hungry days and I actually look forward to them. I typically don't eat on Friday until after I've done a 20-mile ride and I've got to say, this is one of my most enjoyable rides of the week — when I have the most energy. Not only do I look and feel more healthy, my blood pressure is in a far more sensible zone, and (this might be too much information but us men have to be honest when it comes to talking about our health) – it no longer hurts to go to the toilet. So am I any happier after losing all this weight? Hell yes. While I’m still a long way from being mu idea weight —slow and steady surely wins the race.

Achieving the Impossible and Helping Others

As a child on my bike delivering newspapers, I would never have dreamed of the multi-day cycling adventures I would take on a bike as a man in his late forties. I just wouldn’t think them possible. My bike rides have taken me coast-to-coast across the UK, from a port in the north of England to the city of Brussels in Belgium, all around Lake Balaton (the largest freshwater lake in Europe) in Hungary, and along my favorite cycle path of them all, the full length of the Algarve coast. Although I would never go as far as describing these rides as ultra-endurance events — I believe that most people would think them of them as impossible feats and therefore they are a very real achievement to me. While some of these rides have been done for the hell of it, I've also been able to raise a considerable amount of money for various charities along the way. It might sound a little smug and conceited but there is nothing better in life for releasing those happy endorphins than going some way to help somebody else.

Connecting with Friends

As someone who has moved around a fair bit in life and who now works remotely, it's all too easy to lose touch with your friends. My love of cycling helped me to reconnect with friends who all live many miles away. Although we don't get to see each other very often, an annual cycling trip in Portugal has become something that has brought us all together. Not only do we get to spend four or five days together every year on the beautiful Algarve coast, essentially "putting the world to rights" and creating those beautiful stories that we can dine out on for years to come, as we slowly cycle along the coast. We have also created something that we all look forward to. This is important because I believe, the secret to happiness is having something to do (work, college, a hobby), something to look forward to (a holiday, a special event), and someone to love (friends, family, or even a pet). Our annual bike ride ticks so many different boxes. I would do this ride every year by myself and it would make me happy. The fact I've brought so many other people along with me makes me even happier.

What does happiness look like to you?