Happy on my Home Roads: How cycling arrived just in time to help save my mental health.

Trigger Warning: Anxiety and Depression.

This, I suspect, will be the first of a few blogs tackling cycling and my mental health. As a first effort it certainly rambles. I don’t think I have yet reached full clarity on how cycling and my own mental health interact yet alone anyone else’s. However as this is about the start of my journey you might forgive if it reads like the start of my thinking on it.

I have now done the vast majority of my cycling on the roads around London.  As you can see from this handy heat-map:

https://www.strava.com/athletes/11956804/heatmaps/10c27d71#11/51.42458/-0.21763

It blazes brightest in Hertfordshire, of course on my commute, then spreads out through Essex, the Chilterns, Windsor, Kent and Surrey. Occasionally I’ve sallied with Islington Cycling Club on a grand adventure to Brighton, Cambridge or deep toward Norfolk. Click that link and it centres on London. That said, despite being born and raised in London and doing the vast majority of my riding here, these are not my home roads.

Zoom out further and you’ll see them. North then west. In the heart of Wales.

I haven’t been back to my cycling home since I left university. My cycling happy place surrounds the town of Aberystwyth in a web. The roads of Ceredigion and Powys are a barley discovered cycling paradise in one of the world’s most beautiful and overlooked places. When I started cycling I did not want for Alps. Quite apart from the fact I would not have made it up them. I had instead a collection of passes, mountain lakes, majestic views and intense sweeping descents I now long to go back to. The landscape is Alpine in miniature, the occasionally intense rainfall and vast Victorian dam system in the area makes it feel at times Scandinavian. Turn round the mountain and suddenly you might see what could easily be described as a fjord. The roads used to service the dam system are smooth, well-kept and nearly deserted. I took such joy in discovering this unbelievable landscape on my doorstep. My course was four years and I only picked up road cycling for the last year. Suddenly I had my own personal adventure machine and a landscape that filled me with wonder on my doorstep. Thank goodness I did however, it was still to be the hardest year of my life.

It’s strange to think that I admitted to myself my depression after what had been an absolutely splendid day out on the bike. My university had a very small triathlon club of which the most active wing seemed to be the cycling third. We had gone on an awesome ride to Nant y Moch, a vast mountain top reservoir I never tired of visiting.  The weather had been brisk but perfect, the company was great and I felt like I was really getting into the swing of road cycling. The next day I got up and the crashing emptiness, the pressuring sadness, the utter bleakness of life in my head was back. It manifested as a desire to find all the blankets, clothes and warm things I owned, build them around me, block the door and attempt to anesthetise myself with sleep.

I don’t think I have developed my writing well enough yet to describe what it is to be depressed. Those who know, know. Those who don’t can merely empathise not understand. If I had to scratch it out in a sentence, your mind turns on itself and uses everything about your personality and history to attack your train of thought and state of mind. Emotional auto-immune disease.   Mental violence and defeat.

I do not dare think I speak for everyone. I do think if you have something that drags you outside you have a good foundation for the struggle overcoming yourself will be. Cycling for me took me further and made me feel more independent, self-reliant and stronger than I’d felt ever in my life. The juxtaposition between the life I had led and the path it had paved towards crisis against the life I was discovering and its possible path to contentment was shocking and ironic to me. It arrived just in the nick of time. The joy I was finding in adventure; the beauty I was surrounded by was the glimmer of hope I needed to begin to rebuild.

Why then does it work for me? Cycling and wanting to be good at it requires an enormous amount of time and commitment. However, it also gives very easily. Especially if you are in the right location. As you start small you can immediately go further and see more than you might running. Cycling is low impact and so long as you don’t crash you are unlikely to get injured on the right bike if you build your mileage correctly. Because of this, you can improve fast. However, the scope to improve is so vast that this improvement gives you a constant sense of increasing achievement. During the first couple of years each significant distance you hunt down (50K! 80K! 100 Kilometres! One Hundred Damn Miles! CHASE THE SUN, CYCLE ACROSS A COUNTRY) is on the horizon as something to be ticked off gradually.

There is something else, people with addictive personalities often end up depressed. The sort of person who gets hooked can get hooked on an awful lot of things that hurt them. Luckily for me cycling is deeply moreish, yet your fix must be sweated for and earnt. It is a rewarding and pure positive habit that can teach you the discipline needed to get the most out of it. This discipline works beautifully outside of cycling. In-fact it can be something of a habit breaker to have a hobby like cycling. If you learn to successfully strive and achieve great things even in something that simply gives you pleasure, you might well learn to better strive in areas less instantly gratifying. This works for road cycling in a place like Aberystwyth because of the latent appeal of longer rides and the discoveries on the other side. It would not have worked for me in London. So much of what drew me out of my room, out of my shell and into the world when I wanted nothing to do with most of it came from the landscape. It must be because it’s so remote that it’s not thought of more reverently amongst British Cyclists. There’s only one tiny train to Aberystwyth, it takes ages and there are no motorways headed in that direction either. We should all be going though, the roads there will take your breath away.



Find pictures of my first year road cycling here on my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu8ahpkF8hS/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu_63Mnl0Fg/