The Mysterious Power of the Bicycle Time Machine

We are pedaling our road bicycles, with narrow tires and downturned handlebars and skinny seats, on a secondary road from Lincolnton to Kannapolis. Rob Craig is ahead of me, as usual, and out of sight. I am drafting Drew White like a NASCAR driver on a straightaway at the nearby Charlotte Motor Speedway. Mark Savage is just behind us. 

Or maybe we are on the other side of Kannapolis on the way to Asheboro. The narrow, rolling backroads in the lush foothills and southern Piedmont are beautiful in early October, but they start to look the same on this week-long odyssey across the state. We ride 65 to 75 miles daily, not a huge distance in any one day, but enough to make the days blur together.  

Craig, White, and I have completed the trek from the North Carolina mountains to the coast a half-dozen times over the years with some other friends, but it’s the first time for Savage, who retired in July as a Wake County high school principal and administrator.

He grew up in Wayne, Pennsylvania, 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia, on a bicycle. For his 8th birthday, his mom brought his new bike to school. He rode home and continued riding his bicycle to school for several years, as his buddies did. The bike was his ticket to independence. 

A few years after getting that new bike, the Philadelphia Bulletin stopped delivering to the Savage home in the afternoon. Savage’s dad, an avid newspaper reader, asked a friend who lived near a shopping center if Mark could park his bike in his driveway. 

Mark would ride to the friend’s house, leave his bike in the driveway, walk through the backyard, cross a creek, climb through a hole in a fence behind Gateway Shopping Center, walk by the arcade and the pet store, and buy that afternoon’s Bulletin at the pharmacy. Then he’d retrace his route and ride back home. 

He felt like a contributing member of his family for the first time. He’d expanded his scope of responsibility, as well as his range of territory. “That level of freedom when you didn’t have other levels of freedom—I was really aware of it,” Savage told me. 

Savage, who lives in Wake Forest north of Raleigh, is 57 now. He’s been a recreational cyclist for years. When he retired as an educator, he finally had the chance to spend a week with us on the annual Mountains to Coast Ride, which took him from Lake Lure in Western North Carolina to Wallace in the southeast. It also took him back to when he cruised around Wayne as a boy. 

“It catches me off guard,” he said of riding now with friends. “You come over a hill, and it’s like it was when it was you and two of your friends. It feels the same. It can be a time machine, for sure.” 

A Pack of Cyclists

The Mountains to Coast Ride, which is run by North Carolina Amateur Sports, started in 1999 and takes a different route across the state every year. Cyclists have pedaled through 800 communities and stopped overnight in more than 100 towns. I’ve ridden it since 2018 with a group that calls itself the Nine Bulls; in reality, the number of Bulls fluctuates. The group started with a few guys, most from the Raleigh area, who knew each other, and has expanded to include relatives and friends of friends. 

The ride is always in early October, just after my birthday (65 this year), yet another annual reminder of time’s relentlessness.   

About 800 people participated this year. We started on Sunday, October 5, in Lake Lure and worked our way east on a planned route, stopping for the night in Lincolnton, Kannapolis, Asheboro, Fuquay-Varina, Goldsboro, and Wallace. That was 396 miles. We were supposed to ride another 77 miles to Fort Fisher, near Wilmington, on Saturday, but a coastal storm cut the ride a day short. 

Some of the cyclists camp at night; others stay in hotels or nightly rentals. The Bulls used to camp; most of us now stay in hotels. Once you stay in a hotel, you don’t go back to camping.  

Cyclists came from 38 states this year, as well as Canada, Scotland, and England. The average age was 63, which is about the average age of the Bulls. 

White, a Cary businessman, is one of the Bulls. He grew up in Tallahassee, riding his bike as a boy to Florida State University and the Capitol complex downtown. 

He owned several bikes. Among his favorites was a single-speed cruiser with flat handlebars. It was an early version of a trail bike, simple and indestructible, probably made by Huffy, Raleigh, or Schwinn. When you were about to stop at your friend’s house, you could jump off and let it roll until it lost momentum and fell over, waiting for you to return. 

He later rode a three-speed with skinny tires and fenders (what we used to call an “English Racer”) and then an orange Peugeot 10-speed with downturned handlebars. These bikes were lighter and faster. You could ride hard with a pack of guys, weaving in and out, drawing from the energy of the group. Now when he rides his road bike in a line with other cyclists, drafting each other and taking turns in the lead, it reminds him of his early days in Tallahassee.

“You get into a groove and rhythm and flow,” he said. “It’s a primal, pack animal kind of thing. It feels good—that sense of motion and balance and g-force. It does bring me back to a place of carefree joy.”

White travels internationally to large cities. He says the best way to get around, and to explore, is to rent a bike. Other modes of transportation—subways and elevated trains and taxis—separate you from the city. When you’re pedaling a bicycle, he said, “You’re in and with the city.” 

His routes across Paris and Tokyo and Madrid started with a simple but sturdy bike in Tallahassee. 

‘The Wider World!’

Craig is the fastest and most competitive Bull. If you look closely, you can see the physique of a former 800-meter runner, which he was at Brevard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

He rides because, at 65, his body responds well to it. Many avid cyclists, like Craig, are former runners. Running’s relentless pounding takes a toll on knees, ankles, and feet. Craig, who lives in Wake Forest, gave up running at 49 after a torn meniscus.

But cycling has little to no impact on the lower body. Even if you have some ailments—an arthritic knee, a chronically sore hip, a stiff ankle—you could probably ride for many years. Of the Mountains to Coast cyclists this year, 45 percent were between the ages of 60 to 69, and 23 percent were 70 to 79, according to ride organizers. 

Craig grew up outside the Gastonia city limits in the Southwood neighborhood, cruising Fairlane Drive and Pinecrest Drive on his bicycle to see his friends. 

He kept to his neighborhood until one day, when he was about 11, he rode out of Southwood by himself to New Hope Road, a sometimes busy two-lane road that had a 4-foot-wide paved shoulder good for bicycles. Like a lot of us in that era, his parents let him roam; helicopter parents had not yet been invented. He took a left onto New Hope and rode two miles to the Gastonia city limits. 

“That was a big deal to me,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m out in the world.’” He laughed at the memory: “The wider world! Freedom!” He gained confidence and wanted to do it again. 

Craig is less nostalgic than other Bulls about cycling, and more competitive. He typically rides about 125 miles a week. He has powerful lights so he can ride in the early-morning hours when his schedule demands. He likes riding, getting better, and measuring his progress. “That’s fun to me,” he said. 

But there is one way cycling at his current age reminds him of his youth. As a retired Baptist minister, he generally can ride whenever he wants, just like when he was growing up in Gastonia. “I can go for a 60-mile ride, and nobody cares,” he said. “I like the ability to do that.”

My bike origin story is similar to the other Bulls’. I grew up in the 1970s in a new, sprawling subdivision with large lots in what was then rural Wake County. I had a red, single-speed Schwinn, then a silver Raleigh 10-speed. They were my cell phones of that era. If I wanted to check in with Allan Fetty, or see what Mark Brandenburg or Richard House or the Camacho brothers were up to, I rode to their house. (When I was a little older but not yet 16, I pedaled to Tanyss Mason’s house and swimming pool, but that’s another story.)

Craig, Savage, White, and I—we all want to ride as long as we can, at least into our 70s, if not longer. Our afflictions—physical, emotional, spiritual—dissipate on the bicycle. “There’s a lifting of all those ailments,” Savage said. White concurred: “There’s a therapeutic aspect to riding a bike.”

That’s because the bicycle is an engineering marvel. The design perfectly fuses human and machine. A cyclist moves four times faster than on foot while expending five times less energy, according to Jody Rosen’s 2022 book, Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle. 

“Bike riding is the best way I know to reach an altered consciousness—not an ennobled or enlightened state, exactly, but definitely an enlivened one,” Rosen wrote. “A bike ride is better than yoga, or wine, or weed. It runs neck and neck with sex and coffee.” 

A half-century ago, our bikes gave us the freedom of mobility; now they give us the freedom to move vigorously, despite our limitations. Cycling is one of the few activities we did as kids that we still do as aging men. My favorite factoid from this year’s Mountains to Coast Ride: The oldest rider was 88.