This is an important message at Fausto. For cyclists, the lunch ride is as essential to well-being as pasta and coffee. The day works better if you honor the weekly lunch ride and then, if you are an over-achiever, you back that up with a proper lunch with one or two glasses of wine and a 30- to 45-minute nap.
This may seem counterproductive in our mad race to remain financially competitive and memorize (so we think) all the dreadful headlines of the New York Times app throughout the day and late into the night, listen to multiple podcasts, and quickly save massive amounts of money for retirement. And if we don’t, we will end up living in our cars, eating chili dogs from 7-Eleven and playing the daily state lottery in our pajamas.
It’s just not true—and taking back lunch is a good first step in the process of de-programming the current mind-set. Forget the ice bath and green-powder smoothies and perfect credit scores and CNN-binges and stock market obsessions, and focus on lunch rides and lunch, and everything else will line up properly.
“We need to claim lunch back. It is our natural right. It has been stolen from us by our rulers. The fear that keeps you chained to your desk, staring at your screen, does not serve your spirit. Lunch is a time to forget about being sensible, practical, efficient. A proper lunch should be spiritually as well as physically nourishing.”
–from “How to be Idle,” by Tom Hodgkinson
My best ideas come to me on bike rides. I think I’ve planned out my entire life at least five times while on bike rides. I imagined the paths our kids would take, created vacations we should take, forgave people for no apparent reason, came up with new business ideas, thought about how to be a better person and remembered to be kind to myself.
There is something physical that happens when you break yourself down on purpose while moving at 16 to 25 mph under your own power, the wind blowing into you and past you at midday. You are stepping away on purpose and doing something that makes your mind, body and life better. This is why angry drivers honk at us. They see us at 12:15 p.m. on a quiet road in our kits and wonder why we aren’t in a cubicle filling out an HR assessment of ourselves and our team or creating a report for someone else to present, or just sitting there worrying if we will get promoted or fired.
This is why so many people line the roads in Belgium and Italy and France during the spring classics. They want to catch a glimpse of the people remembering to ride, who have chosen the freedom of the bicycle as their profession, and we want to be them and be near them. We cheer and yell like maniacs because for those scarce moments, we are watching pure freedom and creativity at speed. We want to celebrate with them.
You don’t have to train six hours a day and be one of the few elite athletes globally to get this feeling. Just start with lunch rides and do them over and over again and add some longer, non-lunch rides on the weekend (but don’t skip the meal and nap afterward).
FROM ISSUE 007
