cycling = music?

I was reading a great collection of diary entries and columns by the great Bob “Bobke” Roll, who had a career racing both road bikes and mountain bikes in the 80’s to the early 90’s.  He was also a training partner for a young upstart Lance Armstrong as he made his comeback from cancer.

As I read these various stories of pain, misery, disappointment, triumph, strangeness and fun, it struck a chord with me in my struggles with my meager rides, and also with my years of struggling with the viola, and other aspects of being a student of the arts.

There are a couple of cycling problems that I’m working on now.  First is my overall pace.  I’m at around 13.5 mph average over around a 20-25 mile course.  I’d love to get that up to around 16 mph avg.  It’s a big leap.  I realized this two days ago when I went out with a new neighbor who is an experienced cyclist about 10-15 years my senior.  He kicked my sorry butt as we went around a loop from the Steel Bridge to the Sellwood Bridge twice – 22 miles give or take.  He simply was able to keep a higher cadence on the big chainring that I was able to.  My legs just weren’t up for it.  After a rest day yesterday, I went out on my Cornelius Pass Road loop, and discovered that I was able to stay in a higher gear for longer, and at my desired cadence of around 80-85 rpm.  Progress was made by riding with someone with greater ability than my own.  Hmmm…

This has a direct correlation to the musical world.  When you get a chance to work with someone who is much better than you, either as a musician, or a technician, or both, it challenges you to reach within and try to match what they’re doing.  Sometimes it seems like you’ve failed miserably, but then you go back to the home laboratory and find that through some miraculous process of osmosis that you’ve made a break from your previous plateau.

My next cycling problem is hill climbing.  It’s a similar problem in that I cannot sustain a good pace up any incline steeper than about 5% (a 5 percent grade means that there is 5 feet of rise for every 100 feet of distance).  Obviously, I need to do some routes that present me with lots of hills, and I just need to find a way to get up them – tackle the hard hills and find a way to complete them.

As an instrumentalist, it’s a familiar problem.  Approaching an unfamiliar piece is similar to tackling unknown terrain.  You’ve got to dissect the various aspects of the piece, musical and technical, and see how they relate.  Then you’ve got to see how these aspects affect each other: it’s an oft-made mistake to just work out the technical aspects and leave the musical problems ’till the notes lay well.  A very wise former teacher once told me that this approach was ass backwards – he said, ‘you’ve got to approach the technical passages from a musical standpoint, or else all you’ve done is learn a bunch of notes, and that’s an etude, not a piece of music’.

Some pieces are like a long, relatively flat ride.  Pacing is essential to both survival and making the piece work architecturally.  Other works are serious mountain stages, where you’ve both got to have the brute strength to tackle them, but also be clever and know when to conserve you’re energy.  As with climbing any hill, you’ve got to get used to the fact that on one day you will fail miserably, but that in failing, you will learn some vital information that will eventually help you to conquer the piece (or hill).

Some examples: a Bruckner symphony (or the Schubert “Great” C-major symphony) would be like the long, flat ride.  Strauss’ Don Juan would be the Alpe d’Huez.  And most Mahler symphonies would be a long Tour de France stage, with huge climbs, technical descents, and wild sprints to the finish line.