ride joe ride

One of the things I appreciate most about cycling is the ethos it wraps around nearly every aspect of itself. Even the most basic act of riding with a group can echo a history of tradition and epic structure. My two favorites of these are Rapha’s Gentleman Riding and Belgium Knee Warmer’s “brethren“. Though coffee is certainly a player in the cycling esthetic, the glory of the coffee ride falls through cracks even in these epic models.

Granted, the most efficient way to do coffee is to sip it while rubbing in the embrocation before a ride. Depending on which study you read, caffeine likely has some performance benefits which won’t get you kicked out of the Tour. If the ride extends more than 30 miles, a coffee stop is likely to be a second coffee stop for me.

The true coffee ride, though, is the one undertaken on sleep addled legs and with bleary eyes. As we roll up the empty bike path with the sun rising over the lake, our initial thought is mostly on securing some caffeine. Almost invariably, the plan is to take it easy heading out. It’s not even a plan, really, but the dictate of bodies which have just rolled out of bed. Easy cadence, and chatting, and that satisfaction that comes with knowing that you’re enjoying the best part of the day while most of the city is sleeping.

After a few miles, the blood starts pumping and the legs loosen up. The thought of coffee fades and the path momentarily free of renegade rollerbladers begins to look like a stolen opportunity to get into the drops and push the pace. By the time the half-way mark clicks by, the ride is just about the ride.

And then the coffee. Bliss is drinking coffee outside downtown in a big waking city with your favorite riding partner in the world, knowing you have the second half of your ride ahead of you. When we roll out toward home, the plan is usually the same as on the way up. We’ll take it easy, stretch the legs and enjoy the morning. The empty path, the thrill of a tailwind or the challenge of a headwind usually changes our minds.

While riding an lazy 20 this morning (to loosen up from the nutty fast 50 I rode yesterday) I had some time to boil down what I took away from the SEED conference on Friday. In five easy steps:

1. Enthusiasm about what you do is the key. Be creative with whatever it is you are enthusiastic about. If you’re lovin’ living in your mom’s basement at 40, make that the center of what you do creatively.

2. When you’re really enthusiastic, you are likely to work hard on what you’re doing. These guys all worked amazingly hard. More than one pointed out that their real creative work happened between the time they got home from work and the time they went to bed.

3. Doing your thing on the internet is all a matter of establishing yourself as a brand, or a locus of creativity. Create your stuff, participate in other people’s stuff and tell them about your stuff.

4. According to Jim Coudal (well kinda anyway), creativity is the moment in which you make a connection between something you’re familiar with and something novel and enjoy that connection. That enjoyment is the enthusiasm in #1.

5. And my addition: fostering the creative process is less a matter of “creating” novelty as it is trying to figure out what it is that you are enthusiastic about. The creative process begins with that ethusiasm. Not surprising that the Greek philosophers we’re totally on to this; they called it eros.