You do not choose the route always
Today I did a 17-kilometre bike ride, but I approached it differently from my usual rides. Normally, I prefer to start with the climb. I do the difficult part while I still have strength, gain altitude, then enjoy the easier descent on the way back. Today, the route dictated otherwise. I started with an easy run, mainly downhill. The return journey would therefore be mostly uphill.
Lesson number one: You do not always get to choose how the journey begins.
Sometimes life starts downhill. Things work. Opportunities come. The road is open. At other times, you begin with a climb. What matters is understanding the terrain you have been given and adjusting accordingly.
Engage the hardest gear
I decided that throughout today’s ride I would try to use the hardest gear that the terrain could reasonably allow.
My bicycle has 15 gears. In the higher gears, one revolution of the pedals takes you much further, but your muscles must work harder. In the lower gears, you pedal more frequently and cover less distance with each revolution, but they allow you to keep moving when climbing.For the first 19 minutes, the experiment felt easy. I was going downhill. I could engage gear 15, push hard and move fast. My legs worked harder than they needed to, even though gravity was helping me. That itself was a lesson.
When circumstances make life easy, don’t necessarily make yourself easy.
Use favourable seasons to build strength. Work. Learn. Save. Invest. Exercise. Build relationships. Develop your skills.
A downhill road is not an excuse to stop pedalling.
Know when to abandon the wrong road
At one point I turned onto a very narrow road. Cars approached from behind, repeatedly honking at me because there was hardly enough room for both the bicycle and vehicles. It reminded me of my father, Andrew Giceha Kigondu, who often complained about how motorists treated cyclists. I remembered him telling us about a driver who once forced him off the road and into the bushes as he tried to avoid being hit. I looked at the road ahead and made a decision. I turned back.There was no medal waiting for me for insisting on cycling on a dangerous road. That, too, is life.
Persistence is a virtue, but knowing when to change course is wisdom.
Sometimes we find ourselves on a road that is unnecessarily narrow, hostile or dangerous. We stay because we don’t want to appear to have failed. But turning back is not always failure. Sometimes turning back is simply choosing a better road.
Then came the climb
Eventually I turned around for home. Now the same road that had carried me effortlessly away from home demanded payment.
It was mostly uphill. Gear 15, which had been wonderful on the descent, was no longer useful. The hardest appropriate gear became progressively lower. And I realised something important: The hardest gear is not necessarily the highest gear.
The hardest gear is the one that challenges you while still allowing you to move forward. That distinction matters in life.
There is little wisdom in choosing a challenge so difficult that it completely stops you. Neither is there much growth in choosing something so easy that it demands nothing from you.
The sweet spot is discomfort with forward movement.
On some climbs I had to pedal many times just to move a few metres. But I was moving.
Sometimes progress looks like speed.
Sometimes progress looks like simply refusing to stop.
Don’t stop pedalling on the climb
A bicycle teaches this lesson rather brutally.
When climbing a steep hill, stopping your effort has immediate consequences. You lose momentum. Eventually the bicycle stops, rolls backwards or you fall. So I kept pedalling. There were moments when my thighs were screaming at me to disembark and push the bicycle. I resisted as much as I reasonably could. I got off only once, when a stationary motorcycle blocked the road ahead. Otherwise, I kept turning the pedals.
Right leg. – Left leg. Again. Again. Again.
There are seasons in life when success is not spectacular.
Success is simply continuing to pedal.
The same distance does not mean the same journey
I also compared my times.
The outward journey and the return journey covered roughly the same distance. Yet the return took much longer. Why? Because kilometres are not equal. Eight kilometres downhill and eight kilometres uphill may look identical on a map, but they are completely different experiences. This made me think about how we judge ourselves and others. Two people may appear to have travelled the same distance in life while facing completely different gradients.
Sometimes we need to stop measuring progress purely by distance and start considering the terrain.
There is also a lesson about retirement
Perhaps the biggest reflection came from the difference between the outward and return journeys.
If you spend the downhill part of life simply coasting because movement comes easily, what happens when the road eventually turns uphill? Youth, health, energy, income and opportunity can all be downhill seasons. They make movement easier.
But they do not last forever. So pedal while gravity is helping you. Save while you are earning. Invest while you have time. Exercise while your body can respond. Build friendships before you desperately need friends. Develop skills while you have the opportunity to learn. Do the hard work during the easy season, because an uphill season may come when you have less strength. That may be one of the simplest lessons in retirement planning.
And perhaps a lesson in raising children
The ride also made me think about parenting.
Our instinct as parents is often to remove every obstacle from our children’s path. We want them to have the opportunities and comforts we may not have had. But perhaps there is danger in making the entire first half of their journey downhill. Children also need resistance. They need responsibilities. They need goals. They need occasionally to struggle with something difficult and discover that they can overcome it. Because eventually they will meet a hill that their parents cannot flatten for them.
The objective is not to make their lives unnecessarily difficult. It is to help them develop the muscles they will need when life becomes difficult.
The hardest gear
By the time I completed the 17 kilometres, my understanding of the “hardest gear” had changed.
It isn’t about choosing gear 15 all the time.
It is about asking:
Given the road I am on today, what is the hardest gear I can engage and still keep moving?
When life is downhill, accelerate.
When life is uphill, change gears—but keep pedalling.
When the road becomes unnecessarily dangerous, have the wisdom to turn around.
When progress becomes slow, don’t confuse slow movement with failure.
And when circumstances are favourable, don’t waste the opportunity by simply coasting.
Build your muscles during the easy stretches of life.
There may come a time when the road turns uphill and you cannot work as hard, move as fast or carry as much as you can today.
So while you still can:
Engage the hardest gear that keeps you moving forward.
That was today’s lesson from the bicycle.
#HardestGear #LessonsFromTheBike #Cycling #LifeLessons #KeepPedalling
Dr Kigondu Simon is the Cycling Gynaecologist