Dobovedo's Journal of Journeys

a place to document in mind-numbingly boring and excruciatingly painful detail something as basic as riding a bike (or running… or swimming)

All Quotes

  

"If they can pave it, we can ride it!"
Rhino

"There is something seriously WRONG with you!"
Fred

"If you can talk, you can pull!"
Craig "the Egg" Carroll

"Less talk, more pedaling!"
Vince 'Rhino' Clune

"Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well as now."
PT Barnum

"Enough with this Sunday stroll...let's hurt a little bit."
American Flyers

"That ain't nothin' but ego talkin'."
Fred

"Left turn?"
"Just like every week."
Dobo & PW

"Who needs a map? Just go north and a little bit east."
Dobo

"The bicycle riders drank much wine, and were burned and browned by the sun. They did not take the race seriously except among themselves."
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

"Every ride is a good ride!"
Craig "the Egg" Carroll

"Looks like he's in a spot of bother!"
Phil Liggett

"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

"A bicycle ride is a flight from sadness."
James E. Starrs, The Literary Cyclist

"The pack is a single, fickle entity, a blaze of color leaving only a trail of dust in its vacuum wake. Even the most pervasive social conventions fall by the wayside under physical stress, as mere survival takes precedence over winning. The pack may be heedless of its own stragglers and have no more sympathy or sense of smell than hounds chasing a fox. In the end, you are on your own, a particle in the false constant of motion."
Laurence Malone

"There is something uncanny in the noiseless rush of the cyclist, as he comes into view, passes by, and disappears."
Popular Science, 1891

"The RAMBLE is 100% retired..."
guess

"The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon."
Bill Strickland, The Quotable Cyclist

"Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling."
James E. Starrs

Etta: "Butch? Do you ever wonder if I'd met you first we'd been the ones to get involved?"
Butch: "Well we are involved, Etta. Don't you know that? I mean, you are riding on my bicycle. In some Arabian countries, that's the same as being married."
Butch Cassidy

"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."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"Should I ride the Ramble tonight, or be smart?"
"That depends... how deep do you want them to stick the blade into your chest?"
Dobo & Fred

"Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There's something wrong with a society that drives a car to workout in a gym."
Bill Nye, the Science Guy

"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

"The bicycle enables us to escape many other machines: We use it for transportation, sport, recreation, and make it a way of life."
Jobst Brandt, "The Bicycle Wheel"

For Fitness, For Sport, For Fun... FOR LIFE!
Fred's Ride Motto

Mom: He was very sickly until he started riding around on that bicycle.
Dad: Yeah... well... now his body's fine, but his mind is gone.
Breaking Away

(The peloton passes a field with white cows) "The peloton is passing a field of white cows. This region of France is known for its bovine....(goes off on tangent)....Of course, none of that matters to any of the riders, except that they might like a nice steak at the end of day."
Phil Liggett

"It never gets easier,
you just go faster."
Greg LeMond

"We STOLE another one!"
Fred (every time we beat the bad weather)

"I'm fascinated by the sprinters. They suffer so much during the race just to get to the finish, they hang on for dear life in the climbs, but then in the final kilometers they are transformed and do amazing things. It's not their force per se that impresses me, but rather the renaissance they experience. Seeing them suffer throughout the race only to be reborn in the final is something for fascination."
Miguel Indurain

"Remember... this is all voluntary."
Coach Troy

Bicycle Salesman: "I say this, I say ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, friends and enemies, meet the future."
Crowd member: "The future what?"
Salesman: "The future mode of transportation for this weary Western world. Now I'm not gonna make a lot of extravagant claims for this little machine. Sure, it'll change your whole life for the better, but that's all."
Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid

"I keep tellin' you guys, it NEVER rains on Fred's Ride!"
Dobo (usually in the rain)

"There is NO part of this ride that requires the small ring."
Vince 'Rhino' Clune

"He's digging deep into his suitcase of courage."
Paul Sherwin

"That's what you get when you suffer - you get results."
Paul Sherwin

"I've forgotten the pain already... I'm doin' Hogpen again!"
me (less than 30 minutes after climbing Brasstown Bald)

"Put me on the start line, point me towards the finish and I go!"
Jens Voigt

"When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day's sensations: bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay's call, ice melting and so on. This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind and focus on nature instead. I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart."
Diane Ackerman

"A bicycle does get you there and more.... And there is always the thin edge of danger to keep you alert and comfortably apprehensive. Dogs become dogs again and snap at your raincoat; potholes become personal. And getting there is all the fun."
Bill Emerson, "On Bicycling"

"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live."
Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"

"Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history."
P.J. O'Rourke

"It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle."
Ernest Hemingway

"It is curious that with the advent of the automobile and the airplane, the bicycle is still with us. Perhaps people like the world they can see from a bike, or the air they breathe when they're out on a bike. Or they like the bicycle's simplicity and the precision with which it is made. Or because they like the feeling of being able to hurtle through air one minute, and saunter through a park the next, without leaving behind clouds of choking exhaust, without leaving behind so much as a footstep."
Gurdon S. Leete

"You never have the wind with you - either it is against you or you're having a good day."
Daniel Behrman, The Man Who Loved Bicycles

"I came out for exercise, gentle exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanise. And no sooner do I get on that accursed machine than off I go hammer and tongs; I never look to right or left, never notice a flower, never see a view - get hot, juicy, red - like a grilled chop. Get me on that machine and I have to go. I go scorching along the road, and cursing aloud at myself for doing it."
H.G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance

"I found out it's easier to cry during a ride than during a run." (said about Ironman training)
Kathy Robbins

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
T.S. Eliot

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