How Numb Hands Nearly Ended My Cycling Lifestyle
I wasn’t careful with how I rode, and my body rebelled
In the summer of 2022 my teenage son and I cycled from Brooklyn to Montreal.
It was a sort of a capstone project. For almost a decade, we’d been going on rides of increasingly epic lengths. When he was eight, we did a 14-mile trip; the next year, 28 miles. We kept on bumping it up and up until he was a freshman in high school and we did our first “century”, 100 miles in a day.
By that summer of 2022, we dared ourselves to go further, longer, and more intensely than ever. So we picked Montreal as an ambitious destination — it’s about 450 miles from our house in Brooklyn. We plotted a route where we’d go 100 miles a day for four days in a row, then top it off with a 50-mile day, which would feel like a wafer-thin mint by comparison to the previous days’ slogs.
It was fun! And pulling off these sweat-soaked feats of endurance — this was new territory for me. I’m a nerd from the 80s, a weary veteran of gym-class jock bullying that was sniggeringly endorsed by the chain-smoking coaches of the day. I came away from it loathing all athletics and everyone who brayed in the bleachers. From high-school onwards I’d not avoided not only watching any pro sports, but mostly managed to even avoid a single…
