Field notes 6 MIN READ
The ride you never told anyone about
The rides that end up on a wall are rarely the ones with a number pinned to them. Here is why the ordinary Tuesday tends to outlast the event you trained for.
Ask a cyclist which ride they would put on a wall and they will usually name an event first. The sportive with the timing chip. The gran fondo with the photographer at the top of the climb. Then they will think about it for a moment and change their answer.
The ride that actually gets printed is almost never the one with a number on it. It is the one that started as a normal Saturday and turned into something else around hour four.
Why the unplanned ride wins
An event has a shape somebody else decided. The route is signed, the distance is fixed, and the story is the same story a thousand other people came home with. That is not a criticism — it is the point of an event. But it does mean the map looks like everybody else's map.
An unplanned ride has a shape only you chose. The detour because the wind had turned. The extra loop because you were not ready to go home. The bit where you got lost and it turned out better. Those decisions are what make the line unrepeatable, and they are visible in the drawing even when you cannot remember making them.
What makes it read well on paper
Three things, roughly in order of how much they matter.
A closed loop beats an out-and-back. A route that returns by a different road encloses area, and area is what your eye reads as shape. An out-and-back draws one line twice, and no amount of good paper fixes that.
Corners beat straights. A ride through a river valley or along a coast has direction changes that make the line specific to that place. Forty kilometres of straight road makes a gentle curve that could be anywhere.
Length is not the same as interest. A 200 km ride across flat farmland can draw worse than a 60 km ride through a town with a river running through it. If you are choosing between two files, choose the one you could sketch from memory.
The ferry test
There is one ride in my own files that settles this argument. Two hundred and twenty kilometres, one ferry crossing, and a route that only makes sense if you know the geography. The ferry shows up in the drawing as a straight line where every other segment wanders — a gap in the logic of the map that turns out to be the most interesting thing on the sheet.
Nobody handed out a medal for it. That is rather the point.
YOURS, FROM A FILE, IN 90 SECONDS
One effort. One sheet of paper.
Bring the file and every choice is yours: treatment, colour, which numbers come along. Museum-grade 250 gsm matte, printed in Denmark, shipped in a tube with a nail taped inside.
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