What is life without bicycles?

I have this recurring nightmare.  I live in some not so far-off, dystopian land.  A grey place that is without much color or light, and strangely enough all the buildings are unimaginably difficult to navigate, with elevators that stop on random floors, confusing layouts and a pervasive loneliness that strikes to the very core. People wander about in a lethargic haze. 

What is this strange, frightening place? 

It is a world without bicycles and cycling. A world where one cannot even move autonomously, even by foot.  A world where pedestrians and bikes are banned from using city streets, and the only modes of transport are in automobiles or on these convoluted elevators and escalators throughout grey cities.  Everyone goes everywhere and yet they go nowhere.  I wake up in a cold sweat. Whew, it was just a dream.  Or was it? 

Returning to cycling was not a conventional success in 2025: 

My first season trying to come back to high level cycling and fitness wasn't exactly a success, for a whole host of reasons that I've gone into in some earlier posts.  But success is relative. 

Sometimes success can even be failure, figuring out what does and doesn't work, things like that.  As one of the reasons for starting this blog was hoping to give others inspiration for starting a sport, or a starting point for returning to a sport, putting one foot in front of the other is itself and accomplishment. Furthermore, these things don't happen overnight. 

What does cycling in 2026 look for me? 

1. I'm either going to participate in the Gran Fondo Nationals cycle race in Maryland in September of 2026, or the masters 55+ road race in Wisconsin in June of 2026. My long-term goal for returning to the sport was to bookend, in a healthy way, the first nationals event I did as a very young lad in 1986.  If I finish last in either of these, I'll still have accomplished this goal. 
2. The most important goal is sticking with it.  85 year old women and men are, as we speak, training for and finishing Ironman distance triathlons. Hiromo Imada finished an Ironman World Championship in about 16 hours, itself a very respectable time, at 85.  
3. I'm assiduously working on staying injury free, especially as it pertains to trail running, which is what I do in the winter primarily, along with some indoor cycling and gym work.  If something hurts, even a 1 on a scale of 10, I stop.  If something hurts before I head out, I'll do something else.  
4. I believe that staying healthy as a masters athlete also means doing other things (hence the trail running).  Did I say I want to get back to a 4.0 NTRP rating in tennis?  This shouldn't be a hindrance to cycling, or anything else for that matter.  One sport should compliment another.  It's absurd at this point, and I think mentally destructive, to be monomaniacal about one sport as one ages.  I believe it is also not physically healthy.