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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #344 - Going Soft
03.23.16
One or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives
for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities,
and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the
encounters they find there.
It's a bike ride.
Started by user nathansnider and user theroyalacademy.
It meets every Wednesday at 8:30pm
at California Donuts #21.
We ride at 9pm.
While we endeavor to return before the last red line trains (around midnight),
it is generally not possible. Please plan accordingly.
On this bike ride, you might expect:
- inconvenient passageways
- oblique strategies
- Oulipian constraints
- disorientation
- reorientation
- "cover" versions of other people's rides, performed with amateurish enthusiasm
- amateurish enthusiasm
- playgrounds, pool halls, bowling alleys, karaoke
- geocaching
- full moon picnics
- traffic median tea parties
- rivers that no longer exist
- smell tourism
- Couchwick v2.0
Furthermore:
- usually 20-35 miles
- usually some hills
- a medium pace (probably not for beginners; certainly not a hustle)
- few stops, short stops
- but we're not in a rush; we don't need to run every light
- victory donuts!
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This week:
Going Soft
There a point at which the archetype of toughness -- so prevalent in cycling culture -- breaks down. To go bigger, to get stronger, to push ahead ever faster, these all can be good things, certainly. Testing limits is often an important part of learning and growing. But being "hard" can also mean to be rigid. A carbon bike is indeed quite stiff, but very well may shatter under certain conditions. Hardness can be similarly fragile, can it not?
This week on the ride (and, really, every week) we explore softness as an ideal. Can we ride with supple legs and supple minds? Rather than merely cutting our path through the places we pass, can we allow them too to press their contours into our own pliable figures, to let them shape us? This is not to say that we will be taking it easy -- softness, in terms of cycling, is generally far more difficult than hard, smooth road. But can we look upon whatever difficulties we may encounter not as opportunities to flex but instead for flexibility?
(~20 miles; a fair amount of off-roading; some climbing, including one fairly steep uphill hike)
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For the latest information about each week's ride, join our mailing list:
groups.google.com/group/the-passage-announcements
For more information about past rides, visit our website:
ThePassageRide.com
For miscellaneous images, information, and links, take a look at our tumblog:
thepassageride.tumblr.com
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Discuss
For example,
certain models of
one-man helicopters
currently being tested
by the US Army
will probably have spread
to the general public
within twenty years.
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Ridazz Roulette!
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