When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.
Enough with this sunday stroll...let's hurt a little bit.
American Flyers
A bicycle ride is a flight from sadness.
James E. Starrs
To be a cyclist is to be a student of pain....at cycling's core lies pain, hard and bitter as the pit inside a juicy peach. It doesn't matter if you're sprinting for an Olympic medal, a town sign, a trailhead, or the rest stop with the homemade brownies. If you never confront pain, you're missing the essence of the sport. Without pain, there's no adversity. Without adversity, no challenge. Without challenge, no improvement. No improvement, no sense of accomplishment and no deep—down joy. Might as well be playing Tiddly—Winks.
Scott Martin
When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair or the future of the human race.
H.G. Wells
The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles ... And you would be flabbergasted at the number of bicycles that are half-human almost half-man, half partaking of humanity.
Flann O'brien
The best rides are the ones where you bite off much more than you can chew—and live through it.
Doug Bradbury
Ride your bike, ride your bike, ride your bike.
Fausto Coppi, on what it takes to become such a great champion
There are nine million bicycles in Beijing
That's a fact,
It's a thing we can't deny
Like the fact that I will love you till I die.
Katie Melua
Winning never gets repetitive.
Mat "Cashmoney" Glaser
I thought of that while riding my bike.
Albert Einstein, on the theory of relativity
Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.
H.G. Wells
This is not Disneyland, or Hollywood. I'll give you an example: I've read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don't fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else.
Lance Armstrong
When Lance first turned professional, it was like trying to put a hand brake on a raging bull.
Paul Sherwen
The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.
Sloan Wilson
Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living! I take exercise every afternoon that way. Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it, into the tub, rub down well, then into a soft shirt and down to the dinner table, with the evening paper and a glass of wine in prospect — and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!
Jack London
Pain is a big fat creature riding on your back. The farther you pedal, the heavier he feels. The harder you push, the tighter he squeezes your chest. The steeper the climb, the deeper he digs his jagged, sharp claws into your muscles.
Scott Martin
An engineer designing from scratch could hardly concoct a better device to unclog modern roads - cheap, nonpolluting, small and silent...
Rick Smith, International Herald Tribune, May 2006
A mountian bike race is a constant hard effort for two to three hours. In road racing the efforts often come in surges. You ride easy for awhile then you have to make an extreme, hard effort. They are two different efforts, two different forms of suffering.
John Tomac
It was eleven more than necessary.
Jacques Anquetil, after winning a race by twelve seconds.
