Notecard: Cycling as instinctive

Finally, cycling is instinctive, making you feel a landscape rather than merely seeing it. By bike your environment writes itself onto your body. 'Certain configurations of field, road, weather and smell,' writes the historian Graham Robb, 'imprint themselves on the cycling brain with inexplicable clarity and return sometimes years later to pose their nebulous questions. A bicycle unrolls a 360-degree panorama of the land, allows the rider to register its gradual changes in gear ratios and muscle tension, and makes it hard to miss a single inch of it, from the tyre-lacerating suburbs of Paris to the Mistral-blasted plains of Provence.'

from Cyclogeography by Jon Day

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