I’ve been thinking about momentum a lot recently. I’ve been working on carrying speed, both on the bike and in my life, and I keep coming back this idea of dead spots – situations where you’re vulnerable to losing momentum.
I’m always tempted to succumb to a non-cyclical worldview, where any personal improvement or failure is happening at a consistent, linear rate. But the older I get, the more I feel the wheel spin, the more I notice the cycles coming back around. Instead of trying to make sure that this current dead spot is the last one I ever experience, it’s more helpful to try to learn from it and plan ahead to help mitigate the next one. And, in life, just like on the bike, when you do jab into that dead spot, and teeter helplessly for a moment before you fall over, it’s an opportunity to start over, to reset the pedals, clock them into a power position so that when you try again, you’re set up for success.
Or that’s what I like to think anyway. My partner says that my cadence looks like a rusty muppet trying to pedal a triangular chainring, so what do I know?