Towards the end of the summer of 2024, Rouleur Magazines' editor, Ed Pickering, rang me up with an odd request:
"Miles, we're putting together a piece about how people from different parts of cycling have learnt from cycling, I'd love to get your thoughts"
I had a few questions, including, "who else is contributing Ed, I don't want to be out of my depth or look an idiot...". Ed did his best to placate me and what we ended up doing was having a very casual chat, through some of my earlier years on the bike, some of my motivations for starting Cycling Culture Club and what I would ultimately underline as my learnings from my time in cycling.
I've taken the following directly from Ed's edited transcript of our conversation. Reading this back, on Boxing Day, 2024, I felt compelled to share what I said here. I stand by every word - despite it being so easy to change your mind in hindsight - and wanted to reinforce it here.
Rouleur Magazine 132: Age and Experience
For me, cycling has always been a tool in various different ways. I've realised that the word tool can be really interesting. It can be a vessel to take you from A to B but it's also got the ability to connect and create communities, drawing lines between different communities and people. Part of what I'm doing is using that as a vessel to connect people all over the world. What it's taught me is how powerful the idea of cycling and the tool of the bike can be at bringing people together, no matter what background they have, no matter what group they are from, be they in the minority or majority. That's critical to where I am now.
In terms of what I think cycling can generally teach people, I think it's the power of being able to make change at your own speed and under your own steam. No matter what bike you are riding, no matter what experience in cycling you have, there's something tangible for people to share, which is that when you pedal you move forward. That mentality is really useful in lots of other realms of life. If you can just move forward a little bit, you can make progress. In this world, finding commonality between groups and between people is difficult, so to find something that can unify is really magical.
Big thanks to Ed for giving me a column of sorts in one of the most prestigious cycling magazines, it's a unique privilege to see yourself in print, especially among other truly esteemed legends in cycling like Geraint Thomas, Lizzie Diegnan, Mark Beaumont and Audrey Cordon-Ragot.
In case - for some reason - you want to read the other columns in this feature aside from my own, you can buy individual copies of Rouleur Magazine at Rouleur.cc
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