You ride because you love it.

You ride because you need it.

You ride because you want it.

Sometimes you ride because you don’t love, want or need it,

you just do it because that is what you do.

You ride because it helps with your weight,

you ride because it makes you well,

you ride because you need the therapy,

you ride because you need the escape.

You ride because she rides.

You ride because she doesn’t. Or he does.

Or he doesn’t. Or you ride because they do.

Or because they don’t.

You ride to find God.

You ride because there is no God and because everything is futile and yet that matters so much and you may as well ride anyway because your time here is finite.

You ride because you love the earth.

You ride because sometimes you don’t like your self and heck can you ride fast when you are angry.

You ride because you kinda secretly enjoy shaving the pins and because you love taking an age to get your bartape perfect.

You ride because you love the sound of a freewheel thrumming on a summer’s day, love even more the sound of a hundred of the things humming together in the quiet moments of a race.

You ride because when the sunlight comes through the trees above and dapples the road and the rays catch the spokes, you almost think, however fleetingly, that you might just understand this entropic and essentially unknowable universe.

 You ride because it needs no language to be on a bike with someone and to look over to them and to smile and to get one back, and you ride because the bike is our language and you ride because no one who does not ride can fully understand why the f*ck you ride.

You ride because this is our brotherhood, our togetherhood.

You ride because you miss the hurt.

You ride because you don’t fit in anywhere else.

You ride because you dared once to dream and you don’t ever want to stop.

You ride because you fell in love with the most beautiful, the most epic, the daftest, the most furious, the most poetic, romantic, brutal, life-affirming and soul-destroying sport of all, the sport that drives its flawed geniuses to destruction and its devotees to distraction.

You ride because this is the love affair of human with machine and itʼs the one toy from childhood we get to keep, that grown men and women still get to play with, all over the world, no matter how old, no matter what culture, race, creed or ideology.

You ride because itʼs the thing that gave you the freedom to leave your neighborhood and to explore the world around and when we ride, all grown up and adult, itʼs the same barnstorming thrill you had when you sped down your block, racing home from school against your best friend to see who could get back first.

You ride because you still feel that same rush, that same freedom, the same breath of Sheer and Unadultered Life. You ride because the bike connects this you to that you.

You ride because you are you.

You ride because you ride