The real barrier stopping more people from cycling

Comfort, convenience and a decreasing willingness to do hard things...

Much is made of the barriers to cycling and the sports’ governing bodies are targeted with reducing them in an attempt to encourage more people to ride. The results of their efforts are mixed and it’s difficult to unpick how much of the success they claim is legitimate. The most quoted barriers are cultural like cost, sex, age, environment, risk, opportunity and physical ability.  

However, first and foremost, cycling is hard. It’s physically hard in the utilitarian context of getting from one place to another for travel. Harder if you decide to push it, harder still to train to compete. The need to enthusiastically embrace some physical discomfort is a barrier that many don’t want to confront. Frankly, it’s more convenient to employ a cultural excuse rather than admit cycling is just too hard.

This reflects the current cultural epoch that equates easier with better, where mental and physical effort can be eased by Apps, machines, AI and labour saving devices. More comfort and more choice – shakes remove the need to chew, delivery removes the effort to collect junk food, gears change themselves and music is selected for you. 
 
This is fake, it’s a pastiche. It’s superficial and shallow. It looks genuine but it’s not. Above all, it makes activities that require effort easier. Not better, just easier.  
  
This subterfuge is exemplified by putting an electric motor in a pedal cycle. This makes the hardest part of riding a bike easy. Just hit a button and it eliminates the risk of effort induced suffering. It dilutes human involvement by eliminating a critical dimension that makes cycling a meaningful activity.

This is not to dismiss eBikes, they have their uses and places. However, cyclists who train, compete or race identify strongly with the effort required to ride a bike, it being a hard thing to do is one of the defining shared characteristics of group membership. Riders are voluntarily embracing a little suffering in order to achieve their goals. This identity explains the enmity felt by many non-electrically assisted riders toward those who choose the easy option.

The effort barrier is not cultural or related to any of those things commonly quoted, but a measure of the strength of an individuals’ intrinsic motivation to be physically active – to seek satisfaction and contentment from pushing at the physiological limits of the body.  To attain a sense of achievement by doing something hard and to be seen to be part of a group with this shared characteristic. It’s not a learned dimension, it’s either inherent or a stable personality type. You’ve got it, or you haven’t. You understand it, or you don’t.

This is not say other ‘non-effort’ related barriers to cycling don’t exist, they do. However, the first one to jump over is that it’s going to hurt a bit but therein is a sense of connection between mind, body and environment that’s lacking in contemporary culture.

There is meaning and fulfilment for those motivated to do hard things.

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​Rich Smith has an MSc and a BSc in psychology, specialising in competition, motivation and affective states. He is a British Cycling qualified Level 3 Road and TT coach supporting riders nationally and internationally. He established RideFast Coaching in 2015 to deliver physiologically effective and psychologically sustainable training to enthusiastic amateur riders. ​